On Apr 27, 2005, at 5:33 PM, John Howell wrote:
The first printed polyphonic music shows up in the early 16th century, 1501 in Venice, to be exact. This was music printed from movable type, which means that each piece of type had a single note shape or a single rest shape on it. So beaming was physically impossible and it never occurred to them.
We've been thru this before, but it bears repeating: limitations of early printing technology had absolutely nothing to do with vocal beaming conventions. The Gregorian beaming convention persisted in early polyphonic (MS) notation because the music and words of a given MS would be entered by separate scribes, w. the music coming first. The resulting underlay was often approximate at best (especially because the music notation was extremely compact), and so it was essential that syllabification continue to be reflected in the actual music. The old ligatures had by then taken on rhythmic significance, but the rule that a ligature must be broken between syllables was retained.
When music printing was invented, it aimed, very successfully, at reproducing literally the best MS conventions of the day. Beaming was introduced in the 17th c. because the smallest note values (wh. had by then become very common) had never been used to form ligatures, and beams were a way of connecting them in a similar fashion. The notation was still extremely compact, so underlay was still a problem, and the tradition of dividing these new "ligatures" was carried over from before. Only in the latest 18th c. did printed music become cheap enough that it was possible to make the kind of expansive, well-fitting underlay we demand today, and after that the weight of tradition kept the old beam-breaking tradition going for about another century.
Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
