Capturing Music: The Story of Notation
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $44.99
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- $44.99
Publisher Description
An entertaining history of how musicians learned to record music for all time, filled with art that sings.
In today’s digital landscape, we have the luxury of experiencing music anytime, anywhere. But before this instant accessibility and dizzying array of formats—before CDs, the eight-track tape, the radio, and the turntable—there was only one recording technology: music notation. It allowed singers and soloists to travel across great distances and perform their work with stunning fidelity, a feat that we now very much take for granted.
Thomas Forrest Kelly transports us to the lively and complex world of monks and monasteries, of a dove singing holy chants into the ear of a saint, and of bustling activity in the Cathedral of Notre Dame—an era when the only way to share even the simplest song was to learn it by rote, church to church and person to person. With clarity and a sense of wonder, Kelly tells a story that spans five hundred years, leading us on a journey through medieval Europe and showing how we learned to keep track of rhythm, melody, and precise pitch with a degree of accuracy previously unimagined.
Kelly reveals the technological advances that led us to the system of notation we use today, placing each step of its evolution in its cultural and intellectual context. Companion recordings by the renowned Blue Heron ensemble are paired with vibrant illuminated manuscripts, bringing the art to life and allowing readers to experience something of the marvel that medieval writers must have felt when they figured out how to capture music for all time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Before the era of recording before wax cylinders, vinyl, or digital media songwriters, composers, and musicians relied on sheet music and musical notation to disseminate their works. In this marvelously witty and engaging chapter of music history, Kelly, a Harvard musicologist, thoughtfully reviews the long process through which musical notation developed. Accompanied by 100 color illustrations, as well as a CD that allows readers to hear how these early compositions might have sounded, Kelly's chronicle traces the rise of notation from its earliest stages to its more developed manifestations in the late Middle Ages. Along the way, we meet the individuals actively trying to capture sound in verse or notation, from Notker, who used language as a means to capture sound, and Guido the Monk, who revolutionized the writing of music by introducing a very early system of notation that could guide musical performance, to Perotinus, whose notations captured rhythm, and Philippe de Vitry, who ingeniously built upon earlier work to develop scores for longer pieces of music. Kelly uses sidebars for more technical music theory, saving space for the larger story of the personalities who bequeathed musical notation to us and the times in which they lived.
