The beginnings of music-writing in the west: Historical and semiotic aspects

Abstract

The earliest systems of European musical notation were Carolingian inventions, accomplished, like the Carolingian Miniscule hand and the full array of Carolingian punctuation signs, as products of a concentrated drive toward an augmented role for writing and reading that was energized and directed from the centers of Carolingian political power. To us musical notation is an autonomous sign-system sufficiently capable of encoding the essential sound features of musical works so that musical texts (scores) both convey the structures and qualities of such works—in effect, stand for works—and constitute prescriptive programs for their performance. Initially European notations were conceived in neither sense. They were marks added to language texts, to serve as guides in their oral performance; in that respect their function was a further refinement and specialization of the function of the punctuation signs. That the repertory of notational signs was substantially an adaptation of the repertory of punctuation marks is the obverse side of that functional continuity. The texts to which musical signs were added are principally scriptural, performed within the ritual practice of the Roman church, and the signs had reference to the oral-formulaic melodic tradition for the ritual performance of those texts. But it was at least two generations before one began to think of them in the sense of an autonomous and prescriptive system of musical notation; and that was a radically new way of thinking that engendered fundamental changes in the notation and in the nature of its signification.