The oldest notations of medieval monophonic music   
The "Zeitschrift für Semiotik": Abstracts  ______________________________________________________________________  

"Signs and Music"

Year: 1987
Volume: 9
Number: 3-4
Vladimir Karbusicky  
Foreword 
Signs and Music 
 Constantin Floros  
Medieval monophonic music 

Christoph Lischka 
Sign change in music notation 


Ivanka Stoianova   
20th century musical graphics 


Mei-chu Wang 
Chinese musical notation 


Albrecht Schneider   
Music, sound, language, writing.  
Transcription and notation in comparative musicology and music ethnology 


Literary report 
Christoph Lischka  
Semiotics and musicology 


Enclosure 
Hans Wald  
Congratulations. Or: the latest from Klagenfurt 


Discussion 
Karin Böhme-Dürr  
What are the effects of media specific codes on reader, listener and viewer? 
 


Constantin Floros, University of Hamburg 
 
Summary. Among the most important contributions of the Middle Ages to the development of music were the introductions of polyphony (on the basis of the choral) and of musical scores (in the form of the neumatic notation). While the oldest Latin neumatic manuscripts date from the 9th century A. D., Greek manuscripts with ekphonetic notation had already been written in the 8th century, a tradition which was continued in Old-Byzantine and Old-Slavonic church music. Byzantine and Slavonic musical manuscripts contain four different systems of notation: two Byzantine and two Slavonic, known as Coislin Notation and Chartres Notation and as Sematic Notation and Kondakaria Notation respectively. All of them are modeled an the grammar of verbal language and have anthropomorphic features (e.g. the division of the notes into somata, pneumata, and aistheseis, i.e. body, spirit, and senses). Historically, Byzantine Notation developed in a straightforward way so that its stages are reconstructable and can be of help in the task of dating undated manuscripts. In the typology of neumes five of the seven Byzantine classes have exact parallels in the Latin neumes, and among the figures, formulas, and phrases common in Old-Byzantine church music remarkably many reappear in the Gregorian Choral. These are striking arguments for the thesis that Western choral notation was directly adopted from Byzantium.