music notation Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

, a ligature is a graphic symbol that tells a musician to perform two or more notes in a single gesture, and on a single syllable. It was primarily used from around 800 to 1650 AD. Ligatures are characteristic of

neumatic 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 n ...

(chant) and

mensural notation Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for European vocal polyphonic music from the later part of the 13th century until about 1600. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measured rhythm ...

. The notation and meaning of ligatures has changed significantly throughout Western music history, and their precise interpretation is a continuing subject of debate among

musicologists Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some mu ...

History

Plainchant

The early notation of

plainchant Plainsong or plainchant (calque from the French ''plain-chant''; la, cantus planus) is a body of chants used in the liturgies of the Western Church. When referring to the term plainsong, it is those sacred pieces that are composed in Latin text. ...

, particularly

Gregorian chant Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe durin ...

, used a series of shapes called

neumes 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 ...

, which served as reminders of music that was taught

by rote Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. The method rests on the premise that the recall of repeated material becomes faster the more one repeats it. Some of the alternatives to rote learning include meaningful learning, ...

rather than as an exact record of which notes to sing. Neumes were in use from the 9th through the 11th centuries AD for most plainsong, and differed by region. Due to their malleable nature, there were no hard and fast rules for the lengths each note was supposed to last, or even how high or low the intervals between notes were to be.

''De mensurabili musica''

A treatise on notation named ''De mensurabili musica'' was copied around 1260. In this treatise, the anonymous author proposed that, much in the same way that poetry of the time was based on a series of modal rhythms, music should also be set up in this way. The notation of these

modes Mode ( la, modus meaning "manner, tune, measure, due measure, rhythm, melody") may refer to: Arts and entertainment * '' MO''D''E (magazine)'', a defunct U.S. women's fashion magazine * ''Mode'' magazine, a fictional fashion magazine which is ...

was accomplished primarily through using ligatures in varying lengths and with varying degrees of complexity, where the rhythms would be derived from context. For most of their notated history, this was the purpose of ligatures: to indicate the rhythmic mode.

Franco of Cologne

Around 1250, a music theorist named

Franco of Cologne Franco of Cologne (; also Franco of Paris) was a German music theorist and possibly a composer. He was one of the most influential theorists of the Late Middle Ages, and was the first to propose an idea which was to transform musical notation per ...

published a treatise on music entitled ''Ars cantus mensurabilis''. In this treatise, Franco proposed that note values should be set up objectively, so that when looking at the notated music, a musician would be able to tell what notes were being sung or played, and the duration of those notes, with some degree of certainty. Ligatures were used for this as well, as they had become more or less standardized through the practice of the rhythmic modes.

Polyphonic music from c1300-c1600

See

(ligatures).

Usage

Ligatures have two basic shapes: ''box'' (rectangular) and ''oblique'' (angled). Additionally, some ligatures have tails that either point up or down; the direction of the ligature's tail affects its meaning, unlike the direction of a tail on a modern note head. While primarily contextual, the system of ligatures in use from the 13th to the 16th century is fairly standardized. All ligatures of this period have the following principles in common: *All ligature notes are either the length of a '' longa'' ("''L''"), a ''

breve A breve (, less often , neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (the wedge or in Czech, in Slo ...

'' ("''B''"), or a '' semibreve'' ("''S''"). *All ligatures have at least two notes. *For ease of discussion, ligatures of different lengths have different names. A ligature with two notes is called a ''binaria''; one with three notes, a ''ternaria''; one with four notes, a ''quaternaria''; and one with five notes, a ''quinaria''. Larger ones are possible, but rare. *If a ligature has three or more notes, all notes in the middle (the ''mediae'') are ''B''. *A downward tail changes the value of the note where the tail occurs, either from ''L'' to ''B'' or, less commonly, from ''B'' to ''L''. *An upward tail indicates that the next ''two'' notes are a series of ''S''. *A tail at the end of a ligature indicates an additional note be sung or played, called a ''plica'', that is not part of the ligature. Plicas were especially common with the rhythmic modes, to accommodate in practice what could not be accomplished within the very strict theoretical basis for modal music.

Alternate interpretations

Most scholarship on ligatures is focused on period from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Prior to this period, ligatures were far less standardized; a ''quaternaria'' ligature that, under the above rules, would mean a series like ''SSLB'' would simply mean ''BBBB''.

Transcription

In transcribing old works to modern notation, where no compound graphs as ligatures exist, editors usually indicate by a hook, a bracket (brace), or (less often in polyphonic music) a slur/ phrase mark those notes that the original combined into a ligature. To avoid confusion, many scores transcribed purely for performance do not include additional notation to indicate that a particular note originally belonged to a ligature, as most methods to show this have separate meanings in a performance capacity.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ligature (Music) Musical notation Renaissance music Medieval music theory