Neumes are the basic elements of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The earliest neumes were inflective marks which indicated the general shape but not necessarily the exact notes or rhythms to be sung. Later developments included the use of heightened neumes which showed the relative pitches between neumes, and the creation of a four-line musical staff that identified particular pitches. Neumes do not generally indicate rhythm, but additional symbols were sometimes juxtaposed with neumes to indicate changes in articulation, duration, or tempo. Neumatic notation was later used in medieval music to indicate certain patterns of rhythm called rhythmic modes, and eventually evolved into modern musical notation. Neumatic notation remains standard in modern editions of plainchant. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... In musical notation, the staff or stave is a set of five horizontal lines on which note symbols are placed to indicate pitch and rhythm. ... A musician plays the vielle in a 14th century medieval manuscript. ... In medieval music, the rhythmic modes were patterns of long and short durations (or rhythms) imposed on written notes which otherwise appeared to be identical. ... Broadly speaking, plainsong is the name given to the body of traditional songs used in the liturgies of the Catholic Church. ...

A sample of the Kýrie Eléison (Orbis Factor) from the Liber Usualis. Listen to it interpreted.

Image File history File links Sample of Gregorian chant; Kyrie orbis factor File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Early history

Although chant was probably sung since the earliest days of the church, for centuries they were only transmitted orally. Chant is the rhythmic speaking or singing of words or sounds, either on a single pitch or with a simple melody involving a limited set of notes and often including a great deal of repetition or statis. ...

The earliest systems involving neumes are of Aramaic origin and were used to notate inflections in the quasi-emmelic recitation of the Christian holy scriptures. As such they resemble functionally a similar system used for the notation of recitation of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam. This early system was called ekphonetic notation, from the Greek ekphonesis meaning quasi-melodic recitation of text. Aramaic is a Semitic language with a four-thousand year history. ... The Qurān [1] (Arabic: ‎ , literally the recitation; also called The Noble Quran; also transliterated as Quran, Koran, and Al-Quran), is the central religious text of Islam. ...

Around the 9th century neumes began to become shorthand mnemonic aids for the melodic recitation of chant proper. A prevalent view is that neumatic notation was first developed in the Eastern Roman Empire (see Byzantium and Byzantine music). This seems plausible given the well-documented peak of musical composition and cultural activity in major cities of the empire (now regions of southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel) at that time. The corpus of extant Byzantine music in manuscript and printed form is far larger than that of the Gregorian chant, due in part to the fact that neumes fell in disuse in the west after the rise of modern staff notation and with it the new techniques of polyphonic music, while the Eastern tradition of Greek Orthodox church music and the reformed neume notation remains alive until today. As a means of recording the passage of time the 9th century was that century that lasted from 801 to 900. ... Byzantium, present day Istanbul, was an ancient Greek city-state, which according to legend was founded by Greek colonists from Megara in 667 BC and named after their king Byzas or Byzantas (Βύζας or Βύζαντας in Greek). ... Byzantine music is the music of the Byzantine Empire and by extension the music of its culture(s) as they continued in the Orthodox Christian parts of the population after the fall of the empire to the rule of the Ottoman Empire. ... Gregorian chant is also known as plainchant or plainsong and is a form of monophonic, unaccompanied singing, which was developed in the Catholic Church, mainly during the period 800-1000. ...

Slavic neume notations ("Znamennoe singing") are on the whole even more difficult to decipher and transcribe than Byzantine or Gregorian neume notations. An example of hook and banner notation used by Okruzhniki Old Believers in 1884. ...

Use in Western plainchant

"Iubilate deo universa terra" shows psalm verses in unheightened cheironomic neumes.

The earliest Western notation for chant appears in the 9th century. These early staffless neumes, called cheironomic or in campo aperto, appeared as freeform wavy lines above the text. Various scholars see these as deriving from cheironomic hand-gestures, from the ekphonetic notation of Byzantine chant, or from punctuation or accent marks.^[1] A single neume could represent a single pitch, or a series of pitches all sung on the same syllable. Cheironomic neumes indicated changes in pitch and duration within each syllable, but did not attempt to specify the pitches of individual notes, the intervals between pitches within a neume, nor the relative starting pitches of different syllables' neumes. Tomb painting depicting ancient Egyptian cheironomy. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...

Presumably these were intended only as mnemonics for melodies learned by ear. The earliest extant manuscripts (9th-10th centuries) of such neumes include:

• the abbey of St. Gall, in modern-day Switzerland
• Messine neumes (from the monastery of Metz in northeast France)
• Aquitanian neumes (southern France, also used in Spain)
• Laon, Chartres, Montpellier

"Gaudeamus omnes," from the Graduale Aboense, was scripted using square notation.

In the early 11th century, Beneventan neumes (from the churches of Benevento in southern Italy) were written at varying distances from the text to indicate the overall shape of the melody; such neumes are called heightened or diastematic neumes, which showed the relative pitches between neumes. Shortly after this, one to four staff lines clarified the exact relationship between pitches, an innovation traditionally ascribed to Guido d'Arezzo. One line was marked as representing a particular pitch, usually C or F. These neumes resembled the same thin, scripty style of the chironomic notation. In 13th-century England, Sarum chant was notated using square noteheads, a practice which subsequently spread throughout Europe; in Germany, a variant called Gothic neumes continued to be used until the 16th century. Abbey of St. ... For other uses of Metz, see Metz (disambiguation) City motto: Si paix dedans, paix dehors (French: If peace inside, peace outside) City proper (commune) Région Lorraine Département Moselle (57) Mayor Jean-Marie Rausch Area 41. ... Location Administration Capital Bordeaux Regional President Alain Rousset (PS) (since 1998) Départements Dordogne Gironde Landes Lot-et-Garonne Pyrénées-Atlantiques Arrondissements 18 Cantons 235 Communes 2,296 Statistics Land area1 41,309 km² Population (Ranked 6th)  - January 1, 2005 est. ... Interior of the cathedral Notre-Dame of Laon is a cathedral located in Laon, France. ... Cathedral of Chartres The Cathedral of Chartres (Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres, French: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres), located in Chartres, about 50 miles from Paris, is considered one of the finest examples in all France of the Gothic style of architecture. ... Montpellier (Occitan Montpelhièr) is a city in the south of France. ... Benevento is a town and archiepiscopal see of Campania, Italy, capital of the province of Benevento, 32 miles northeast of Naples. ... In musical notation, the staff or stave is a set of five horizontal lines on which note symbols are placed to indicate pitch and rhythm. ... Guido of Arezzo or Guido Monaco (995-1050) is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation. ... Woodcut of Old Sarum as it was during its height Old Sarum is the site of the earliest settlement of Salisbury, England, with evidence of human habitation as early as 3000 BC. It sits on a hill about two miles (3km) north of modern Salisbury on the west side of...

By the 13th century, the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in square notation on a staff with four lines and three spaces and a clef marker, as in the 14th-15th century Graduale Aboense shown here. In square notation, small groups of ascending notes on a syllable are shown as stacked squares, read from bottom to top, while descending notes are written with diamonds read from left to right. In melismatic chants, in which a syllable may be sung to a large number of notes, a series of smaller such groups of neumes are written in succession, read from left to right. A special symbol called the custos, placed at the end of a system, showed which pitch came next at the start of the following system. Special neumes such as the oriscus, quilisma, and liquescent neumes, indicate particular vocal treatments for these notes. This system of square notation is standard in modern chantbooks. (12th century - 13th century - 14th century - other centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 13th century was that century which lasted from 1201 to 1300. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Solesmes notation

Various manuscripts and printed editions of Gregorian chant, using varying styles of square-note neumes, circulated throughout the Catholic church for centuries. Some editions added rhythmic patterns, or meter, to the chants. In the 19th century the monks of the Benedictine abbey of Solesmes, particularly Dom Joseph Pothier (1835-1923) and Dom André Mocquereau (1849-1930) collected facsimiles of the earliest manuscripts and published them in a book called Paléographie musicale. They also assembled definitive versions of many of the chants, and developed a standardized form of the square-note notation which was adopted by the Catholic church and is still in use in publications such as the Liber usualis (although there are also published editions of this book in modern notation). Metre or meter is the measurement of a musical line into measures of stressed and unstressed beats, indicated in Western notation by a symbol called a time signature. ... Solesmes (St-Pierre-de-Solesmes), a Benedictine abbey near Sablé, in the Sarthe department in France, founded in 1010. ... This page is a candidate to be moved to Wiktionary. ... The Liber usualis is a book of commonly-used Gregorian chants compiled by the monks of the Abbey of Solesmes in France. ...

As a general rule, the notes of a single neume are never sung to more than one syllable; all three pitches of a three-note neume, for example, must all be sung on the same syllable. (This is not universally accepted; Richard Crocker has argued that in the special case of the early Aquitanian polyphony of the St. Martial school, neumes must have been "broken" between syllables to facilitate the coordination of parts.) However, a single syllable may be sung to so many notes that several neumes in succession are used to notate it. The single-note neumes indicate that only a single note corresponds to that syllable. Chants which primarily use single-note neumes are called syllabic; chants with typically one multi-note neume per note are called neumatic, and those with many neumes per note are called melismatic. The St. ...

Rhythmic interpretation

The Solesmes monks also determined, based on their research, performance practice for Gregorian chant. Because of the ambiguity of medieval musical notation, the question of rhythm in Gregorian chant is contested by scholars. Some neumes, such as the pressus, do indicate the lengthening of notes. Common modern practice, following the Solesmes interpretation, is to perform Gregorian chant with no beat or regular metric accent, in which time is free, allowing the text to determine the accent and the melodic contour to determine phrasing. By the 13th century, with the widespread use of square notation, it is believed that most chant was sung with each note getting approximately an equal value, although Jerome of Moravia cites exceptions in which certain notes, such as the final notes of a chant, are lengthened.^[2] The Solesmes school, represented by Pothier and Mocquereau, supports a rhythm of equal values per note, allowing for lengthening and shortening of note values for musical purposes. A second school of thought, including Wagner, Jammers, and Lipphardt, supports different rhythmic realizations of chant by imposing musical meter on the chant in various ways.^[3] Musicologist Gustave Reese said that the second group, called mensuralists, "have an impressive amount of historical evidence on their side," (Music in the Middle Ages, p. 146), but the equal-note Solesmes interpretation has permeated the musical world, apparently due to its ease of learning and resonance with modern musical taste.^[4] The authentic performance movement is an effort on the part of musicians and scholars to perform works of classical music in ways similar to how they were performed when they were originally written. ... Gustave Reese (November 29, 1899 – September 7, 1977) was an American musicologist and teacher. ...

Illustrations

Examples of neumes may be seen here: [1],[2], [3].

Clefs

Neumes are written on a four-line staff on the lines and spaces, like modern music notation. A clef at the beginning of each line indicates the location of C or F on any of the lines, as shown: In musical notation, the staff or stave is a set of five horizontal lines on which note symbols are placed to indicate pitch and rhythm. ... A clef (also, in former times, cleff) is a musical notation symbol that assigns note letter names to lines and spaces on a musical staff. ...

	C clef
	F clef

Note that chant does not rely on any absolute pitch; the clefs are only to help find the half and whole steps (see hexachord). Image File history File links C clef for Gregorian chant File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links F clef for Gregorian chant File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Absolute pitch (AP), widely referred to as perfect pitch, refers to the ability to identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note, or to be able to produce a note (as in singing) that is the correct pitch without reference. ... In music, a hexachord is a collection of six tones. ...

Neumes representing single notes

	Punctum ("point")
	Virga
	repercussive neume

The virga and punctum are sung identically. Scholars disagree on whether the bipunctum indicates a note twice as long, or whether the same note should be re-articulated as the name repercussive implies. Image File history File links Punctum neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Virga neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Repercussive neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Neumes representing two notes

	Clivis	Two notes descending
	Podatus or Pes ("foot")	Two notes ascending

When two notes are one above the other, as in the podatus, the lower note is always sung first. Image File history File links Clivis neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Podatus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Three-note neumes

	Scandicus	Three notes ascending
	Climacus	Three notes descending
	Torculus	down-up-down
	Porrectus	up-down-up

The fact that the first two notes of the porrectus are connected as a diagonal rather than as individual notes seems to be a scribe's shortcut. Image File history File links Scandicus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Climacus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Torculus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Porrectus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Compound neumes

Several neumes in a row can be juxtaposed for a single syllable, but the following usages have specific names. These are only a few examples.

	Praepunctis	a note appended to the beginning is praepunctis; this example is a podatus pressus because it involves a repeated note
	Subpunctis	One or more notes appended at the end of a neume; this example is a scandicus subbipunctis

Image File history File links Pressus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Scandicus subbipunctus neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Other basic markings

	Flat	same meaning as modern flat; only occurs on B, and is placed before the entire neume, or group of neumes, rather than immediately before the affected note.
	Custos	At the end of a staff, the custos indicates what the first note of the next staff will be
	Mora	Like a dot in modern notation, lengthens the preceding note, typically doubling it

Image File history File links Flat sign used in Gregorian chant File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Figure 1. ... Image File history File links Custos (part of neumatic notation) File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Punctum mora neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

Interpretive marks

These markings, although present in almost all early manuscripts, are subject to great dispute.

	Vertical episema (vertical stroke)	Seems to indicate a subsidiary accent when there are five or more notes in a neume group
	Horizontal episema (horizontal stroke)	Used over a single note or a group of notes (as shown), essentially ignored in the Solemnes interpretation; other scholars treat it as indicating a lengthening or stress on the note(s).
	Liquescent neume (small note)	Can occur on almost any type of neume; usually associated with certain letter combinations such as double consonants, consonant pairs, or diphthongs in the text
	Quilisma (squiggly note)	Always as part of a multi-note neume, usually a climacus, this sign is a matter of great dispute; the Solemnes interpretation is that the preceding note is to be lengthened slightly.

Other interpretations of the quilisma: Image File history File links Vertical episema, notation used in neumes File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Horizontal episema, sign used in neumatic notation File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Liquenscent neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ... Image File history File links Quilisma, a type of neume File history Legend: (cur) = this is the current file, (del) = delete this old version, (rev) = revert to this old version. ...

• Shake or trill -- Prof. William Mahrt of Stanford University supports this one
• Quarter-tone or accidental. The support for this interpretation lies in some early digraphic manuscripts which combine chironomic neumes with letter-names. In places where other manuscripts have quilismas these digraphs often have a strange symbol in place of a letter, suggesting to some scholars the use of a pitch outside the solmization system represented by the letter names. The trigon is a neume peculiar to St. Gall which may also have a microtonal meaning.

There are also litterae significativae in many manuscripts, usually interpreted to indicate variations in tempo, e.g. c = celeriter (fast), t = tenete (hold) (an early form of the tenuto), a = auge (lengthen, as in a tie). The Solesmes editions omit all such letters. In music, a trill is a type of ornament; see trill (music) In phonetics, a trill is a type of consonant; see trill consonant In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Trill are two symbiotic races of aliens; see Trill (Star Trek). ... Stanford redirects here. ... A quarter tone is an interval half as wide (aurally, or logarithmically) as a semitone, which is half a whole tone. ... An accidental is a musical notation symbol used to raise or lower the pitch of a note from that indicated by the key signature. ... In music and sight singing solfege or solmization is a way of assigning syllables to degrees or steps of the diatonic scale. ... Microtonal music is music using microtones -- intervals of less than a semitone, or as Charles Ives put it, the notes between the cracks of the piano. ... A tenuto marking on an individual note Tenuto (Italian, past participle of tenere to hold) is a direction used in musical notation. ... In music, a tie is when multiple notes of the same pitch are to be played as one note with a duration equal to the sum of the individual notes durations. ...

Other functions of Western neumes

Neumes were used for notating other kinds of melody than plainchant, including troubadour and trouvère melodies, monophonic versus and conductus, and the individual lines of polyphonic songs. In some traditions, such as the Notre Dame school of polyphony, certain patterns of neumes were used to represent particular rhythmic patterns called rhythmic modes. A troubadour was a composer and performer of songs during the Middle Ages in Europe. ... Trouvère is the Northern French (langue doïl) version of troubador (langue doc), and refers to poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadors but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France. ... Polyphony is a musical texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice (monophony) or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords (homophony). ... The group of composers working at or near the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris from about 1170 to 1250, along with the music they produced, is referred to as the Notre Dame school, or the Notre Dame School of Polyphony. ... In medieval music, the rhythmic modes were patterns of long and short durations (or rhythms) imposed on written notes which otherwise appeared to be identical. ...

Other types of neumes

• Ekphonetic neumes annotating the melodic recitation of (Christian) holy scriptures.
• Neumes of byzantine music - in several stages, old byzantine, middle byzantine, late byzantine and post-byzantine, and neo-byzantine (reformed).
• Neumes of slavic chant (slavic neumes).
• Mozarabic or hispanic neumes (Spain), also called Visigothic script. These neumes have not been deciphered, but the Mozarabic liturgy varies somewhat from the Roman rite.
• Daseian notation - an early form of byzantine music notation.
• Buddhist chant uses a type of neume.

Byzantine music is the music of the Byzantine Empire and by extension the music of its culture(s) as they continued in the Orthodox Christian parts of the population after the fall of the empire to the rule of the Ottoman Empire. ... Visigothic script was a type of medieval script, so called because it originated in the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. ... Mozarabic was a continuum of closely related Iberian Romance dialects spoken in Muslim dominated areas of the Iberian Peninsula during the early stages of Romance languages development in Iberia. ... Latin Rite, in the singular and accompanied, in English, by the definite article (the Latin Rite), designates the particular Church, within the Catholic Church, which developed in western Europe and northern Africa, when Latin was the language of education and culture, and so also of the liturgy. ... Buddhist chant is chant used in or inspired by Buddhism, including many genres in many cultures: Repetition of the name of Amitabha in Pure Land Buddhism. ...

Notes

References

External links

• David Hiley and Janka Szendrei: "Notation", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed June 12 2006), (subscription access)
• Font package for writing post-Byzantine neumes
• Kenneth Levy: "Plainchant", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed January 20 2006), (subscription access)
• Comparative table of cheironomic and square neumes
• Samples of early notation, showing the same chant in many different notations
• Catholic Encyclopedia entry for Neume (spelled neum)
• Sample of Mozarabic chant
• Abbey of Solesmes