- Early Notation History
- Notation as we know it
- The 20th Century
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Notation As We Know It
By the early 17th century, music notation was essentially recognizable as what we use today- it was written on a 5-line staff, the note heads were round rather than squares or diamonds, and the convention of beaming together notes in rhythmic groups came into use. Also, the G clef (treble clef) became more or less standard for use (for instruments and voices of the appropriate range), placing the G on the second line as we see today. (11) Increased composition for instruments in the 16th and 17th centuries saw some different features developed, such as bar lines, beams, slurs, and standardized clefs. (12) However, there are many aspects of music notation that we now expect to see that took two more centuries to develop.
As already mentioned, neumes did not tell a performer exactly what pitch to sing/play- it was relative to the starting pitch. By the 17th century, the use of the staff told performers exactly what pitch was expected. Sharp and flat signs were already in use, but an innovation of the mid-17th century was the use of the natural sign. (13) This made it perfectly clear to performers what pitch the composer expected. For example:
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| Example 1 | Example 2 |
In the first example, the composer uses a sharp sign to cancel out the first flat, but in the second example a natural sign is used. The natural sign is what performers today would expect to see.
Notating expression, generally speaking, was hardly done at all in early music, and throughout the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras became increasingly used by composers, and increasingly expected by performers. Expressions that performers came to expect in their music are tempo, dynamics, articulation, and mood. In the early 17th century, dynamic and tempo markings were all relative to what the piece started at. (14) Today, different terms that all generally mean "fast" (allegro, presto) have subtle differences, and different terms that generally mean "slower" (andante, adagio, lento) also have subtle differences.
Dynamics have experienced huge changes through time. In the Baroque and Classical eras, musical instruments were not advanced enough to make subtle differences in their dynamic- they could either play loud, or soft. As technology advanced, composers extended the dynamic range from extremely soft, to extremely loud. Some instruments can achieve these more easily than others. The earliest use of dynamics was Giovanni Gabrieli's Sacrae Symphoniae, written in 1597. (15) By the mid 18th century, composers started using the terms crescendo and diminuendo, as well as using graphic symbols to represent them. (16) The mid-18th century was also a time when differences between different kinds of articulations came to be used- for example, some composers distinguished between two different kinds of staccato. (17)
The standard for expression markings has come to be Italian, because the Italians were the first to use words to mark expression in music. (18) It seems was a general consensus that a standard way of notating expression would be advantageous for composers and performers. However, when Nationalism gripped composers in the late-Romantic and early 20th century eras, the use of one's one home language also became a standard. Composers such as Mahler are known for using their own language, rejecting the standard Italian. For this reason, a dictionary of foreign musical terms is a sound investment for any musician.