So simple as scarcely to perplex the youngest child

Several discussions of musical performance practice on this blog are illustrated with snippets of staff notation, often as facsimiles taken from historical sources. When focused on instruments for which alternate forms of notation came into common use, the instrument-specific ones are employed preferentially, or both appear in parallel. This approach to writing about music and musical instruments has been commonplace for centuries.

When the graphic representation of music is itself the topic of discussion, it is obviously difficult to avoid reliance on staff notation or some widely understood alternative to it. Countless such systems have been put forward over the past centuries. The overwhelmingly greatest number of them attracted only fleeting attention, at best. However, a few have come into persisting use.

One of more widely encountered is the “ABC notation” used both in parallel with staff notation and as a replacement for it. It has standard and informal forms, with the shared barebones attribute of representing the notes in a melody by their single-letter names — A, B, C, D, etc. If the octave is also indicated, standard ABC does so with lowercase and uppercase letters for two adjacent octaves, adding a subscript or superscript index for an additional octave below and above each. Note lengths and rhythm are conveyed by numbers juxtaposed with the alphabetical pitch indicators.

Methods with more limited followings have been typified in several preceding posts by one that Charles F. Zimmermann developed during the 1870s. He had patented an accordion tablature at the outset of that decade and went on to devise a more comprehensive system of notation for instruments with piano-type keyboards. When he later turned his attention to the autoharp, he came to regard it as an ideal adjunct to the teaching of his approach to notation.

The basis throughout was the assignment of numbers, first to the buttons on an accordion, and then the notes in a C major scale. Zimmermann vaunted this as a monumental innovation. However, the numerical representation of Western European music can be traced back to the early 17th century. Instruments had also been designed prior to the autoharp specifically to ease the teaching of one or another alternate notation.

This blog has examined possible sources of inspiration for Zimmermann’s work in developing the instrument itself. I now plan to do the same with his system of notation. The first scheme to be considered was published in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1785.

It is by far not the oldest in the queue but is the one with the strongest resemblance to ABC notation. The path from what might be called Dearborn ABC (for a reason that will become apparent) and the standard ABC that is now widely used in online repositories of traditional music, does not lead straight through Zimmermann’s system. Nonetheless, both branches of that trajectory are relevant to the broader scope of this blog.

As described by its developer Chris Walshaw here, standard ABC grew out of an informal alphabetically based approach to writing music. The lower-case spelling of “standard” deliberately indicates that its status as such derives from user consensus. There is no oversight or mandate of any recognized normative organization.

The broader variation noted in Walshaw’s account remains characteristic of the “blackboard ABC” used as an adjunct to aural instruction in traditional music, particularly Irish. It is now nearly ubiquitous in that context, with details that reflect the preference of whomever is doing the teaching. There is deeper history here as well, and blackboards began to appear in descriptions of both letter and number-based schemes for writing music during the first half of the 19th century.

The specification of standard ABC defines it as “a text-based music notation system designed to be comprehensible by both people and computers.” Yet again, this was not the first proposal intended to meet precisely those two requirements. A predecessor in the digital realm is among those slated for discussion here, and the remainder of this post takes a closer look at one based on typographical and pedagogical considerations.

In 1785, Benjamin Dearborn published A scheme, for reducing the science of music to a more simple state, and to bring all its characters within the compass of a common fount of printing-types; especially calculated for the convenience of learners. This post’s banner image shows a pre-publication advertisement for it in the issue of the New Hampshire Gazette and General Advertiser from 1 April of the same year. The observation in the ad about the notation scheme being “so simple as scarcely to perplex the youngest child who can read,” presaged the claims of near-instant comprehensibility that Zimmermann made for his system — and echoed the authors of numerous ones appearing from the very outset.

Dearborn had a keen interest in the pedagogy of several subjects, of which music seems to have been particularly important. He ran the following advertisement in the 5 April 1783 issue of the newspaper cited in the preceding paragraph.

His notation scheme would surely have developed in the same context. The book in which he gave the rules for it includes six sacred pieces, each with four separately written but vertically aligned voices. Here is the soprano part from one of them, followed by a more legible transcription of the first four measures.

The stacked numbers between the initial colons indicate the time signature — 3/2. The upper-case G at the bottom of the next vertical pair indicates the reference pitch. The letter above it designates the key. It is also shown as a G in this piece but incorrectly so; the four-part setting is unequivocally in C major. The symbol thereafter is a treble clef and the “flower” in the last position of the facsimile “shows the end of a tune.”

The lower-case letters are note names, with an l (small L) representing a bar line. Accidentals are indicated by a v for a flat and a turned ʌ for a sharp. Paired single quotation marks “include so many letters as must be sung to one syllable” and equate to a slur.

The duration of an individual note is indicated by a number placed over or under the letter, with that position determining the octave in which the note sounds. The letter above the number marks the higher octave, and the letter below the number marks the lower octave. This range is extended one octave further in either direction by doubling the letter.

The numbers range from 1 for a whole note, to 32 for a thirty-second note. An appended dot extends each by half its nominal value. The same number applies to all following letters until a different number appears. A number between two letters indicates a rest.

An octave starts on the keynote, which also determines where the shift is made between placing a number above or below the letter. The facsimile example marks the break between the octaves for the erroneously designated key of G but not the actual key of C. Here is an additional transcription of the entire soprano part in staff notation and the proper key.

Although there is no instance of it in any of the songs included in his book, Dearborn states that the G reference pitch can also be a G♯.

From a pitch-pipe, or otherwise take the sound of the lower letter, which is always a G or ʌG ;‍— Sound the upper letter on this pitch, and the other letters of the tune their natural distance from it.

This suggests that when a performance was tuned to a pitch pipe it was a chromatic one. If so, a question follows about why the G or G♯ was always the reference, rather than simply the keynote designated by the upper letter. The pitch would otherwise presumably have been taken from a tuning fork, or a musical instrument that happened to be at hand. However, in those cases as well, there would be no apparent reason for tuning to anything other than the keynote.

Dearborn targeted his system to musically inexperienced singers. This adds need for explaining why he required the ability to gauge the interval between the reference pitch and the keynote. The semitone offset between the G and G♯ can plausibly be taken as evidence of high and low pitch standards in parallel use. If so, and tuning forks were commonly available only for the nominal G in each, the questioned detail might have its explanation. Otherwise, there is no reason for building the transposition into a simplified system of notation, especially when its scope is restricted to vocal music.

If Dearborn’s scheme for replacing staff notation with a typographically more familiar alternative was the first to be published in the US, its European counterpart appeared a century and a half earlier. I’ll describe its detail in the next post, but in brief preview, it represents notes solely by number. Their pitch and duration are both indicated by font variation.

I am unaware of any open-access source for a digitized reproduction of Dearborn’s book. I’ve been working from photos made with a cell phone at a library that holds a printed out microfilm copy of what I believe is the only surviving exemplar. As a complement to the snippets quoted or paraphrased above, here is the full set of his rules.