NEUMES
It is this special body of psalmodic chants for the Mass, consisting of about five hundred antiphons and
responds, that is in strictest terms the repertory designated by the phrase “Gregorian chant.” It was this
corpus that was imported by the Carolingian Franks under Pepin and Charlemagne and thus became the
earliest music in the European tradition to be written down. The interesting thing, as we have already
observed, is that this writing down, which seems to us such a momentous event, seems to have occasioned
so little notice at the time.
There is not a single literary reference to document the invention of the so-called neumes that tracked
the relative rise and fall of the tunes, and the placement within them of the text syllables, in the earliest
musically notated (“neumated”) manuscripts. Etymologically, the word “neume,” which comes to us by
way of medieval Latin from the Greek word pneuma (“breath,” whence vital spirit or soul), referred to a
characteristic melodic turn such as may be sung on one breath. By now, however, the word more
commonly denotes the written sign that represented such a turn. Since surviving antiphoners with neumes
do not seem to date before the beginning of the tenth century, several generations after the Carolingian
chant reform had been undertaken, scholarly speculation about the actual origins of the neumes and the
date of their first employment has enjoyed a very wide latitude.
Traditionally, scholars assumed that the Carolingian neumes were an outgrowth of the “prosodic
accents,” the signs—acute, grave, circumflex, etc.—that represented the inflection of poetry-recitation in
late classical antiquity, and that still survive vestigially in the orthography of modern French. (As
originally conceived, the acute accent meant a raising of the vocal pitch, the grave a lowering, the
circumflex a raising-plus-lowering.) Others have proposed that the neumes were cheironomic: that is,
graphic representations of the hand-signaling (cheironomy) by which choirmasters indicated to their
singers the rise and fall of a melody. A more recent theory associates the neumes with a system of
punctuation signs that the Franks seem to have developed by around 780—functional equivalents of
commas, colons, question marks, and so on, which break up (parse) a written text into easily
comprehended bits by governing the reader’s vocal inflections. All of these explanations assume that the
neumes were parasitic on some earlier sign-system, and yet we have no actual basis in evidence to rule
out the possibility that the neumes were independently invented in response to the immediate musical
purpose at hand.
There were other early schemes for graphically representing music, some of them much older than the
Carolingian neumes. Some did not even reflect melodic contour but were entirely arbitrary written signs
that represented melodic formulas by convention, the way alphabet letters represent speech sounds. The
ancient Greeks used actual alphabetic signs as musical notation. Alphabetic notation survived to a small
extent in medieval music treatises, like that of the sixth-century encyclopedist Boethius, which formed the
basis for music study within the quadrivium curriculum.
More familiar examples of special formula-signs for music, called ecphonetic neumes, include the so-
called Masoretic accents (ta’amim) of Jewish biblical cantillation, which Jewish children are taught to
this day in preparation for their rite of passage to adulthood (bar or bat mitzvah), when they are called to
the pulpit to read from scripture. To learn to read ta’amim one must have a teacher to instruct one orally
in the matching of sign and sound. Such matching, being arbitrary, can vary widely from place to place,
and also varies according to the occasion, or according to what kind of text is being read. The same signs,
for example, will be musically realized one way in readings from the prophets and another, usually more
ornate, in readings from the Pentateuch; the very same portion of Scripture, moreover, will be variously
realized on weekdays, Sabbaths, or holidays.