At 6:09 PM -0600 11/9/07, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
To my comment,
Of course, it should be remembered too, that with Hildegard's
music, both modern notation AND square notation are anachronisitic,
as when she was writing, neither notation system had yet been
systematized.
John Howell wrote:
You're suggesting that Guido's notation, developed in the first
third of the 11th century, was unknown in the Germanic Kingdoms in
the middle of the 12th?
to which I would respond, that no, I was not suggesting that
Hildegard was unfamiliar with Guido's notation, but rather that the
system of rules applying to square notation as we know them today,
is a more recent, and most likely, different, system of organization
than existed in her time. In other words, I was not suggesting that
Hildegards music was not notated, but rather like round, five line
notation, it very likely used very different customs and perhaps
different signs (or the same sign to mean different things) than we
use now, just as is true of round notation, where the way a
contemporary reader would perform the music might be different than
a contemporary performer reading from a score of Victoria (to name
an example).
Thank you , Noel, and I can understand what you're saying. But since
Guido appropriated the very neumatic shapes that had been in use for
a couple of centuries previously, and simply regularized them
graphically, I don't really see why there would have been much
ambiguity. In fact the whole point of his innovations was to remove
ambiguity so that something composed in Arezzo and copied in Milano
could be accurately read in Munich! (If you knew his system, of
course, but according to the infallible Wikipedia his "Micrologos"
was the 2nd most copied and recopied ms. of the middle ages right
after the works of Boethius.)
John
--
John R. Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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