Music notation

Notes is a musical language that allows musicians to communicate without any problems. It’s hard to say exactly when it really started to be used, but the first forms of notation were significantly different from those known to us today.

The fact that today we have a very accurate and even detailed musical notation is due to the long process of developing music notation. This first known and documented notation comes from the clergy, because it was in monastic choirs that it found its first use. It was a different notation from what we know today, and the main difference was that it was linearless. Also called cheironomic notation, and it was not very accurate. It only roughly informed about the pitch of a given sound. It was used to record the original Roman chant called Gregorian and its origins date back to the 300th century. 1250 years later, cheironomic notation was replaced by diastematic notation, which defined the pitch of sounds by varying vertically the distribution of neumes. It was already more precise and it was still quite general in relation to the present day. And so, over the years, a more detailed modal notation began to emerge, which more closely determined the interval that occurred between two individual notes and the rhythmic value, which was initially referred to as a long note and a short one. From XNUMX, mensural notation began to develop, which already determined the parameters of notes known to us today. The breakthrough was the use of lines on which notes were placed. And here it has been experimented for decades. There were two lines, four, and you can find a period in history that some out of eight tried to make music. The thirteenth century was such a beginning of the staff we know today. Of course, the fact that we had staves did not mean that even then this record was as precise as it is today.

how, in fact, such a musical notation known to us today began to take shape only in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. It was then, along with the great flourishing of music, that the signs known to us from contemporary sheet music began to appear. So clefts, chromatic marks, time signatures, bar lines, dynamics and articulation markings, phrasing, tempo markings and, of course, note and rest values ​​started to appear on the staff. The most common musical clefs are the treble clef and the bass clef. It is mainly used when playing keyboard instruments such as: piano, piano, accordion, organ or synthesizer. Of course, with the development of individual instruments, as well as for a clearer recording, people began to create couchets for specific groups of instruments. The tenor, double bass, soprano and alto clefs are used for individual groups of instruments and are adjusted to the pitch of a given musical instrument. Such a slightly different notation is notation for percussion. Here, the individual instruments of the drum kit are marked on specific fields or staves, while the drum clef looks like an elongated narrow rectangle running from top to bottom.

Of course, even today, more detailed and less detailed provisions are used. Such, for example: less detailed ones can be found in musical notes intended for jazz bands. There is often only the primer and the so-called pounds, which is the letter form of the chord on which the given motif is based. This is due to the fact that in this type of music a large part of it is improvisation, which cannot be accurately written down. Besides, each improvisation will be different from each other. Regardless of the various forms of notation, be it classical or, for example, jazz, there is no doubt that the notation is one of the best inventions thanks to which musicians, even from distant corners of the world, can communicate.