This page relies heavily on a book by Thomas Forrest Kelly’s entitled, “Capturing Music,” which we highly recommend if you are interested in the topic of how our standard Western musical notation evolved to what it is today.
Capturing Music. Many people have observed that our database is heavily American and Celtic, and that is true. When people urge us to be more inclusive of other cultures, we are sympathetic. Surely, they say, China or Indonesia or Africa must have a vastly rich and expansive musical culture that can be tapped, even if one is limited to music in Western-style notation. But the fact of the matter is that most cultures have an oral tradition of music, as did the Irish and the Americans, for a long time. In the history of mankind, in any culture on all continents and for tens of thousands of years, music has been passed down orally.
Writing music down on paper (or papyrus or stone) within a culture, while not unheard of, was rare and highly unsystematic for much of human history. The oldest surviving written music is from 200 B.C. on an Old Babylonian clay tablet. The tablet shows pictures of what fret and what string to put your finger on for a four-stringed Babylonian lute to play a specific tune. There’s no information about how long to hold each note, the speed of the playing, etc. Crude and hard to reproduce, we can see why it didn’t catch on universally. While there are other examples for the next 1,200 years, none became universally popular or carried the information our notes do today.
As it happens, we know with some precision when the Western idea of a musical note was invented. In the year 1030 C.E. an Italian Benedictine monk named Guido Monaco of Arezzo (central Italy, not far from Florence) had a brainstorm. In his own words:
“The notes are so arranged, then, that each sound, however often it may be repeated in a melody, is found always in its own row. In order that you may better distinguish these rows, lines are drawn close together, and some rows of sounds occur on the lines themselves, others in the intervening intervals or spaces. All the sounds on one line sound alike.” — Guido the Monk in the year 1030
With these words, Guido created the musical staff, a parallel series of lines on which individual notes sat indicating pitch. It’s hard today to appreciate why it took so long to do something so obvious, but it wasn’t obvious until late medieval times. Until then, written musical notation existed only to remind a performer or singer of a tune they already knew. Guido the Monk’s insight was to make it possible to play a tune you didn’t know. That was revolutionary and it caught on immediately throughout Europe and then worldwide. Guido even thought to name the notes. Those names are still with us and known by everybody who has ever heard the “Do-Re-Mi” song from the Sound of Music.
As remarkable as Guido’s invention was, he didn’t think of everything. Guido’s invention did not carry any information about how long the note should be held (its duration). It’s easy today to wonder not only how Guido could have missed this important piece of information. It would take scores of musicians, composers, and theorists centuries to experiment with groupings of notes, vertical lines to indicated pauses, and other symbols before hitting on the idea to represent the length of a note by the shape and fill of the note’s head.
Around Guido’s time, composers were focused on allowing a first-time musician to be able to duplicate a tune he or she did not know. It took 200 years for the focus to shift from a notation system that taught an unknown melody to a system that was possible to sight read. By the middle of the 13th century long notes had little tails on them and most notes had no tail at all, and were still hard to read.
To make a long story short, the process of our modern musical notation began, arguably, in 1030 and ended, also arguably, around 1500, a span of almost five centuries. The result was a notation system that can be sight read and that has remained more or less stable for the last five centuries.
Does Music Exist If It’s Not Captured? We tell the story of Guido the Monk and his musical notation to make this point: If music isn’t captured on paper, it doesn’t exist for our purposes. That’s a strong statement and we certainly recognize that it exists for the time and culture in which it was played. But if an instance of music can’t be passed on to someone else, the music itself is only ephemeral and proof of its existence is impossible. Thus, while we can surmise that other cultures had a rich and vibrant musical culture rivaling that of Europe, we just don’t have any direct evidence because the music wasn’t captured. In a sense, the written musical notation until modern recording was the high-tech of the day, and not everybody had high-tech.
Capturing Music Loses Something. Ironically, the ability to capture the pitch and length of the notes being played so efficiently meant that other musical information stopped being transmitted. Before Guido had his insight in 1030, musical notation consisted primarily of ornamentation, trills, voice quality such as warbling, and other symbols to convey style, subtleties, and refinements of the performance, whether voice or instrumental. While some of these, such as the trill, are retained today, we have lost some ability to indicate the “look-and-feel” of a performance that was captured in the pre-modern system of musical notation. In other words, the ability to allow someone else to look at a sheet of paper and repeat the basic tune of a previous performance came at a cost — the inability to convey that performance’s musical nuances.