Re: Idle curiousity about ancient Lily-lore

[Karl Hammar]

Jim Long:
> Just curious, how did the absolute notation system come about?

Do you mean in the program Lilypond, I don't know.

> My main observations are that it is piano-centric, with 

It's the other way around, the notes are music-centric and the
piano is a reasonable simplification of the scales in current
use. There have been keyboards with split keys to be used in
different scales.

> { c d e f g a b c' } being an intuitive sequence, while { a b c d
> e f g a' } is less logical.   Mmm, well, maybe that's not
> piano-centric, that's just music theory, C is the only (major)
> scale without sharps or flats. [...]

The ancient greeks used letters for notes.

The earliest surviving manuscript/text describing the use of
latin letters as a musical notation is Boethius "De Instututione
Musica" [1]. He used the letters A..P (but not J) and other
systems. Oddo de Cluny, used "Gamma" A..G a..g "alfa" (a over a).
 Later systems assigning letters to notes are the Helmholz
notation [2] (as someone else mentioned), the scientific [3]
(replaces Helmholz and used by scientists), if you really care, you
can use the frequency (in Hz), to round it up MIDI has its own
version. Note, the roman lanuge countries seem to not use letters,
they use do re mi instead (I think).

Notation with lines and pseudo-greek letters (dasian notation)
appeared in tht 9'th cent. Clefs seems to appear in the 11'th (I
assume people didn't bother writing down all note names, f c and g
were the only ones to survive, with c beeing the most common.
In the beginning the "clefs" were just the letter, but with time they
become elaborate.

Why they used the tone "a" as a starting point and not "c" I don't
know (most western scales seems to relate to "c", not "a"). Perhaps
it was like if you start at c in a good part of your voice, it is good
to have some tones below, i.e. the "a" could be choosed to be the
lowest tone of you voice, and that is usually not a good starting
point of singing.

Regarding the "absolute" as in absolute pitch, it is a rather modern
invention and as such it is not very important for the notation.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

[1] p.134 in Gustav Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, Dent 1940
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_pitch_notation
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch_notation

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