It’s
easy to take a musical staff with five lines and four spaces for granted in
today’s world. Everyone recognizes music notation when they see it – whether
they can read it or not. But where did music notation come from? Let’s dig into
this a little bit.
The
history of music corresponds somewhat with the history of the Christian church.
The reason for this is that the church was always known to use music in its
services. Music notation was actually invented for use in the church. The music
seen in early church history consisted of the chanting of scripture and the
singing of psalms. These early chants had various dialects depending on the
region or the division of the church. During the first millennium, the Roman
Empire had split into the Western Empire (this became the Roman Catholic
Church) and the Byzantine Empire (the became the Orthodox Church).
During
the mid-8th century, Pope Steven II needed military alliance and Pepin the
Short, King of the Franks in the North, wished to use the church in order to
unify the lands. This is when we see the standardization of chant. By
eliminating the various dialects and coming up with a standard chant and means
of notating it, people from different regions would more likely feel unified.
When Charlemagne took over as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, he declared that every
church had to sing the same thing in order to help with this standardization
process.
But
how did this lead to music notation? And what did music notation look like?
We’ll continue looking at this next time.
