Written Music: how and when did it began ?

Some times ago I was wondering if/when/how Bards would write music in different cultures.


Since there are so many educated people on these boards, I figured that I could ask here about real history of written music.


Anyone has some knowledge about this, or links, or ideas?


Chacal

my memory is fuzzy on this one...

I can't remember exactly from my old music history courses, but I think in written music first became widespread in western Europe during the 1400s.

The Church during the Renaissance funded works of art (statuary, paintings, etc) by people like Michelangelo. They also hired composers to write Gregorian Chant and early "contrapuntal" instrumental pieces. Contrapuntal pieces used different groups of musicians facing each other at opposite sides of a church--they'd alternate playing music back and forth (kinda like dueling banjos) to create a cool 3-d stereo reverb effect during masses. Interestingly, one of the reasons Gregorian chant sounds so weird and "dirgy" is because early musical scales had fewer (and different) notes than the ones used regularly today.

But I digress. In order to play this church music consistently all over europe, these composers used a prototype of the written music notation we use today. It's use really exploded once the printing press was invented in the 1400s and cheap, mass produced sheet music became available.

I have no idea about other cultures beside Europe, though. China might also have used it's own form of musical notation, as well as the Roman empire. If other cultures had musical notation systems, I don't think there's very many examples extant.

I stand corrected

I just found a website on ancient musicology in which cunieform tablets unearthed from the sumerian city of Ugarit during the Ras Shamra expedition have been analyzed and even translated loosely into midi music files!

Cunieform writing involved taking clay tablets and carving or chiseling tiny pictograms/symbols on them. Most ancient sumerian examples of cunieform found by archaeologists are mountains of sales receipts (the sumerians always kept their receipts!), so digging up cuneiform music is a rare find indeed.

Anyway, Ugarit was an Akkadian city in Mesopotamia which dates these tablets back to around 3000 B.C.

Most ancient cultures had musical notation systems derived from or developed from Ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cultures. These include the ancient greeks and babylonians.

Some of the links i found also implied that Sumerians were into AStrology & numerology, and associated certain numbers with certain gods. So different notes on a huge scale (say of 60+ notes) playable by a lute were invented, and different notes played during religious ceremonies would be played for different gods.

Hope this is interesting...i think it's peachy keen myself...

Voobaha

Thanks !

That's the kind of info I was looking for.

3000BC ! Wow ! I didn't expected such an ancient date.


The religion/astrology/numerology/music connection is very interesting too.



Chacal

The earliest known writing dates to 3400BC and appears in Uruk (Iraq).

The oldest known musical instrument, a wooden flute, dates to 45,000BC and was found in north Africa.

I once saw a documentary on the history of music. I think it focused on european music, however. In it, though, it said that it wasn't until Beethoven (I think) cracked the math of proper musical notation that it became possible to get the range we have today. Until then, instruments were something along the lines of two notes and only the human voice had any range whatsoever.

Re: I stand corrected

Voobaha said:

Cunieform writing involved taking clay tablets and carving or chiseling tiny pictograms/symbols on them.

Click to expand...

Good stuff, but minor nitpick. Cuneiform was written in wet clay, then dried or baked (sometimes unintentionally, as when a city got torched) to make it hard. So no real "carving or chiseling", just pressing a stylus into the soft clay.

On topic, a friend has a CD that is of ancient Greek music. Apparently found texts with musical notation of some sort, but it's been a while since I've seen the CD so I can't describe their methods.

A number of scholars interpret the complex accent notation found in copies of the Old Testament to also be musical in nature, but there's a lot of questions (AFAIK) still on this issue.