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Scan 109
The New Encyclopedia Of Music And Musicians, 1929
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1Nomenclature, Musical. A general name for the technical names or terms belonging to music as an art and science; musical vocabulary or terminology. It includes both those words that are peculiar to music and those that have a special musical application, besides some symbolic uses of letters, numerals and syllables. At several points nomenclature and notation are so interwoven that they cannot be separated; see Notation.
3Nomenclature and terminology are usually regarded as synonyms; but it may be urged that terminology is broader, including the criticism of terms as well as their mere collection, as well as any philosophy of the subject that may be possible.
5The size of the musical vocabulary in any language is difficult to estimate satisfactorily. The separate entries in a first-class English dictionary run close to 10,000. But this includes a large number of words taken bodily from Italian, French, German and some other languages. Many of them are so special or limited in use that they do not attract general notice.
7In some connections it is useful to note that musical terms belong mostly to the following classes: (a) those of acoustics as a science, (b) those of the tone-system and its notation, (c) those of instruments and their structure, (d) those of composition as a process and of forms as its product, (e) those of performance and style, and (f) those of the adaptation of music to other interests, such as the stage, the church, the school, etc.
9Nones. The sixth of the Canonical Hours (3 P.M.). G.
11Nonet. A group of nine performers or music for such an ensemble; cf. trio, quartet, quintet, etc. G.
13Nonole, Nonuplet. A 9-note group occupying the time of a normal 8; see Note-Groups.
15Normal Pitch, Normal Tone. In acoustics, a pitch or tone with a fixed number of vibrations per second, used as a standard of reference, as the diapason normal adopted by the French Academy in 1859 (a = 435).
17Notation. A general name for any system of marks and symbols by which tonal effects are visibly recorded for preservation and reproduction. Such systems have tended to be alphabetic or graphic in character. The so-called staff-notation, which is now universal and standard throughout the musical world, is essentially graphic, but at every point involves a system of letter-names, which is alphabetic, as well as interlocking with the mechanical apparatus known as the keyboard. These three accessories of musical art, the letter-names, the staff-notation and the keyboard, as they have developed hand in hand since medieval times, present one of the most intricate problems in music-history. The main outlines of the story, however, are clear enough and the total result as it now stands, though not free from objection, is on the whole an impressive monument of practical ingenuity. G.
19The Letter-Names and the Keyboard. The Greeks had an extremely complicated method of designating tones by letters and similar signs, but this has no direct connection with modern usage. The earliest data about the use of Latin letters come from about 900, when Gregorian music was assuming permanent form. For a time a two-octave series of 15 letters (A to P) seems to have been somewhat used, but the simpler plan of using only 7 (A to G), covering but one octave, early became the favorite. As this rested on a notion of scales brought over from the Greeks, the letters stood for a series of tones in which there were two short steps, while the rest were long. Normally, the short steps fell at b-e and e-f, but (to provide for the full or 'Doric' scale) sometimes at a-b instead of b-c. In other words, there were two bs, which were distinguished by being written in two forms. The two types may be tabulated thus—
21a b c d e f g a
22a b
24The earliest keyboards corresponded to this scheme, having both what we call b-flat and b-natural. The starting-point in naming was at a because this was the basis of the prevailing scale-system of the time, as it continued to be till at least the 15th century.
26[The lower b was called b rotundum and was the source of the character b and of the modern notion of a flat, while the upper b was called b quadratum and was the source of the characters # and b, as well as of the notion of a sharp (see Flat and Sharp).]
28This nomenclature was carried out in the hexachord-system and the pedagogical device of the Guidonian Hand, involving the related system of syllable-names for tones (see Hexachord and Solmization). For the plan of discriminating between octaves by using large and small letters, etc., see Pitch and Octave.
30The above simple system sufficed for the needs of plain-song. It was gradually extended to meet the demands of polyphony and the allied practice of musica ficta. All the longer steps were gradually filled in with additional tones. These, like the early b-flat, appeared as substitutes for regular tones and took their names from the latter. These intercalated or chromatic tones may have been recognized in this order: bb, f#, c#, eb, and g# or ab; together they gave rise to this keyboard-plan—
32bb c# eb f# g# g or a
33a b c d e f g a b
35This stage was reached by the 15th century. It was not till much later (17–18th cents.) that the generalized form of modern usage became established, with the basis of reckoning transferred from a to c—
37c# d# f# g# a#
38db eb gb ab bb
39c d e f g a b c
41Neither the letter-names nor the early form of the keyboard implies a precise pitch. The low a of the medieval system stood for any convenient tone in the lower men's voices; in actual singing it may have fluctuated. There was no fixed pitch to which instruments like the organ or the spinet were regularly tuned. The notion of standardized pitch did not appear till the 18th century and even then was a topic of dispute (see Pitch).
43The Neumes. Along with the growth of the letter-nomenclature ran manifold efforts to depict the rise and fall of plain-song melodies by stenographic marks of various sorts. These were called pneuma or neumes (that is, 'breathings' or accents). The need of something of the sort was insistent. Just as each cathedral, church and monastery had its own copies of the Bible, so it had its own copies of the Missal and Breviary—in both cases in manuscript. Verbally, the service-books in different places were substantially identical, but in chirography each set was more or less unique. Though there came to be a fair consensus as to the writing of the words, there was no consensus for a long time as to the noting of the melodies. The marks used consisted of dots, dashes, crooks, etc., formed and collocated variously according to the skill and taste of individual scribes. In general, they aimed to represent up and down motion of the voice by higher and lower placing on the page, but often without much regularity or definiteness. The marks served to suggest melodies that were already familiar, but the books of one monastery were often unintelligible to singers from another.
45[It is to be noted that this system from the outset embodied the modern notion of 'up' and 'down,' which is the reverse of the ancient notion. The origin of this reversal is not clear.]
47Chaotic and bewildering as are many examples of this cursive musical script careful research (especially by means of facsimiles of manuscripts from different places and times) has shown that it tended toward a
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