metrehelp.org

Music

Notation

The signs for voice and instruments, and how they record pitch, duration and rests.

Notation · 1 of 6

Two sign systems

By the middle of the third century BC, the date of the first surviving scores, Greek professional musicians had an agreed way of writing pitch. They set letters above the syllables of the text.[1] The same system is found, consistent, in papyri and inscriptions down to the late third century AD. It is also found in the tables that the late handbook of Alypius gives for every key and genus. It is from those tables, above all, that the signs are understood.[2]

Vocal and instrumental

There are two series of signs, one for singers and one for players. The scores nearly always keep them apart.[2]

The vocal series is simply the twenty-four letters of the Ionic alphabet. They are assigned in descending order to the notes of the central octave: about f′ down to f in the modern equivalents, the average male singing register. Outside that octave the letters are repeated in altered forms. They may be inverted, turned on their side or marked with a stroke.[3]

The instrumental series is older and stranger. It is a set of letter-like symbols “in no intelligible order”. Following Westphal, West derives them from the local script of Argos. He would attribute them to a musician of the north-east Peloponnese, not much later than the mid fifth century.[4] Hagel accepts that many of the signs look like letters of local Greek scripts. But he finds that no meaningful series emerges, and he calls their origin a riddle still to be solved.[5]

A tablature is a notation that shows where to put the fingers, rather than which note sounds. Nowacki suggests that the instrumental set began as a tablature of fingerings.[6] Landels makes it specifically a piper’s fingering notation, a theory of his own.[7]

The vocal set was devised later, in the late fifth or the fourth century. It gave singers a series in a familiar order.[8]

Triads

Both series work in groups of three. In the instrumental set a basic sign stands for a natural, diatonic note. The same sign turned on its side is the “first sharp”, and the sign reversed is the “second sharp”. These lie a quarter-tone to a semitone above the natural, according to the genus.[9]

The vocal set hides the same structure under continuous lettering. The third letter of each group is the natural, and the two before it are the sharps. In the central octave the naturals Γ, Ζ, Ι, Μ, Ο, Ϲ, Φ, Ω stand for f′, e′, d′, c′, b, a, g, f. Α Β stand above Γ, Δ Ε above Ζ, and so on.[10]

A first sharp is used only for the lower of the two movable notes of a tetrachord. The upper one is written with a second sharp, or, in the diatonic, with the natural of the next group.[11]

There is no sign for lowering a note. Nowacki explains this from the instruments. A lyre string could be raised by stopping, and an aulos hole by part-uncovering, but neither could be lowered.[6] The signs do not distinguish the enharmonic from the chromatic genus, which share the same shape of tetrachord.[12]

Natural key: The Hypolydian key is written entirely with the basic, unturned signs. It is the “white-note” scale of the system, and the modern convention makes it A minor. Every other key needs sharps; the Dorian needs seven of them.[13]

Pitch

The modern letter-equivalents go back to Bellermann in the 1840s. He chose them to avoid sharps and flats. The editors agree that the true pitch was about a minor third lower.[14]

Hagel goes further. He argues that the Lydian key, not the Hypolydian, should be taken as the natural scale, because the central note of the Lydian is the note most often attested in the documents. That would bring every transcription down by a fourth.[15] On this site the conventional letters are kept, and the dispute is noted.

A printed page of German text with a musical staff, under which run two rows of Greek vocal and instrumental note-signs.
Bellermann’s table of the Greek signs, 1847

Who could read it

The notation was a professional’s tool. Aristoxenus dismissed it as no part of harmonic science. A written fourth, he said, looks the same whatever its place in the scale. And the man who writes out the notes of a Phrygian melody need not know what the Phrygian melody is.[16] The Alexandrian scholars never used it in their editions of the lyric poets.[17]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes a melody of Euripides laboriously in words, rather than citing the signs. By the fourth or fifth century AD, Gaudentius implies that the system was no longer current.[18]

Notes

  1. ^ West 1992, p. 254; Hagel 2009, p. 1.
  2. ^ a b West 1992, p. 254.
  3. ^ West 1992, pp. 259–260; Nowacki 2020, p. 44.
  4. ^ West 1992, pp. 260–261.
  5. ^ Hagel 2009, p. 2.
  6. ^ a b Nowacki 2020, p. 43.
  7. ^ Landels 1999, c. pp. 208–209; see the An aulos tablature? tab.
  8. ^ West 1992, p. 263.
  9. ^ West 1992, pp. 255, 262.
  10. ^ Nowacki 2020, p. 45.
  11. ^ West 1992, pp. 255–256.
  12. ^ West 1992, p. 255.
  13. ^ Hagel 2009, p. 9; Nowacki 2020, p. 44.
  14. ^ West 1992, p. 255; Anderson 1994, p. 204.
  15. ^ Hagel 2009, pp. 452–453.
  16. ^ West 1992, pp. 263–264, 271.
  17. ^ Pöhlmann and West 2001, p. 1.
  18. ^ West 1992, pp. 272–273.
Picture credits on this page
  1. Behind the title: A music lesson: the teacher (inscribed ΣΜΙΚΥΔΟΣ, right) and his pupil (ΕΥΔΥΜΙΔΕΣ, left), both with lyres; between them a boy (ΤΛΕΜΠΟΜΕΝΟΣ) recites a text. Attic red-figure hydria by Phintias, c. 510 BC, from Vulci. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen SH 2421. Phintias; photo: Bibi Saint-Pol · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
  2. A page of Friedrich Bellermann, Die Tonleitern und Musiknoten der Griechen (Berlin, 1847): the Greek note-signs set against modern notes. Friedrich Bellermann; scan: Internet Archive · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
  3. Bust of Aristotle: Roman marble copy after a bronze original by Lysippos of c. 330 BC; the alabaster mantle is a modern addition. Rome, Palazzo Altemps Inv. 8575. After Lysippos; photo: Jastrow (2006) · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons
  4. A block from the southern wall of the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, incised with the hymns to Apollo composed by Athenaios and Limenios and carved in 128 BC. Archaeological Museum of Delphi. Zde · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  5. The Seikilos epitaph, a funerary column inscribed with a short song and its musical notation. Copenhagen, National Museum of Denmark. Artem.G · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons · background removed
  6. Blocks from the south wall of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, inscribed with the two hymns to Apollo by Athenaios and Limenios (128/127 BC) and their musical notation. Delphi, Archaeological Museum. Zde · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  7. The Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi, Greece. Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons