Gregorian Chant Sheet Music Modern Notation

[Eleanora Parrot]

Questionis this:

How do I change the notehead to square notation, through out the score, (not meaning diamond head notation!), and how do I get the metrical to reflect the approximate duration of the chanted note per syllable?

I do not want to use modern notation - seeing that it is a monastery, and all the monks can read the music fine.

However, I am busy re-writing the chant books, as the ones in use at present are hand-written notation, and really does not look too good at present. I would like to have it professionally printed, but staying with the same notation and style.

I had a quick look. (I will read about more in depth later!)

I'm not familiar with the program, and would actually prefer something more WYSIWIG - hence I use MS. It would be great if I could use MS - although the above project does have its merits.

Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for polyphonic European vocal music from the late 13th century until the early 17th century. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measured rhythmic durations in terms of numerical proportions between note values. Its modern name is inspired by the terminology of medieval theorists, who used terms like musica mensurata ("measured music") or cantus mensurabilis ("measurable song") to refer to the rhythmically defined polyphonic music of their age, as opposed to musica plana or musica choralis, i.e., Gregorian plainchant. Mensural notation was employed principally for compositions in the tradition of vocal polyphony, whereas plainchant retained its own, older system of neume notation throughout the period. Besides these, some purely instrumental music could be written in various forms of instrument-specific tablature notation.

Mensural notation grew out of an earlier, more limited method of notating rhythms in terms of fixed repetitive patterns, the so-called rhythmic modes, which were developed in France around 1200. An early form of mensural notation was first described and codified in the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis ("The art of measured chant") by Franco of Cologne (c. 1280). A much expanded system allowing for greater rhythmic complexity was introduced in France with the stylistic movement of the Ars nova in the 14th century, while Italian 14th-century music developed its own, somewhat different variant. Around 1400, the French system was adopted across Europe, and became the standard form of notation of the Renaissance music of the 15th and 16th centuries. Over the course of the 17th century, mensural notation gradually evolved into modern measure (or bar) notation.

The decisive innovation of mensural notation was the systematic use of different note shapes to denote rhythmic durations that stood in well-defined, hierarchical numerical relations to each other. While less context dependent than notation in rhythmic modes, mensural notation differed from the modern system in that the values of notes were still somewhat context-dependent. In particular, a note could have the length of either two or three units of the next smaller order, whereas in modern notation these relations are invariably binary. Whether a note was to be read as ternary ("perfect") or binary ("imperfect") was a matter partly of context rules and partly of a system of mensuration signs comparable to modern time signatures. There was also a complex system of temporarily shifting note values by proportion factors like 2:1 or 3:2. Mensural notation used no bar lines, and it sometimes employed special connected note forms (ligatures) inherited from earlier medieval notation. Unlike in the earliest beginnings of the writing of polyphonic music, and unlike in modern practice, mensural notation was usually not written in a score arrangement but in individual parts.

Mensural notation was extensively described and codified by contemporary theorists. As these writings, like all academic work of the time, were usually in Latin, many features of the system are still conventionally referred to by their Latin terms.

Originally, all notes were written in solid, filled-in form ("black notation"). In the mid-15th century, scribes began to use hollow note shapes ("white notation"), reserving black shapes only for the smallest note values. This change was probably motivated by the change from parchment to paper for the most common writing material, as paper was less suited to holding large dots of ink.[1]

As with the notes, the shapes of the rest symbols in mensural notation are already similar to their modern descendants (with the smaller values being successively introduced in the course of the period of mensural notation). The rest symbols of the larger values had a clear visual logic reflecting their time durations, based on the breve rest being a vertical stroke the length of one staff space. For the longa rests, a visual distinction was made depending on whether the longa was imperfect (two breves long) or perfect. Accordingly, their signs were visually twice or three times the length of a breve rest respectively, while the semibreve rest was half that length. Maxima rests, in turn, were groups of two or three longa rests combined. If several longa rests followed each other, groups of either two or three of them were written together on the same staff line to indicate whether they were supposed to be grouped into perfect or imperfect maxima units. (The modern forms of the maxima and longa rests refer to their use in traditional multimeasure rests.)

Ligatures are groups of notes written together, usually indicating melismatic singing of the same syllable over several notes. Ligature forms exist only for the larger note values from the semibreve upwards. Their use in mensural notation was a holdover from the earlier modal rhythmic system, of which they inherited some of their rhythmic meaning.

The rhythmic values of ligatures in modal notation had been based on a metric reinterpretation of the ligature neumes used since much earlier in the notation of Gregorian plainchant. In modal notation, ligatures represented stereotyped rhythmic sequences of short and long notes, typically involving groups of one or more initial short notes (i.e., breves) and one final long note (i.e., a longa). In mensural notation, this rule was generalized, with all other rhythmic combinations being classified in terms of deviation from this basic pattern. In medieval terminology, a ligature possessed perfectio ("perfection")[2] if its final note was a longa (L), and it had proprietas ("propriety") if its first note was a breve (B).[3]

If, by way of exception, the first note was to be a longa, this was signaled by a reversal of initial stems: the descending clivis had its downward stem removed (), while, conversely, the ascending podatus had one added to it ( or ).

In addition to sequences of longa and breve, ligatures could also contain pairs of semibreves (but not normally a single one).[4] These were called cum opposita proprietate, and always marked by an upward-pointing stem to the left of the note pair.

Ligatures could contain any number of notes. In multi-note ligatures, the rules about initial and final values are applied in analogy to those in the binary forms. In addition, the following rules hold for notes in all positions:[7]

Mensural notation distinguished between several basic metric patterns of a piece of music, which were defined as combinations of ternary and binary subdivisions of time on successive hierarchical levels and roughly correspond to modern bar structures. The division of the semibreve into minims was called prolatio, that of the breve into semibreves was called tempus, and that of the longa into breves was known as modus. The division of the maxima into longas was called modus maximarum or modus maior; in the modern literature it is also sometimes called maximodus. Each of these levels could be either perfect (ternary) or imperfect (binary). The two types of prolatio were also known as "major prolation" and "minor prolation" respectively.

There were normally no special signs for indicating the higher divisions of modus and maximodus. However, groups of longa rests at the beginning of a piece (which occurred frequently, as often some voices in a polyphonic composition would enter later than others) could be used as an indicator of the intended meter. If longa rests were written across three staff spaces, they were perfect; moreover, if they occurred in groups of three written together on the same staff line they indicated perfect maximodus. Occasionally, if no voice happened to have a sufficiently long rest at the beginning of the piece, a dummy rest symbol of one maxima's worth of longae would be written to the left of the mensuration sign; in that case it was understood as part of the time signature and not actually executed as a rest.

The time value of some notes could change according to their immediate context in certain situations. The rules for this were developed on the basis of the typical rhythmic nature of music in the 13th century. Most music at that time followed the same basic metric pattern, which in modern notation would be written as a swift 6

4 (or 6

8) meter.[8] Thus, melodies consisted mainly of ternary long notes (in modern notation, dotted minims), or alternating sequences of binary long notes and short notes (minims and crotchets), or groups of three short notes. In the 13th century, all of these were notated using only the longa and breve notes. A longa was automatically understood to fill a whole ternary metric group whenever it was in the neighborhood of other notes that did the same, i.e., whenever it was followed either by another longa or by a full group of three breves. When, however, the longa was preceded or followed by a single breve, then both filled a ternary group together. Thus, the longa had to be reduced to a value of two (it was "imperfected"). When, finally, there were only two breves in between two longae, then the two breves had to fill up a metrical group together. This was done by lengthening the second breve (brevis altera) to a value of two, while the first (brevis recta) kept its normal value.[9]

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