A media ecological approach to the history of music notation: The neume, staff and mensural rhythm

Abstract

This article examines the transition from the oral mode of memorized song to the visualization of written musical notation. Modern music notation, unlike writing, emerged as a product of the medieval era. Musical forms burst information capacity boundaries sometime around fifteen centuries ago when unison cantillated plain-chant (one cantor) evolved into diversified organum (harmonious voices) in sacred ceremonies. New modalities of visually codifying song were required to keep pace with the growing possibilities of rhythm and harmony. Musical notation took recognizable shape roughly four hundred years prior to the printing press and some twelve hundred years after the onset of the phonetic alphabet. Moreover, musical notation, the ability to recreate from visual symbols polyphonic pitch and rhythmic complexity, was firmly in place centuries before the onset of the Renaissance. Although song and the spoken word coevolved naturally over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, the split from orality to literacy eventually required a visual technology to ‘hold’ song in stasis similar to the alphabet’s capturing of speech. This article focuses attention on the history of the neume, the musical staff and the mensural rhythm system as fundamental building blocks in the architecture of modern musical notation. This suggests that modes of visual specialist separation and tendencies towards individualist learning in the form of musical practice were embodied prior to and synergistically inspired the social transformations shaped by literacy.