Monday, November 7, 2011

Neumes

In sticking with the musical theme going on in the blog lately, I figured I would post about another form of written knowledge, written music, specifically that of the ancient Brits (and therefore Welsh), neumes.
















In my Music 101 class, we learned about European music (specifically religious music) from the Middle Ages, which mainly consisted of Gregorian chant, also known as plainchant. These are what the neumes were used to notate. Plainchant had no harmony or parts, everyone sang the melody. Also there was no rhythm to plainchant, as there is no way to notate it using the neume system; there are no bars, measures, or time signatures. They were not written in major or minor scales like modern music, but rather "modes" (basically the same idea as a scale, just different notes). Something really interesting that my music teacher mentioned was that composers of religious music could only write in certain modes approved by the Catholic Church.(I think he said there were four church approved modes.)

(This is an example of plainchant from the later middle ages,
as there is actually some harmony towards the end; a simple
bass line).

Now back to the neumes themselves. "Neume" comes from the ancient Greek word for breath, pneuma. I would assume this has something to do with the relationship between singing and using your breath to do so. The system is rather similar to our modern music notation system, which is natural since it was the blueprint and precursor to our modern system. For more detail on how to write in this form and how it relates to our modern music notation system, there is a really cool website entirely devoted to teaching someone how to compose in it and the similarities between neumes and notes, etc.

So now for something fun. I thought I would take a really simple, short piece of music, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and write it using neumes.
As you can see, the two styles are very similar, but the modern one is much more useful in denoting rhythm and meter than the neume system. I wonder how people reacted to this change in music notation, whether they were outraged and reactant to the change, or whether true musicians realized the benefit of the modern system. Either way, without writing music down, there was no effective way to share it with the masses. A person wanting to learn a piece would have to hear someone play it live over and over again, memorize it and then figure out how to play it. Perhaps there are some who might consider the improvisation and personalization of music learned by ear and memorization to be better than the uniformity brought about by a standardized system of music. That is their opinion, and my personal opinion is that writing down music preserves it as the composer originally intended, and I think this is the most important thing when it comes to learning and playing music.

2 comments:

  1. Hey cool similarity with Rachel's post: the music was influenced by religious organizations. Kind of makes me mad because music is all about free expression.
    I also liked how Dane made the connection between notation and rhythm. It makes me wonder if different kinds of rhythms were discovered as more advanced notation became available, or if these rhythms have existed in human cultures since the beginning.

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  2. It's crazy to think how different a piece of music could sound if you changed the key signature and got to hold out whatever notes you felt like. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my siblings about how playwrights are really good when they take themselves out of the play... when the words just speak for themselves, maybe. The neumes remind me of the dialogue of a play and the stage directions: it's the basic format, but you can basically make it say what you want within that format, and there are a LOT of different interpretations of it.

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