Figure 1. A page (folio 111r) from Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS latin 1118. It shows part of a tonary, the beginning of the materials for Tone VII. This part of the MS is illustrated profusely with pictures of musicians, but there is no obvious connection between what they are playing and the music on the page. The notation is Aquitanian (diastematic, without clefs), middle of 11th century.

During the Middle Ages all documents, books, charters, etc., were handwritten. Called "manuscripts" - from the Latin words for hand (manu) writing (script) - they were produced before mechanical printing was developed in the mid-1500s. The art of manuscript writing persists somewhat even today, especially in Eastern European cultures. In the early Middle Ages, the domain of writing and books was almost entirely in the hands of monks, nuns, and clerics of the church (monasteries were, indeed, the bastions of literacy for hundreds of years). It is not surprising, therefore, that the earliest forms of musical notation were devoped for the purpose of recording religious chants.

The early forms of musical writing are called "neume notation." Pronounced noom or nju:m, the word likely comes from the Greek πνεύμα (breath, spirit) or νεύμα (nod, sign). As an emergent system of writing, it existed in many early forms that are precursors of modern musical notation. Neumation was eventually standardised as "square-neume notation" on a four-line "staff," as it appears in mechanically printed sources. Around the time of the Renaissance, so-called "mensural" notation for music was invented, whereby the durations of notes could be explicitly shown. It is important to remark, however, that neume notation provides no explicit information about the durations of notes. (CF., Figure 1: for one thing, the musical notation obviously lacks the 'bar lines' of modern musical notation, which are used to mark regular intervals of time.) Each chant melody is strongly tied to a religious text, and it is likely that the natural cadence of recited text governed the 'rhythm' of chant melodies. Furthermore, in early species of neumation, little or no information was provided about pitches of the notes. One must conclude, therefore, that early neumed manuscripts were only references for singers who had already memorized the melodies from oral transmission.

It is generally accepted by musicologists today, that early neume notation conveys subtleties of vocal expression that are impossible to depict in modern musical notation. Discovering what these subtleties are might be accomplished by comparative study of many manuscripts. Such comparative study, however, has been hampered by several factors:

• the inaccessibility of the manuscripts (they are widely distributed in rare book collections, and permission to inspect them is highly restricted);
• for some species of early neumation, only a handful of experts in the world are capable of accurately reading them; and
• transcription to computer data is highly problematical, due in part to the problems mentioned above.