When all else fails turn up the music and dance with your dog

Among the manifold forms the written image of music has taken are letters or syllables, to represent individual tones, and symbols to represent groups of them. But a more advanced approach is expressed in notation guided not only by the wish to fix the immediate impression of a given musical sound but by the attempt to render the act of musical performance in its continuity. The notational signs which were to prove of the most lasting influence were the highly expressive neumes; it was from them that the generally surviving style of musical script arose. The term was derived from the Greek word neuma –a nod or motion, and in this particular context the manual gesture or gestures to establish different pitch levels–and it suggests the melodic flow as indicated by the leader of an ensemble. Widely used in Eastern and Western music practice, the neumes were invariably connected with vocal performance whose notation was also greatly aided by the joining of musical symbols with verbal text.

When all else fails turn up the music and dance with your dog

The decisive step in the evolution of a readily perceptible image for the musical sound was taken by the Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (circa 1000), the preceptor of the cathedral choir school at that northern Italian city and a theorist of unusual pedagogical gift. Guido’s achievement was in placing the neumes on lines, for clearer orientation drawn in different colors and representing the interval of a third. With this invention he created the basis of a system that has remained alive in modern practice. So immediately successful was his method that Pope John XIX, “after brief instruction, and to his own surprise, was able to sight-read a melody not previously known to him, without any error,” and in justified pride, Guido added “musica sine linea est sicut puteus sine fune” (“music without lines is like a well without a rope”).1