Course: From Ink to Sound: Decoding Musical Manuscripts

Now it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for joining our journey through medieval music and its history of notation and for sharing your thoughts with us and the other …

In addition to showing us beautiful music examples, the preceding steps were mostly concerned with how different forms of tablatures work. Let us now focus on why tablatures were made. …

French lute tablatures make use of an utterly practical system. This notation does not depict the notes in a symbolic way as we are used to in the vocal music. …

During the 16th century Germany and Spain implemented the most common keyboard tablature systems. Those tablature systems were used by musicians to render a polyphonic vocal piece into an instrumental …

Intabulation of Gilles Bins dit Binchois Dueil angoisseux. © München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 352b, Buxheimer Orgelbuch, f. 32v Nearly all keyboard sources from the past were notated using tablatures. Generally, …

The last week of this course will introduce you to the main notational systems of keyboard and lute music: the so-called tablatures. You will get an overview on how instrumental …

So far you have become familiar with similarities and differences between full and void mensural notation. As you already have experienced in previous steps it is always convenient to listen …

With the emergence of the so-called white or void notation the way of conceiving of music notation does not change. The general framework of writing down musical time remains mensural. …

Last week, you learned how to read and decode mensural notation from the Ars Nova period. Now we are going to delve deeply in a further evolution in notation history …

As we have seen during this week the evolution of Ars Nova notation during the early 14th century enhanced the compositional potentiality of the older system bringing new possibilities for …

With the evolution of notation in the first decades of the 14th century, four combinations of tempus and prolatio were introduced, attributed to Vitry as the quatre prolacions. The relationships …

In addition to the introduction of a smaller note value, the minima, about which we learned in Step 5.2, Ars Nova notation also made use of other new signs which …

One of the most important changes in the Ars Nova period had been time units, in which musical notes were put into. This process was called mensuration (from mensura, Latin …

A series of treatises on musical notation were written in Paris around 1321. One of the most influent texts was Philippe de Vitry’s Ars Nova. In this text the author …