Present Characters Used in Music

The present characters used in music are a growth; and it is an interesting study to watch this growth from the earliest effort at representing musical thought, down to the present system of notation, which is remarkable for possessing many of the properties of an universal language.

In all civilized countries musical symbols are the same, and musical compositions, when carefully written, receive everywhere substantially the same interpretation. In ancient times, to record musical ideas was a matter of great perplexity even among those who could express other forms of thought in refined and appropriate language. The earliest attempts at expressing musical sounds on paper were made by Alypius, a Greek, about 400 A.D.; the signs adopted seem to have been the letters of the Alphabet, which, to convey from one mind to another the pitch and duration of the sounds, were placed erect, or inverted, were multilated, or commingled, or cast into fanciful forms, so that by degrees there were 100 such characters in use. This complicated system yielded in Mediaeval times, to a system of Numes, which consisted of dots, points, accents, and other such hieroglyphs placed over the words to be sung, without lines or indication of clefs, each mark having a separate value. This system lasted from the 8th to the 12th century. There was quite an improvement in musical notation when, about the tenth century, a single line was drawn over the words and the position of the numes or notes, over and under this line, defined their meaning more distinctly. A second line was afterwards added, one line being made red and having the letter F at the beginning of it, the other yellow, with the letter C, and from these apparently grew up the clefs C, F, G, of our modern notation. Musical symbols gradually became simplified by an increase of lines, and numes changed into what are now called notes. But as late as the 13th and 14th centuries, numberless crooked marks, loops, curves, hooks and wavy lines were used. The earliest use of the four-line staff is to be found in England. The ancient notes belonging to the four-line stave were called large, long breve and semi-breve. The long and breve is still used in Church music. The introduction of the present notes, called semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver, semiquaver, etc., is ascribed to Jean de Muris, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who made these important additions to musical notation in 1338.

But the man who is honored by historians as "the father of music," as we know it, is Guido Aretinus, a Benedictine monk of the eleventh century. He is credited, at least, with having given an impulse to the study of music such as it had never received at the hands of any one man. Among his other inventions are the names given to the seven notes of the scale used in singing; they were taken from the initial syllables of the lines of a hymn to St. John the Baptist, which was a favorite in Guido's day; running thus:--

In later times the Sa was changed into Si and thence into Ti, and Ut into Do, excepting in France. In Arezzo, Italy, where Guido is supposed to have been born, a statue of him was dedicated, on the 2d of September, 1880, the date being pronounced, by some recent authorities, the nine hundredth anniversary of his birthday. Also, a portrait of him hangs on the wall of the refectory in the Monastery of Avellana, bearing the inscription, "Beatus Guido, inventor musicae." The earliest note printing from movable types was by Ottavino du Petruccio, in 1466, but the neat printing of modern music belongs to the present century.