Musicology: Sources, Notation & Performance Practice: Reading What the Past Left Behind

Open a score and it feels like a recording on paper: the music, fixed. It is not. A chant manuscript from the 920s shows where a tune rises and falls but not by how much. A Renaissance lute book shows where the fingers go and says nothing about which pitches will come out. A violinist playing Handel with a period-instrument ensemble tunes the A about a semitone below the A of a modern symphony orchestra, and both are playing "the notes".

So every performance of old music is a decision about the unwritten part. Where does the evidence for that part come from? How reliable is it? And who decided what the page would be and what it would leave out? Those are the questions of this course. Each card below plays sound if you tap Play (made in your browser, no files) and also shows the notes and numbers, so it works silently. Sound is not available in this reader, so the cards show notes and numbers only.

Sources and their silences

There are six kinds of evidence for music of the past. Manuscripts and prints give the notes, in some notation. Treatises and letters describe practice: how to ornament, how to tune, what a good singer does. Pictures (iconography) show who played what and where; surviving instruments show what they could do. Recordings exist only from the late 19th century: the earliest intelligible one is a phonautograph trace of "Au clair de la lune" made on 9 April 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, which nobody could play back until 2008, and Edison's phonograph followed in 1877. And a living teacher can hand on a practice, though what passes down always changes a little on the way.

No source answers every question. The card shows a judgement, not a measurement, of how well each source speaks to six questions. Switch sources on and off, or jump to the situation of a historian in a given era, and watch what the evidence cannot reach. Before 1877 nothing can answer "how fast?" or "what did it sound like?" better than a treatise, an instrument and a lot of caution.

Neumes: writing the shape of a tune

Western chant notation begins in the 9th century. The first marks, neumes, are small signs written above the words: a punctum (a point) for one note, a virga (a rod) for one note carrying stress, a clivis for two notes going down, a podatus (or pes) for two going up. In the earliest "staffless" (adiastematic) manuscripts they show the general shape of a melody, a memory aid for singers who already knew the tune by heart. Heightened or diastematic neumes, placed at different heights to show relative pitch, appear in the early 11th century, and Guido of Arezzo is traditionally credited with the staff of one to four lines that fixed the heights.

What does a graduate keep from this? A neume page does not contain one tune. It contains a contour, plus whatever the singers carried in memory. Add a line that marks one pitch and you narrow it. Add four lines and a clef and the tune is fixed. The card counts, with live arithmetic, how many different seven-note tunes fit each stage of notation. The tune is the opening of the Dies irae sequence, a 13th-century chant text and melody in the Dorian mode, on its first seven notes: fa-mi-fa-re, mi-do-re (F E F D, E C D).

Mensural notation: making time visible

Chant has no metre. When singers began to combine several lines, in the Notre-Dame polyphony of about 1200, they needed to know how long each note lasted so the voices would meet. At first this was done by the pattern of notes tied together in groups called ligatures, read according to a few fixed rhythmic modes. A later step, associated with Franco of Cologne's treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis (dated to about 1260 to 1280 depending on the source), gave each note shape its own duration. In the 14th century the Ars nova added the minim and a flexible system of dividing every note into two or three.

The rule to keep is that a mensuration sign tells you how each note divides. Tempus governs how a breve divides: perfect (a circle) means into three semibreves, imperfect (a half circle) into two. Prolatio governs how a semibreve divides: major (a dot in the sign) means three minims, minor two. Two choices, four combinations, and each is a different metre when you transcribe it to modern barlines.

Tablature: writing the fingers, not the sound

Staff notation tells a player which pitch to make. Tablature tells the player where to put the fingers, and the pitch follows from the instrument. Lute tablature came in several national forms: German tablature is traced to the 15th century and the organist Conrad Paumann; French tablature puts lowercase letters on a line for each course (a open, b first fret, c second fret, and so on); Italian tablature uses numbers. In French tablature the top line is the highest course.

Because tablature records fingers, it is mute about pitch. A six-course Renaissance lute was tuned like a tenor viol: fourths between neighbouring courses except a major third between the third and fourth, usually called "in G" from the top course, G C F A D G. Lutes came in many sizes, and there was no pitch standard before the 20th century, so the same tab could sound a tone higher or lower on a different instrument. Set the frets below and the card gives the notes, names the chord if there is one, and lets you change lute size.

Print and the urtext: whose marks are these?

The next change was the printing press. Ottaviano Petrucci of Venice, who petitioned in 1498 for the exclusive right to print music for twenty years, issued Harmonice musices odhecaton A in 1501: 96 chansons, the earliest known printed collection of polyphonic music. He printed each sheet three times, once for the staves, once for the notes and once for the words. About 61 music books followed, most between 1501 and 1509. Print did not create written music, but it made one fixed text that hundreds of people could buy and compare.

A printed or manuscript source is not the same as the version you buy in a shop. Many 19th-century "performing editions" added the editor's own phrasing, dynamics and fingering, and some altered notes and cut passages. Later editors reacted with urtext ("original text") editions that try to print what the composer wrote and nothing else. Even there, an editor must choose between variant sources, correct misprints, and decide what to mark. The musicologist James Webster has argued that many editions called Urtext change more than their editors admit. A good edition lists its sources and shows its own additions in brackets or small print.

Pitch: what A meant before 440

An orchestra today tunes to A = 440 Hz, a figure recommended by an international conference in 1939 and adopted as ISO 16 in 1955 and reaffirmed in 1975. Before that, pitch was local and drifted. A tuning fork associated with Handel (1740) gives A = 422.5 Hz. A Paris Opera fork of 1810 gives 423; a Paris fork of 1822 gives 432; one of 1855 gives 449; La Scala before 1859 is reported as high as 451. In 1859 a French law fixed A at 435. Many orchestras today tune a little above 440 (the Berlin Philharmonic is reported at 443). Period-instrument groups today often use A = 415 as a convention for Baroque music: it is almost exactly one semitone below 440.

Pitch matters because it changes the music. A singer's high note sits differently; a violin's open strings ring differently; a key may sound brighter or darker. The Verdi tuning of A = 432 has been promoted by some groups, but it sits only about 32 cents under 440, a third of a semitone. The card turns any A into frequencies, a cents offset from 440, and beats against 440.

Historically informed performance and its critics

From the mid-20th century a movement set out to play old music on the instruments, at the pitch and in the style the sources point to. Arnold Dolmetsch, who published The Interpretation of the Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries in 1915 and helped revive the recorder and the viol, is a founding figure; later ensembles such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt's Concentus Musicus Wien, Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music and Frans Brüggen's Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century made period instruments a mainstream sound. It is now usually called historically informed performance, because "authentic" overclaims; John Eliot Gardiner has called that word misleading.

The strongest case for it: the sources describe real alternatives to the habits of a modern conservatory, and trying them changed how Bach, Monteverdi and Mozart sound for everyone. The critique is also serious. Richard Taruskin's Text and Act (1995) argued that supposedly authentic performances embodied "a whole wish list of modern(ist) values" and that we can never know how early music really sounded. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson holds that the gap between evidence and a sounding performance is bridged by musicianship and invention. Robert Philip asks why we assume that what sounds tasteful now sounded tasteful then, and Lydia Goehr frames the argument as fidelity to the conditions of performance versus fidelity to the musical work. These are live positions, not a settled score.

One convention the debate has handled well is notes inégales ("unequal notes"): in 17th- and 18th-century France, notes written as equal were often played unevenly in pairs, long then short. More than 85 French treatises between 1550 and 1810 discuss it, and they agree on a rule of thumb (stepwise notes of a certain length, depending on the metre) but not on how uneven. Mechanical instruments suggest ratios of about 3:2, 2:1 or 3:1; the exact amount was left to taste. Whether it applied outside France, in Bach or Scarlatti, was one of the most heated disputes of 20th-century musicology.

Fieldwork and its ethics: who is the music for?

Not all musical evidence is old. Ethnomusicology studies music in living cultures, and it grew out of "comparative musicology" in the late 19th century. The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv began in September 1900, when the psychologist Carl Stumpf used Edison cylinders to record a Siamese theatre troupe visiting Germany; Erich von Hornbostel was its director from 1905 to 1933. Its cylinders (about 30,000 of them) were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 1999. In the 1950s scholars moved from "comparative musicology" to "ethnomusicology", partly to answer the charge that the older approach imposed Western ideas on other music; Jaap Kunst is credited with coining the term. After the Second World War the field moved towards fieldwork, and Alan Merriam (1964) criticised mere collecting of sound. Mantle Hood urged researchers to learn the music they study, an idea he called bi-musicality.

The ethical questions are specific. Who agreed to the recording, and to which uses? Who is credited by name? Who is paid when it is reused? Does a copy return to the community? One documented case shows how much can go wrong after the tape stops. In 1970 the ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp recorded a Baegu lullaby from the Solomon Islands, sung by a woman named Afunakwa; UNESCO issued it in 1973 on Solomon Islands: Fateleka and Baegu Music from Malaita. The French project Deep Forest later used it, in 1992, without authorization from the singer, Zemp, the label or the distributor, and the album's sleeve wrongly attributed the samples to African Pygmies. The case is cited in ethnomusicology courses as a lesson in how archives and recordings can travel beyond what anyone agreed.

What a graduate just sees

• Every score assumes a reader who knows the unwritten rest.
• No source answers every question; before 1877 nothing says how fast or how loud, only how someone described it.
• Staffless neumes give a contour, not a tune, and heights, then a staff, narrowed it.
• A mensuration sign decides whether a breve is three or two, and the same line of notes becomes four different metres.
• Tablature records fingers; the pitch depends on the instrument.
• An edition is a layer of someone's decisions, and "Urtext" still hides some.
• "A = 440" is a 20th-century agreement; before it, A varied from about 390 to 450 across places and decades.
• "Authentic" is argued over, and good performers can hold both the evidence and the doubt.
• Recording a living tradition creates duties of consent, credit and return.

Where it shows up next

• Music of Latin America & the Caribbean (36/72) reads colonial cathedral manuscripts and asks what can and cannot be known from pre-Columbian instruments.
• Music, Power & Society (36/73) asks who paid for the sources that survive, and whose music was never written down.
• Acoustics, Tuning & Timbre (35/68) supplies the temperaments and tuning systems that pitch standards sit inside.
• In the world: the musicologist writing programme notes, the editor at a music publisher, the period-instrument player choosing a pitch and a bowing, the archivist deciding whether a recording may be shared.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900–1600 (Mediaeval Academy of America, 1942; later editions). The classic guide to reading neumes, mensural and tablature notation.
• 📘 Textbook. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (University of Illinois Press; third edition 2015). The standard introduction to fieldwork and its debates.
• 📘 The debate. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford University Press, 1995), and John Butt, Playing with History (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21M.220 Early Music (Fall 2010), with lecture notes and listening.
• 🌐 IMSLP for free scans of manuscripts and old prints, and e-codices for digitised medieval manuscripts, including St Gall.