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§ Byzantine Chant Notation
 he origins of Western chant notation are uncertain. One camp holds that it derived from Latin accent marks for text. Another school holds that it evolved from Hebrew cantillation marks on sacred texts (which served as reminders for correct intonation of the texts). Yet another theory is that Western notation was invented ex nihilo in the West during the Carolingian period. The most reasonable theory, in my opinion, is that a system of script neumes already existed in the East, which was adapted to the requirements of the Latin language by the Carolingians in their efforts to catalog and systematize Western chant.1
Egon Wellesz identifies two distinct systems of musical notation in the East. The first was devised for regulating the cantillation of the readings from the Prophets, the Epistles, and the Gospels. The second was to fix the method of chanting certain parts of the ordinary of the Mass, particularly the Kanons, the Stichera, Kontakia, and other poetical texts.2 He contends that notation of the Psalms, Alleluias, and Doxologies does not appear in manuscripts in the East until the thirteenth century. Grout says that typical Byzantine hymns evolved from short responses, or troparia, between the verses of psalms, "being furnished with music on the basis of melodies or melody-types perhaps taken over from Syria." 3 Grout divides Byzantine hymns into kontakia and later kanones; the latter probably adapted the melodies of the earlier form. They differ from the metric hymns of the Western Church for their elaborate structure. The kanon consisted of eight divisions, or odes, each having several strophes. Each ode had its own melody. "Each ode corresponded to a specific Biblical canticle .... The canticles of the Byzantine Church, with one exception, still remain today in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. The most important of these for the history of music is the Canticle of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Magnificat." 4
The system of notation for the first type of cantillation was the 'ecphonetic signs'; the system for the second type was the 'musical signs proper', or neumes. Both systems are believed to have derived from ancient Greek prosodic signs, which were used to mark texts for proper declamation. Old Greek writing ran together without spaces between words, and so it was difficult to render a fluid recital without the help of these prosodic marks. Invention of the prosodic signs ( ) is generally attributed to the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 180 B.C.). From his examinination of manuscripts, Wellesz concludes that ecphonetic signs were introduced in the fourth century C.E., but by the fifteenth century their meaning and proper interpretation had been forgotten.5 The ecphonetic symbols would fall under Treitler's classification as 'iconic symbols',6 that is, symbols that represent the shape of a melody, its inflection, and contour without reference to actual pitch or durations of notes.
Wellesz provides the following table of ecphonetic signs for Byzantine manuscripts.
Fig. 1. Table of ecphonic signs
Each sign had a specific meaning for the cantillation of text. The Oxeia, for instance, indicated that the voice should "rise and remain on a higher pitch until the end of the phrase," 7 while the Syrmatike indicated an undulating action of the voice. The compound signs appear either in pairs to enclose a segment of text, or in multiples with some special meaning.
The second major system for Byzantine musical notation was neumes. Eastern neumes would fall under Treitler's classification as 'symbolic characters'. Each character is a literal (not pictorial) representation of a note or group of notes, in an analogous way to letters of the alphabet standing for sounds of speech. There is nothing inherent in the shape of the letter 'A' that would lead one to think that it stands for the sound 'ah', and so 'A' is symbolic, not iconic.
An example of a notated Greek text follows.
Fig. 2. Greek text notated with chant signs
Wellesz gives credit to Jean-Baptiste Thibaut as being the first scholar to make a systematic investigation of Byzantine musical notation and to propose that Western neumes originated in the notational culture of Constantinople.8 Thibaut identified three periods of Byzantine neumatic notation, as follows:
- the early period, when the signs have no distinct intervallic value;
- the middle period, when intervals between notes are clearly indicated; and
- the late period in which subsidiary symbols are added in red ink to the normal musical notation, which is in black ink.
Dating of Byzantine manuscripts can be very problematical. By contrast, Western manuscripts can be dated (albeit with limited dependability) by the type of script the scribe used. Minuscule script, for instance, was developed by the Carolingians, and manuscripts employing it cannot date from before that period and are unlikely to date later. Gutenberg’s printing machine largely ended the copying of books by hand in the West. In the Orthodox world, however, the copying of manuscripts continued almost till modern times. (Even now in some monasteries prayers are transcribed by hand and kondakars are compiled.) In Byzantine manuscripts copyists frequently employed a self-consciously archaic script that dated from the fifth and sixth centuries for its great beauty, so-called 'Old Parchment Uncial'.
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The lectionaries were the most precious books, particularly the Evangeliaria [which contained the Gospels], with their richly jewelled covers, and therefore had to be written calligraphically with an archaizing tendency. A script composed of capital letters was more legible in the darkness of the church before dawn or after dusk than the complex forms of minuscule script which developed later. These two causes contributed to make the scribes intensely conservative. 9
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The shape of ecphonetic signs remained essentially unchanged for almost five centuries.10 Telltale signs help sometimes in dating and determining provenance. Wellesz mentions a manuscript from around the year 1000; although most of it is written in Old Parchment Uncial, in places where the scribe started to run out of room on the page he resorted to the more compact 'Liturgical Uncial' that was common in his day. The presence of Liturgical Uncial in a document implies that the manuscript was not written before the ninth century. Other telltale signs help scholars, such as the method of construction and binding of books. Wellesz mentions manuscripts in minuscule script, whose covers consist of two thin wooden plates, glued together, and covered in red leather. Because of the small grooves on the cross-sides and protruding front-sides of the covers, Wellesz says that these manuscripts must have come from Constantinople; only in that area did craftsmen make book bindings of this sort. Ink color can be another telltale indicator. Wellesz mentions a manuscript with the letters of the text written in dark brown ink and ecphonetic signs written in light brown ink, which causes him to believe that the text and music symbols were written by two different scribes at different times. (We know, however, that it was often the case in the West that one scribe copied the text, following which an expert in chant notation wrote the neumes; a more scientific investigation into ink types may be in order.)
A system of musical notation existed in Constantinople well before the Carolingian era in the West and at a time when Byzantine was the cultural and religious center of Christendom. It is reasonable to assume that the development of musical notation in the West was influenced by Byzantium. This conjecture might be strengthened circumstantially by the idea that the ecclesiastical modal system was adapted from the Byzantine modes. Clearly, Gregorian chant has some melodic ancestry in Byzantine chant. The influence of Syrian music upon Byzantium, and indirectly on the West, seems probable, though speculative at this point. No early form of Syrian chant notation is known, which makes this speculation almost impossible to validate.
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believe a strong argument might eventually be made for substantial Syrian influence upon early Church music. This idea is based on cultural proximity, the great antiquity of Christianity in Syria, and striking similaritities between modern Syrian melismatic contours of those of Gregorian chant.
ome scholars (notably Jacques Chailley) argue that the ecclesiastical modes for classifying the music of the Western Church evolved directly from the modal system of the Byzantine Church. The Western ecclesiastical modes, in any case, are a classification system that is distinct from the ancient Greek modes of octave species, as presented in the Greek musical treatises. Late in the Middle Ages, Church melodies were written to conform to theoretical notions about the ecclesiastical modes, but I believe the modal system was initially used descriptively to impose order upon a disorganized corpus of melodies.