Let’s continue our series on interpretation and scores. In our previous post we have been discussing the issue of editions, today let’s focus on notation and its interpretation.

The score is often the first medium you have to deal with when studying a piece. It enables the composer to encode four key dimensions of music: pitch, duration, intensity and timbre. This document can then transmit the composer’s thought, or rather transcribe his music in a format understood by any interpreter.

In the previous parts of our little story of musical notation we have mainly been focusing on note pitches. But what about the evolution of rhythmic notation?

In the second part of the little story of musical notation, we have seen appear neumes and have discovered that musical notation at this time corresponded more to an aide-mémoire than to a vector of propagation. In the XIth century, a new fact has considerably enrich musical writing: in order to make their work easier, some scribes used to first draw a light line on their support: it was the beginnings of the staff.

During the first episode of this little story of musical notation, we were mainly focused on Greeks. Following this tradition, the western medieval musical notation was first alphabetic. Octaves were labeled in uppercase and lowercase letters: The uppercase letter (A) indicated the first octave, the lowercase letter (a) the second one, the doubled lowercase letter [...]

For several thousand years, music was mostly handed down verbally without leaving a written trace. Regardless, since the origin of writing, it is possible to find some localized attempts of musical notations. A Babylonian tablet dated from the 16th century BC attests these attempts and lets us see a musical notation based on writing (alphabetic letters and grammatical accents).