« Not the drawing... | Main | Threshold »
February 11, 2006
Musical Notation
Today was one of those days that renewed my faith in academia and reconfirmed my decision of being an academic, hopefully.
I atteneded a lecture given by a Cambridge University professor of Medieval English, Dr. Christipher Page, about the history of musical notation. He talked about an 11th century Italian monk named Guido of Arezzo who was a briliant musician and a perfect snob, in the true genius fashion. He thought that the method of learning songs at his time, basically learning a song by listening to it countless times, was inefficient and time consuming. He also knew that the musical notation at his time, basically content with marking the notes and showing pitch of the lyrics, was inefficient since it did not consider the passage of time and the relation of notes to the pitch. So, he created the five-bar musical notation system we know today and managing to record songs with it. As Dr. Page mentioned, Guido did not create the five bars, he created the "space", meaning that he thought of the use of the position of notes on the page and how the space between them shows passage of time and musical pitch. He was well received by Pope John XIX and was a widely read musician. He believed that his system saves a lot of time, since there is no need for continuous listening to a song for learning it, and it is also efficient since it preserves a song the way it was composed.
Among the interesting things mentioned was the matter of the importance of notation in musical composition. Before that, each new day, the composer had to remember the sections of a song he had worked on the day before, and of course one can not remember everything. So, the music was much simpler. However, after the creation of notation, a composer could record as complicated a song as he or she wanted and could compose and then add to it later as well. This allowed the writing of complicated and multi-layer music such as symphonies. As he said, witout Guido we could hardly have a Mozart.
He was also asked about the names of the notes: "do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si". He explained that Guido noticed that in solfage of the song Ut Quaent Laxis, the note at the beginning of each verse is one higher than the one before, so he took the beginning of each verse and named the notes after them. Then, without any preperation, he started singing Ut Quaent Laxis perfectly, as if in a church, and then sang the notes in perfect harmony! It was so impressive that people could not help themselves and burst into a roaring applause!
Afterward, I talked to him about my dissertation topic and he was so kind and well articulate and encouraging that I could hardly believe. I am glad I put aside the 2 hours and went and saw this amazing person and listened to his talk. This is how I imagined academia, and I am glad that I occassionally get to see it the way I imagined it!
Posted by Khodadad at February 11, 2006 12:33 AM
Comments
Hi Khodadad, sorry I am late. This weekend has been rather busy. I also commented to your previous post.
This was quite interesting! I had never heard of Guido of Arezzo. I learned to read guitar music at the age of nine and I still play classical pieces occasionally. Apparently, I have been making use of Guido's invention all this time. I salute Guido's genius!
I'm glad that Dr. Page was so encouraging to you.
Posted by: David at February 12, 2006 10:37 PM