{{about, the medieval musical notation, the Greek diacritic, rough breathing 400px, ''Tu patris sempiternus es filius'', written in Daseian notation. The Daseian signs are at the far left of the staff. Daseian notation (or dasian notation) is the type of

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

used in the ninth century anonymous musical treatises ''

Musica enchiriadis ''Musica enchiriadis'' is an anonymous musical treatise of the 9th century. It is the first surviving attempt to set up a system of rules for polyphony in western art music. The treatise was once attributed to Hucbald, but this is no longer accept ...

'' and ''

Scolica enchiriadis ''Scolica enchiriadis'' is an anonymous ninth-century music theory treatise and commentary on its companion work, the ''Musica enchiriadis''. These treatises were once attributed to Hucbald, but this is no longer accepted.Hoppin, Richard H. ''Medi ...

''. The music of the ''Musica enchiriadis'' and ''Scolica enchiriadis'', written in Daseian notation, are the earliest known examples of written

polyphonic music Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, h ...

in history.Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca. ''A History of Western Music''. Norton, 2006, p. 88.

Usage

Musicologist

Willi Apel Willi Apel (10 October 1893 – 14 March 1988) was a German-American musicologist and noted author of a number of books devoted to music. Among his most important publications are the 1944 edition of '' The Harvard Dictionary of Music'' and ''Fre ...

has called the notation "a mediaeval imitation of the ancient Greek notation".Apel, Willi. ''The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600''. Revised 4th edition. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953, pp. 204-206. The treatises themselves refer to it as "dasia"; the word derives from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

''daseia'', which refers to "

rough breathing In the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, the rough breathing ( grc, δασὺ πνεῦμα, dasỳ pneûma or ''daseîa''; la, spīritus asper) character is a diacritical mark used to indicate the presence of an sound before a vowel, d ...

" at the start of a word in spoken prosody.Hiley, David. "Dasian aseianNotation". ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed Stanley Sadie. London:Macmillan, 2001. Daseian notation makes use of a staff of varying numbers of lines, from four to as many as eighteen, as well as a system of four shapes which are rotated in various ways to represent the full

gamut In color reproduction, including computer graphics and photography, the gamut, or color gamut , is a certain ''complete subset'' of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given circ ...

of eighteen pitches used in the treatises. These eighteen pitches are based on a system of four repeating tetrachords, resulting in the following scale: G A B♭ c , d e f g , a b c' d' , e' f♯' g' a' , b' c♯''. This scale does not correspond to any known performance practice. When it is used to construct polyphonic music, as directed in the treatises, it results in a number of written

tritone In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones (six semitones). For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it (in short, F–B) is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three a ...

s, which were considered undesirable by theorists in performance and were probably mistakes of the author or else implied the system was transposable to C D E♭ F , G A B♭ c , d e f g , a b c' d' , e' f♯' or d e f g , a b c' d' , e' f♯' g' a' , b' c♯'' d” e” , f♯'' g♯'' when necessary. The notational signs were then placed at the far left of the staff (similar in placement to modern

clef A clef (from French: 'key') is a Musical notation, musical symbol used to indicate which Musical note, notes are represented by the lines and spaces on a musical staff (music), stave. Placing a clef on a stave assigns a particular pitch to ...

), and some illustrations are supplemented with "T" and "S" in between the signs so as to clarify the placement of

semitone A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. It is defined as the interval between two adjacent no ...

s. Syllables of the spoken words were then written on the staff lines (see example above). If the pitch changed, the word syllables would be raised or lowered to a different staff line. This was used to notate

organum ''Organum'' () is, in general, a plainchant melody with at least one added voice to enhance the harmony, developed in the Middle Ages. Depending on the mode and form of the chant, a supporting bass line (or '' bourdon'') may be sung on the same ...

in two, three and four-voice styles. In addition to the ''Enchiriadis'' treatises, this notation is also used in the ''Commemoratio brevis de tonis et psalmis modulandis'' treatise and ''De organo (dictis autem, prout potuimus)''. However, despite the wide circulation of the ''Enchiriadis'' treatises, this notation was not widely used in practical sources.

Music manuscript Music manuscripts are handwritten sources of music. Generally speaking, they can be written on paper or parchment. If the manuscript contains the composer's handwriting it is called an autograph. Music manuscripts can contain musical notation a ...

s of the ninth and tenth centuries record almost exclusively

monophonic music In music, monophony is the simplest of musical textures, consisting of a melody (or "tune"), typically sung by a single singer or played by a single instrument player (e.g., a flute player) without accompanying harmony or chords. Many folk ...

, and even the extant sources of polyphonic music, such as the

Winchester Troper The Winchester Troper refers to two eleventh-century manuscripts of liturgical plainchant and two-voice polyphony copied and used in the Old Minster at Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire, England. The manuscripts are now held aCambridge, Corpus ...

, are written in unheighted

neume A neume (; sometimes spelled neum) is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The earliest neumes were inflective marks that indicated the general shape but not ne ...

s.Hoppin, pp. 198-199. This would continue until the development of the widely used staff system of

Guido of Arezzo Guido of Arezzo ( it, Guido d'Arezzo; – after 1033) was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a ma ...

in the eleventh century.

Philipp Spitta Julius August Philipp Spitta (27 December 1841 – 13 April 1894) was a German music historian and musicologist best known for his 1873 biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. Life He was born in , near Hoya, and his father, also called Phil ...

was the first modern musicologist to correctly interpret this notation, in an 1889 publication. 300px, Daseian notation and its modern equivalents.

References

Musical notation Medieval music theory

Usage

See also

References