Musical notation

Every other system in this building is a line. Marks follow one another in a single dimension — left to right, right to left, top to bottom — and a reader recovers the sequence by following it. Musical notation is the exception, and it is the reason the Notation Annex exists.

A notehead carries no information at all in isolation. Its meaning is its position: how high it sits against a set of ruled lines gives the pitch, and where it falls along the line gives the moment. The page is a graph. Time runs along the horizontal axis and frequency up the vertical one, and the notation was reading as a coordinate system six centuries before anyone drew a Cartesian plane.

Take a letter off a page and it still says something. Take a notehead off the stave and it says nothing at all.

That is what makes it an artefact this institute can hold rather than a symbol set. It is not a collection of signs that mean things; it is a system with a grammar, a spatial syntax, an engraving tradition, punchcut type, house styles and a canon of specimen practice — everything a script has, applied to something other than speech.

The earliest Western notation, from around the ninth century, is neumes: marks written above a text to show the shape of a melody — rising here, falling there. They are a reminder, not a record. A singer who already knew the chant could be prompted by them; a singer who did not could not learn it from them.

What turned a reminder into a record was a ruled line with a fixed pitch, and then several. The Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo, working in the first half of the eleventh century, is credited with the four-line stave and with a teaching system that let singers read music they had never heard. The claim in his own preface is that what had taken ten years could now be done in one.

Compare the argument in The King's Alphabet: the design that wins is the one that collapses the gap between knowing the system and using it. Guido's stave does for melody exactly what Sejong's featural letters do for speech.

Duration came later. Mensural notation in the thirteenth century made the shape of the notehead and its stem encode length, so that the two axes could carry pitch and the glyph itself could carry rhythm. That division of labour is still how the system works.