The Point of Perfection in XVI Century Notation

Extract

Looking back upon the development of any art, one is tempted to think of it as a more or less straight line leading towards the culminating achievement of the spectator. But just as saplings grow by putting out branches, first to one side and then to the other, so do Arts develop laterally. Music has so developed, and musical notation has followed and recorded its deviations. Their interdependence is so great that in many cases where one can only understand the music through knowing the notation, one can only understand the notation through being in sympathy with the music. Because a particular brand of notation is inadequate to express our modern ideas, it is idle to condemn it as being clumsy and obscure; it is foolish to suppose it has nothing to teach us. I have no doubt but that to those accustomed to it, the dots and dashes and tendrils of neumatic notation conveyed far more feelingly than any modern system can, the refinements of melismatic plain-song. Contemporary music makes enormous use of dynamic contrasts: accordingly its notation is very rich, though not rich enough, in dynamic signs of all descriptions. The music of this polyphonic period excelled in variety and subtlety of rhythm, and the most interesting and significant notational devices of that age have all the same object—to convey and articulate the rhythmical structure.