Monday, March 23, 2009

Text chant notation...


I've been reading some about the history of chant notation lately, and I'm interested in the earliest versions we have. They don't notate pitch, and seem to be elaborations of the tone or accent marks used in Greek. They sufficed, however, since when chant started being notated with pitches, the manuscripts are in basic agreement. That makes me wonder if there isn't some way to go back to that with our expanded unicode font sets, and notate chants in a way that's more concise on a page than with the square notation. Here's what I've been playing with.