¿Cómo mandas una canción a mil kilómetros sin poder escribirla?

We ask ourselves

• If you have never heard a song, can you sing it off a piece of paper?
• How many songs do you know all the way through with nothing to look at?
• Who decides that a song is sung the same way in two different places?
• If I write a melody down, which part of the sound stays off the page?
• Can written music exist that nobody knows how to read any more?
• If four people sing different things at once, how do you write down how long each note lasts so they stay together?
• Why would anyone spend their life singing eight times a day?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

We are not starting by listening today. We are starting with an impossible commission.

First, by ear. The teacher sings a short phrase, seven or eight notes, and says nothing else. The class repeats it until it comes out the same three times in a row. No words, no title, no paper.

Then the commission. Each of you, on a sheet of paper and in silence, writes instructions so that somebody who was not in the room can sing that phrase exactly. Writing the note names is not allowed: hardly anyone knows them yet, and that is the point.

Now the test. Swap sheets between groups. Each group tries to sing whatever sheet it got, as it stands, without asking anything.

What comes out is always the same: arrows up and down, higher and lower marks, numbers, little drawings. And they half work. They work for anyone who already heard the phrase, because they jog the memory. They fail for anyone who never heard it, because they never say where you start or how far you climb.

Keep those sheets. In a few minutes it will turn out the class has just reinvented, in ten minutes, the system Europe used for two centuries.

What changed

Listen now to an introit sung by the monks of Silos. No instruments, no harmony, nobody keeping time. A single line of voices, all singing the same thing. That is plainchant.

Spiritus Domini, introit in mode VIII, by the Choir of Monks of the Monastery of Silos

That singing was not a concert: it was a timetable. In a monastery the office was sung at fixed hours, from before dawn to just before bed, every day of the year, including the middle of the night. Terce at nine, sext at noon, none at three in the afternoon, vespers from five. Every day in the calendar had its own texts and its own melodies.

Maestro de los Cipreses, inicial T con monjes cantando, década de 1430, CC0, National Gallery of Art, vía Wikimedia Commons

Do the arithmetic on what that asks of a memory. Thousands of pieces, each tied to its day, sung by a group that keeps turning over as the old ones die and new boys arrive. And there the real problem appears, and it is political before it is musical.

Óleo de Ignacio Merino, 1861, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

The problem was logistics. Charlemagne's father abolished the local rite of his lands and took Rome's instead, to bind himself to Rome. Between 785 and 786, at Charlemagne's request, Pope Adrian I sent a book of Roman chant to the Frankish court. Charlemagne, by then emperor, pushed it across his empire: one repertory, sung the same way from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, is a cheap way of showing who is in charge.

Ordering it is one thing and getting it is another. A cantor from Metz could not travel to every abbey to teach two thousand melodies. So somebody, in the ninth century, did exactly what you did with your sheets: draw the movement of the voice above the words. Those drawings are called neumes.

From memory to neumes, told by Juan Velázquez (in Spanish) — the video starts at that point, and we come back to it at every step of the story

Neumes say a great deal and keep quiet about the one thing that matters. They say whether the voice rises, whether it falls, whether two notes run together, whether one is held. They do not say which note you start on or how far up you go. They are a reminder for someone who already knows the tune, not a recipe for someone who has never heard it. They fail exactly as your sheets failed, and for the same reason.

Jean Miélot copiando un manuscrito, Biblioteca Real de Bruselas MS 9278, siglo XV, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Every book was copied like this, by hand, letter by letter. A copying slip in one neume was repeated in every copy made from that one.

Copiado en San Galo entre 922 y 925, Cod. Sang. 359, p. 25, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

And this is not an opinion: we have the proof. From the Hispanic liturgy, the one sung in the Iberian Peninsula before the eleventh century, manuscripts survive with almost the whole repertory. And it cannot be read.

The notation does not show intervals, so we know where the voice went up but not by how much. Out of all of it, only twenty-one chants can be read, because someone copied them in the twelfth century in a notation that did fix pitches. The rest are written down and silent.

A system like that lasts only as long as somebody alive knows the songs by heart. When those people die, the drawing is left without its key. It is written music nobody can read any more.

The fix fits in one sentence: a line on the page is a fixed note. Draw a line, agree that the line means one particular sound, and any sign you put above or below it now has a measurable height. What was a drawing becomes a measurement.

By the first half of the eleventh century this was already being done in Aquitaine, and around 1025 a Benedictine monk teaching the singers of Arezzo cathedral turned it into a method, with four lines: the tetragram. It is the modern stave minus one line, and plainchant still uses it.

From one line to four — same video, further on

The same monk solved the other half of the problem, which was what to call what you see. He took a hymn to John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, in which every line starts one step higher than the last, and used the first syllable of each line as the name of that step: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.

Ut queant laxis: every line starts one step above the last

The hymn works as a ladder that hands you your starting pitch. Si came later, from the initials of Sancte Ioannes, and in the seventeenth century Giovanni Battista Doni swapped ut for do, which ends in a vowel and sings better.

The result was measured in time, which is the only measure that interests whoever is paying. Training a capable cantor took ten years. With lines and syllables it came down to one or two. He is also credited with the Guidonian hand, reading notes off the joints of your fingers; treat that with some suspicion, because he only describes a rudimentary version and the full system is a century later.

Mano guidoniana, UC Berkeley Music Library MS 1087, siglo XVI, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

This hand is from the sixteenth century, five hundred years after Guido: the system stayed in use all that time.

Now the awkward part. What the tetragram writes well is which note and in what order. What it leaves out is nearly everything else: exactly how long, how loud, with what ornament, how the voice bends at the end of a phrase. The old neumes drew that gesture in extraordinary detail, and squaring the notes onto lines threw the detail away. We gained pitch and lost gesture.

And then, two voices at once. While some people were learning to write down a single melody, others were already singing two. Around 895 an anonymous treatise, the Musica enchiriadis, gives the simplest recipe: one voice sings the chant and another doubles it underneath, a fifth or a fourth lower, moving in step. That is called organum, and it is the earliest polyphony with written rules that we have.

Musica enchiriadis, Einsiedeln Cod. 79, fol. 24v-25r, siglo X, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Twenty seconds of parallel organum, with the score on screen. The second voice sticks to the first like a shadow

Look at how it is written: no neumes, just syllables placed at different heights between lines. To sing two voices at once, a drawing is no longer enough: you have to measure the gap between them.

From doubling to decoration. In the twelfth century the chant voice slows right down: it holds each note while the other voice draws a new line on top, packed with notes, like a garland. This is the florid organum of Saint-Martial in Limoges, in Aquitaine, the same place where reliable pitches started being written down.

Many notes against one — organum Jubilemus, exsultemus, Saint-Martial de Limoges, twelfth century, with score and translation

Notre Dame and the Ars Antiqua. In 1163 the first stone of Notre Dame in Paris is laid, and its choir turns into the laboratory of polyphony. From the 1160s two-voice organum is sung there. An English student of the thirteenth century, whom we call Anonymous IV, says Léonin put together a great book of organum, the Magnus liber organi.

Nave de Notre-Dame de París, foto de Ibex73 (2024), CC BY 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Historians call the music of this period, roughly 1170 to 1310, the Ars Antiqua, "the old art". The name only makes sense next to the Ars Nova that came after it.

A premiere with a date: Christmas 1198. The bishop of Paris, Odo de Sully, ordered in 1198 and 1199 that certain chants for Christmas and St Stephen's Day be sung in organum for three or four voices. Those orders suggest Pérotin's four-voice Viderunt omnes was written for Christmas 1198. The cathedral was paying, and what it was buying was awe.

Viderunt omnes, by Pérotin — the video starts right at the excerpt

Pérotin, Alleluia Nativitas, códice W2 de Wolfenbüttel, siglo XIII, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

The new problem: how long is each note? With one voice, the words carried the rhythm. With four voices that have to fit together, somebody has to say how long every note lasts, or they drift apart. At Notre Dame they did not change the shape of the notes: they changed how the notes were grouped.

Depending on how the notes were tied into groups, called ligatures, the singer knew which pattern of long and short came next. These fixed patterns are the rhythmic modes. Think of Morse code: one dot means nothing on its own, the group says everything.

The Notre Dame rhythmic modes, explained by Juan Velázquez (in Spanish) — the video starts at that point

Franco of Cologne: the shape gives the length. Around 1250 a treatise, Franco of Cologne's Ars cantus mensurabilis, puts forward the idea we still use: a note's length should be read from its shape, not worked out from its neighbours. The longa is long because it has a stem; the breve is a plain square. This is mensural notation, notation that measures.

Códice de Montpellier, Ms H196, fol. 23v-24r, hacia 1300, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Franco's idea in sixteen seconds — same video, further on

Ars Nova: shorter notes, freer rhythm. Around 1320 some writings attributed to Philippe de Vitry circulate in Paris and give the period its name: Ars Nova, "the new art". What was new was, once again, notation. It allowed rhythms that no longer fitted the modes, it said whether each note split into two or three, and it used a shorter value: the minima, "the smallest one". Our minim, the half note, descends from it.

From Ars Antiqua to Ars Nova — the video carries on from where we left it

Those signs that said whether the rhythm went in threes or twos are where the "C" at the start of a piece in 4/4 comes from.

Charivari, Roman de Fauvel (BnF fr. 146), hacia 1316-1318, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

The first big shop window for the new music is a satirical book, the Roman de Fauvel. Around 1316-1317 it was expanded with 169 pieces of music, and some of them are linked to Vitry.

Garrit gallus, a motet from the Roman de Fauvel, with the score taken from the manuscript

The work that sums up the Ars Nova best is Guillaume de Machaut's Mass of Our Lady, written before 1365. It is the earliest complete polyphonic Mass that can be credited to a single composer; before it, a polyphonic Mass was assembled from pieces by different people.

Naturaleza presenta a Machaut Sentido, Retórica y Música, Maestro de la Biblia de Jean de Sy, 1372-1377, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Machaut's Kyrie with the original notation on screen: this is how music was read in the fourteenth century

And once again something gets lost. With every note measured, the singer no longer stretches a syllable because the words ask for it: they sing what is written. The score gains precision and the singer loses room.

Hard facts: earliest surviving notated sources, around 930. Reliable pitches on lines, first half of the eleventh century. Tetragram and syllables, around 1025. Square notation on four lines in general use by the thirteenth century, which is what still fills the choirbooks of any cathedral. First written rules for polyphony, around 895. Viderunt omnes, Christmas 1198. A note's shape gives its length, around 1250. Ars Nova and the minima, around 1320. Modern bars, over the seventeenth century.

The same device elsewhere

Writing music always means writing one part of it and trusting that you already know the rest. The neume is an extreme case, not a medieval oddity. These three make the point:

• A guitar tab. It gives you string and fret, and never gives you the rhythm. Take the tab for Sweet Home Alabama and try playing it having never heard the song: you will get the notes and you will not get the song. Exactly like a neume.
• A Bach score. In much of his music there are no tempo or dynamic markings at all: the page says which notes and how long, and says nothing else. That is why two recordings of the same page last different lengths and sound like different pieces.
• The Chinese guqin. Its jianzi pu tablature notes which string, which finger and which technique, and does not note the pitch, nor, in most cases, the rhythm. There are written pieces that have gone unplayed for centuries, waiting for somebody to reconstruct how they sounded.

None of the three is badly made. All three write down what needs writing and leave the rest inside the player's head. The useful question is not whether a score is complete, because none is: it is what that score chose to leave out.

And here at home?

Here something happened that can be dated to the day, and it happened in the province of Huesca.

On 22 March 1071, at the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, the first Roman-rite mass in Spain was celebrated. That same year King Sancho Ramírez handed the monastery over to the monks of Cluny. The change was then made official across the rest of the kingdom of Aragón. From outside it looks like a liturgical detail; from inside the choir it is an entire songbook replaced by royal order.

What stopped being sung that year is precisely the repertory we cannot read today. It was not lost through carelessness: it was replaced. And since nobody sang it again, it lost the one thing keeping it alive, which was somebody able to pitch it from memory.

What came afterwards we know well, because it arrived written with pitches. The Codex Las Huelgas, copied in the early fourteenth century at the Cistercian nunnery in Burgos, is the only polyphonic manuscript of the Middle Ages still kept where it was made. Enclosed nuns sang from it, which is worth remembering whenever medieval music gets told as a story about monks.

Polyphony has an anchor in Spain too, and an early one. The Codex Calixtinus, kept in Santiago de Compostela cathedral and compiled between 1135 and 1173, most likely around 1140, contains Congaudeant catholici, regarded as the earliest known piece for three voices. Some scholars think the third voice was never meant to sound together with the other two, because all three clash badly.

Congaudeant catholici, from the Codex Calixtinus, with the score and a translation of each verse

Cantigas de Santa María, Códice de los músicos (El Escorial b-I-2), fol. 162r, hacia 1280, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

About thirty years after Franco's treatise, at the court of Alfonso X, the Cantigas de Santa María were being copied, with the music written on staves and miniatures of musicians playing. This page, from around 1280, shows a lute and a rebec right above the song itself.

Foto: Ecelan, CC BY-SA 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

In Zaragoza you can see the size of the problem without leaving the old town. The choir of La Seo was commissioned between 1445 and 1447 by Archbishop Dalmau de Mur, and it has 117 stalls. A hundred and seventeen people and, in the middle, one lectern.

That is where the giant choirbooks come from. When a single book has to be read from several metres away, the notes get drawn the size of a thumb and the book ends up weighing what it weighs. The lectern in the church of La Magdalena is still standing there and gives you the measurement.

Classroom activities

• While the Silos introit plays: raise your hand every time the voice moves to a higher sound. Afterwards we compare who raised their hand at the same points. Drawn on paper, that is a neume.

• While Ut queant laxis plays: count the line openings on your fingers. There are six, and each starts one step higher. Anyone who wants to can sing those six syllables on their own, one after another.

• While the Las Huelgas chant plays: half the class follows one voice and half follows the other. Raise your hand when the two land on the same note.

• Sing in organum: half the class sings a phrase of chant and the other half sings the same phrase a fifth lower, at the same time. You have just sung the Musica enchiriadis recipe.

• Franco's problem: invent three note shapes, one long, one short and one very short, and use them to write the rhythm of a song you know. The group next to you has to clap it without hearing it.

• Play: we put the opening phrase together on recorder or keyboard, this time with the note names, and compare it with the sheets you wrote. The point is to see which parts of those drawings were right.

• Write: repeat the opening commission with a new melody, but now with four lines drawn on the sheet and one agreed note. Check whether the group next to you sings it correctly first time.

Key vocabulary

• Plainchant — canto llano: una sola línea melódica, sin instrumentos y sin armonía
• Neume — neuma: signo que dibuja el movimiento de la voz encima del texto
• Tetragram — tetragrama: pauta de cuatro líneas para escribir el canto llano
• Organum — organum: la primera polifonía escrita, voces añadidas a un canto llano
• Mensural notation — notación mensural: la forma de la nota indica su duración

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Sweet Home Alabama, Saturn.

The repertory whose key we lost — Hispanic chant from the Toledo Cantatorium, by Eduardo Paniagua.

A Spanish manuscript, in full — the Codex Las Huelgas by the ensemble Psallentes, in the Fundación Juan March series.

Viderunt omnes, complete — Pérotin by The Hilliard Ensemble, eleven and a half minutes to listen to properly.

The whole history of notation in four and a half minutes — from neumes to the modern note, with drawings.

• The tab that keeps quiet about rhythm — Sweet Home Alabama, in the library, with its chart and its tab.
• A modern score that does write it all down — Saturn, in the library, to compare how much gets notated today.
• The other half of the story — What happens when we stop all singing the same thing?: texture, troubadours and the sound of polyphony, in another unit of this book.