FIG. 1-5 Passage from the Book of Genesis showing ta’amim, ecphonetic neumes entered above or below each word in the
Torah along with the vowels. Starting at the number 23 (remember that Hebrew is written from right to left), in the first word
the neume is the right-angled corner below the middle letter; in the second word it is the dot above the last letter. In the
hyphenated word that follows there are two neumes: the vertical dash below the first letter and the right angle under the
penultimate letter. Unlike Gregorian neumes, ta’amim do not show melodic contour and must be learned orally by rote
according to an arbitrary system that can vary from place to place, book to book, or occasion to occasion.
Some scholars think that the Carolingian neumes, in their very earliest application, were used not to
notate the imported, sacrosanct Gregorian repertory, which was learned entirely by heart, but to notate
lesser, newer, or local musical accessories to the canonical chant such as recitation formulas (known as
“lection tones”) for scriptural readings, as well as the explanatory appendages and interpolations to the
chant, including polyphonic ones, about which there will be more to say in the next chapter. (It is true that
the earliest neumated sources for such “extra” items do predate the earliest surviving neumated
antiphoners.) Other scholars assume that prototypes for the surviving Carolingian antiphoners once
existed, perhaps dating from as early as the time of Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor at the end of the
eighth century, more than a century before the earliest surviving manuscripts were produced.^6
Whenever the Carolingian neumes first appeared, whether before 800 or after 900, the fact remains
that they shared the limitation of all the early neumatic systems: one cannot actually read a melody from
them unless one knows it already. To read a previously unknown melody at sight, one needs at a minimum
a means of precise intervallic (or relative-pitch) measurement. It was not until the early eleventh century
that neumes were “heighted,” or arranged diastematically, on the lines and spaces of a cleffed staff
(invented, according to tradition, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, whose treatise Micrologus, completed
around 1028, included the earliest guide to staff notation). Only thereafter was it possible to record
melodies in a way that could actually transmit them soundlessly.
PERSISTENCE OF ORAL TRADITION
As scholars are beginning to recognize, the fact that the earliest notations of the canonized liturgy did not
communicate actual pitch content shows that no one expected or needed them to do so. In some theoretical
treatises of the ninth century, when pitch content needed to be shown, alphabetic notation adapted from the
quadrivium treatises was employed. On the other hand, manuscripts with unheighted neumes went on
being produced in Frankish monastic centers—even St. Gallen (now in eastern Switzerland), where the
earliest surviving neumated antiphoners were inscribed—until the fifteenth century. This shows that the
communication of the actual pitch and interval content of liturgical melodies went right on being
accomplished by age-old oral/aural methods, that is, by listening, repeating, and memorizing. Most monks
(and regular churchgoers, too, until the chant was largely abandoned by the church in the 1960s) still learn
their chants that way. Notation did not supersede memory, and never has.
FIG. 1-6 Greek-derived alphabetic notation from Musica enchiriadis (ca. 850). Such notation (used by Boethius in the sixth
century) did fix pitch precisely; this suggests that Gregorian chant might have been notated that way from the beginning, had