I frequently burned the midnight oil transcribing facsimiles from Apel's book for a graduate notation seminar. (The clausula on page 229 proved particularly tricky.) My comment about the modern use of the word "semibreve" was not intended to get us into a discussion of early polyphonic notation, but simply to emphasize that language is in a constant state of reinvention. This early polyphonic music was liturgical and the notation adopted from the neumes used in plainsong. The biggest challenge is determining the mensuration, whether the value of a note is equal to two notes of the next smaller species (tempus imperfectum) or three (perfectum), as the church fathers would have liked it (a sign of the Trinity). It was not so much that such music became "speeded up" (the tactus remained fairly constant). It was that music began to be troped. Over time, notation would move to a new level of time values. Leading to today's terminology that makes "half a short" (semibreve) our longest note value. I claim no expertise in such notational matters, and my introduction to the subject was long ago. Other and wiser heads can say much more, I'm sure, but it may be getting us off subject. Peter Danner --
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