A word about ligatures

Abstract

Over the ages, ligatures in musical notation have had several different meanings and shades of meanings. First used in chant notation apparently to show that several notes were to be sung to a single syllable, they also had that function in the polyphony of the 16th century, several theorists being quite explicit that you should never break a ligature—statements that Don Harrán has beautifully assembled and translated in his fundamental book Word–tone relations in musical thought.1 But from at least the 13th century onwards they were also used to denote rhythms. As a result their function became confused in the 14th and 15th centuries—and may have become confused in the minds of many modern readers. In trying to write a footnote on editorial procedures for my forthcoming Musica Britannica volume of Secular polyphony 1380–1480 I realized that nobody seems ever to have spelled out why it is misleading for modern editions to indicate which notes are joined in ligature in the sources. The nearest I could find was Gilbert Reaney’s blunt remark of 1955 in the first of his seven grand volumes of Early fifteenth-century music: ‘The ligatures in mensuralist notation are not indicated in the modern score, nor mentioned in the notes, since they only serve to clutter up the transcriptions without serving any purpose whatsoever’.2 That is really rather different from what you normally hear when ligatures are discussed or taught.