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The process of interpreting musical notation is often referred to as reading music. Distinct methods of notation have been invented throughout history by various cultures. Much information about ancient music notation is fragmentary. Even in the same time frames, different styles of music and different cultures use different music notation methods.
The word neume entered the English language in the Middle English forms newme, nevme, neme in the 15th century, from the Middle French neume, in turn from either medieval Latin pneuma or neuma, the former either from ancient Greek πνεῦμα pneuma ('breath') or νεῦμα neuma ("sign"), [4] [5] or else directly from Greek as a corruption or an adaptation of the former.
The yang vowel letters were ㆍ ʌ, ㅗ o, and ㅏ a, with the dots in the yang directions of up and right. Of these seven vowel sounds, three could not be iotized (preceded by a y-sound). These three were written with a single stroke: ㅡ ɨ, ㆍ ʌ, ㅣ i. (The letter ㆍ ʌ is now obsolete except in Jeju dialect.)
The earliest Greek scales were organized in tetrachords, which were series of four descending tones, with the top and bottom tones being separated by an interval of a fourth, in modern terms. The sub-intervals of the tetrachord were unequal, with the largest intervals always at the top, and the smallest at the bottom.
Shape notes proved popular in America, and quickly a wide variety of hymnbooks were prepared making use of them. The shapes were eventually extirpated in the northeastern U.S. by a so-called "better music" movement, headed by Lowell Mason. [16] But in the South, the shapes became well entrenched, and multiplied into a variety of traditions.
However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. [19] The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which were not used in Greek speech.
"But that music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by the few, and that it alone among all language unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable—these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge."
The market demand created by this failure, and the dismal nature of Calvinist "lining out the psalms" in general, was served by hymnals for West gallery singing imported from England. William Billings of Boston took the first step beyond West Gallery music in publishing The New-England Psalm-Singer (1770), the first book in which tunes were ...