Capturing Music: The Story of Notation

by Thomas Forrest Kelly

Overview

An entertaining history of how musicians learned to record music for all time, filled with art that sings.

In today’s digital landscape, we have the luxury of experiencing music anytime, anywhere. But before this instant accessibility and dizzying array of formats—before CDs, the eight-track tape, the radio, and the turntable—there was only one recording technology: music notation. It allowed singers and soloists to travel across great distances and perform their work with stunning fidelity, a feat that we now very much take for granted.

Thomas Forrest Kelly transports us to the lively and complex world of monks and monasteries, of a dove singing holy chants into the ear of a saint, and of bustling activity in the Cathedral of Notre Dame—an era when the only way to share even the simplest song was to learn it by rote, church to church and person to person. With clarity and a sense of wonder, Kelly tells a story that spans five hundred years, leading us on a journey through medieval Europe and showing how we learned to keep track of rhythm, melody, and precise pitch with a degree of accuracy previously unimagined.

Kelly reveals the technological advances that led us to the system of notation we use today, placing each step of its evolution in its cultural and intellectual context. Companion recordings by the renowned Blue Heron ensemble are paired with vibrant illuminated manuscripts, bringing the art to life and allowing readers to experience something of the marvel that medieval writers must have felt when they figured out how to capture music for all time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393064964
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/03/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	455,080
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Thomas Forrest Kelly is professor of music at Harvard University. The author of The Role of the Scroll, Capturing Music, and Music Then and Now, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

List of Recordings ix

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Isidore: Writing as Recording 25

Chapter 2 St. Gregory and the Recording of Music 41

Chapter 3 Guido the Monk and the Recording of Pitch 61

Chapter 4 The Great Book: Leoninus and the Recording of Rhythm 79

Chapter 5 Franco Figures It Out 113

Chapter 6 It Takes a Scientist: Philippe de Vitry 143

Chapter 7 Into the Future: Later Developments 177

Appendix: Text and Translations 209

Notes 221

Credits 227

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/15/2014
Before the era of recording—before wax cylinders, vinyl, or digital media—songwriters, composers, and musicians relied on sheet music and musical notation to disseminate their works. In this marvelously witty and engaging chapter of music history, Kelly, a Harvard musicologist, thoughtfully reviews the long process through which musical notation developed. Accompanied by 100 color illustrations, as well as a CD that allows readers to hear how these early compositions might have sounded, Kelly’s chronicle traces the rise of notation from its earliest stages to its more developed manifestations in the late Middle Ages. Along the way, we meet the individuals actively trying to capture sound in verse or notation, from Notker, who used language as a means to capture sound, and Guido the Monk, who revolutionized the writing of music by introducing a very early system of notation that could guide musical performance, to Perotinus, whose notations captured rhythm, and Philippe de Vitry, who ingeniously built upon earlier work to develop scores for longer pieces of music. Kelly uses sidebars for more technical music theory, saving space for the larger story of the personalities who bequeathed musical notation to us and the times in which they lived. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"With his characteristic blend of deep scholarship and clarity of style, Tom Kelly has written a timely history of the most significant revolution in musical practice of the last thousand years."

Peter Phillips

"Gorgeously illustrated… If you have ever wondered how a system of dots and lines in space came to express the arrangement of sounds in time, this engaging, chatty book explains how… Thomas Forrest Kelly’s witty and colloquial prose style makes the book much more approachable than you might expect."

Seattle Times - Melinda Bargreen

"Mr. Kelly’s fascinating book tracks the centuries-long process by which pitches and rhythms were codified."

Wall Street Journal - Eric Felten

"Readers will delight in the exquisite beauty of this volume—it looks like a richly illuminated manuscript! And with Blue Heron’s expertly and lovingly produced recordings, this is so much more than a book—it is something rare and wonderful."

Susan Hellauer

"From the sparest clues showing the contour of early chant to the most intricate and beautiful musical symbols ever devised, Capturing Music is engaging at every turn. Tom Kelly is a master storyteller."

Ross W. Duffin

"For generations to come, this lucid book will be the go-to study of notation for performers of early music, and a soothing balm for anyone who wants to understand how visual technology reflected the ways music was conceived, performed, and documented."

Benjamin Bagby

"Tom Kelly’s Capturing Music is a splendid introduction to the wonders of medieval notational technology, written in an engaging way."

Margot Fassler

2014-07-13
A comprehensive account of one of the key inventions in music history: a method for writing down a composition so someone could learn it without hearing it performed. Kelly (Music/Harvard Univ.; Music Then and Now, 2012, etc.) assumes neither familiarity with medieval music nor the ability to read music. Instead, he focuses on the conceptual breakthroughs that led a few medieval musicians and scribes to devise a way to make it easier to teach novices the extensive body of music that filled the church year. The very idea required something of an intellectual leap; after all, music cannot be seen, and when a song is over, it lives only in memory. Still, over several centuries, a system of marks, or neumes, was developed to record Gregorian chant. At first, the system was rather inexact; the neumes recorded the general shape of the melody but not the exact pitches. The key invention came in the early 11th century, when an Italian monk named Guido drew a set of parallel lines—the ancestor of the staff—to define the pitch that each neume represented. Guido also named each note of the scale, making it easier to teach music. The pope enthusiastically endorsed his system, and it caught on throughout Western Europe. But Guido made no attempt to notate rhythms, leaving subsequent scholars to guess at a key component of how chant was sung. A couple of centuries later, masters Leoninus and Perotinus hit on the idea of changing the shape of the notes to show how long to hold them. Their system, codified in the next century, became (with additional adjustments as styles changed) the core of our modern musical notation. With over 100 illustrations from original manuscripts, Kelly makes the story clear enough for nonmusicians to follow, and the book includes a CD to let readers hear how many of the examples actually sound. Charmingly written, with plenty of interesting historical tidbits—recommended for anyone interested in early music.

Kirkus Reviews