The Origins of Musical Notation in Central and Southern Italy

Abstract

Musical notation in the Beneventan zone is attested in a brief explicit in a manuscript datable to 948-49. Other safely datable local testimonies to the practice of writing music have survived from about 40 years later; by the turn of millennium there are enough documents to allow us to see how a style of writing music inherently Beneventan was set that was to last for more than two full centuries. What led to the creation of this new musical script in the years before 948-9 and how it evolved from an early experimental form to a more regulated system by about the year 1000; whether it was the created ex novo or whether its foundations were laid on pre-existing imported models … the present study seeks to answer these and similar questions. By examining two sizeable early sources of the Beneventan musical script fi rst against each other and then against documents of several other plainchant scripts, this study proves that Beneventan scribes created it at the same time as a renovation of the equally distinctive Beneventan textual script by adapting elements typical of two earlier Carolingian musical scripts; and that the Beneventan musical script itself was in turn renovated around the year 1000 to emphasize intervallic precision over rhythmic detail, and made more calligraphic and regular in its appearance. Corollary to these two main propositions, this study also presents new, original evidence for positing the Roman and Central Italian musical scripts as simplifying variants of a Beneventan original, in response to several scholars in the last decades who envisaged the opposite scenario of descendancy from Rome to Benevento.