Zither tablature in 890 and 1890

The use of parallel lines to indicate pitch in written music can be traced back to the late-9th century. It developed from an older approach to the description of musical intervals and scales by reference to the strings on two instruments — a single-stringed monochord and a multi-stringed cithara. The latter provided the model for what would become the definitive attribute of staff notation.

The step from plucked string to drawn line is documented in two treatises. One was written ca. 890 by the French monk, Hucbald (b. ca. 840 – d. 930), who in it derived a lined system from a six-stringed instrument. The other is of less certain 9th-century date and unknown authorship. It shows a lined system derived in the same manner and adds a set of symbols called “daseia” to represent notes. (Early manuscript illustrations of both are shown below, as are daseia taken from a font packaged with current music notation software.)

Hucbald was once believed also to have been the anonymous author of the second volume and therefore the deviser of so-called daseian notation. However, none of its symbols appear anywhere in his named work. Both his and daseian notation employ an otherwise identical system of lines. His description of how it was derived from the strings on a cithara is more detailed than the one in the anonymous work, suggesting that lines and daseia appeared successively in the two treatises.

Since Hucbald tied all pitch designation in his system to a specific instrument, it would perhaps be more correct to treat it as a tablature rather than an idiosyncratic precursor to staff notation. (I’m not the first to make this observation but the latter perspective is still widespread.) The difference is that staff notation indicates the pitches of individual notes, leaving it to the player to know how to produce them. A tablature directly maps the placement of the player’s fingers on a given instrument.

There are also hybrids, with one common instance being the stems and flags of staff notation used to indicate rhythmic detail in what is otherwise a strict tablature. This is seen in a far younger “Music-Chart” for alternate use on a piano or zither that was discussed in two earlier posts (here and here). It originated in a US patent application filed by James Dodd in 1890 (issued as US452995).

The invention consists in a chart…composed of a series of arbitrary vertical lines corresponding to the keys of a piano or other like instrument or to the strings of a zither or other like instrument, notes written on said lines, and a continuous guiding-line extending across the clear spaces between the arbitrary vertical lines and extending unbroken throughout the entire series of notes, connecting the same in the order in which they are to be played in order to produce a melody or tune as set forth.

An illustration of such a chart in playing position on an autoharp is seen in this post’s banner image. They are still used in the same fashion on other types of fretless zithers, and appear in many patent drawings of them. Dodd only claimed the invention of the chart, as illustrated with this mapping of an older hymn tune.

The vertical lines show the available pitches. The noteheads on them mark the individual notes of the melody, played in the sequence indicated by the diagonal lines. Duration is given by stems and flags. However, when accompanying the vocal performance of a hymn, the cadence would instead match that of its text.

Depending on the hymnal being used, different words were often set to the same tune. If the noteheads on Dodd’s sheet were replaced with the syllables of a text associated with Peterboro, there would be no difference between his patent drawing and Hucbald’s illustration of his own system. He derived it from a six-stringed psaltery (as his cithara would now be termed; lyre is a further alternative but more appropriate to earlier contexts) and intended it for use both with that instrument and a water organ.

Here again, the available pitches are determined by the tuning of the strings and the melody delineated by the diagonal lines. Rhythm and pulse are inherent in the text, in this case the plainchant Ecce vere Israhelita in quo. Performers were assumed to be familiar with detail of this type. One of the main forces driving the development of music notation was a desire to reduce the scope of such requisite prior knowledge.

Before wading more deeply into the history of how a type of zither became the fountainhead of staff notation, here is a brief demonstration of the prototypal tablature. Its format corresponds to a second chart in Dodd’s patent, for a two-voice setting on a 14-stringed instrument of another hymn tune.

The Roman polymath best known by his last name, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (b. ca.480 – d. 524), was a portal figure in the analytical description of musical intervals and scales. His work provided a bridge between early Greek music theory and that of medieval Western Europe. The above-mentioned use of the monochord and psaltery in that context is rooted in his treatise De Institutione Musica, written shortly after the outset of the sixth century. (An English translation by Calvin Bower is cited below.)

There is some question about whether Boethius described stringing arrangements on psalteries observed in actual performance situations, or used the instrument primarily as a conceptual model. Either way, he installed it centrally in the narrative about music theory that led to the graphic notation of music.

…we will discuss for a while the strings of the kithara and their names, and also how they were added, since this determines their names. … In the beginning, Nicomachus reports, music was truly simple, since it was composed of four strings.

Boethius went on to describe how further strings were added and named. This extended to a 15-stringed instrument, here as illustrated in a copy from the 15th century. The horizontal lines correspond to the strings, labeled with their names, and the arches designate the intervals between them.

It seems likely that psaltery players had less cumbersome names for the strings on their instruments and the notes they produced. However, short-form reference in theoretical writing was still a generation in the offing — but then splashed bigtime with what would become the now familiar do-re-mi solfège.

Hucbald titled his treatise De Harmonica Institutione, and cited the work of Boethius in it. The illustration of Hucbald’s tablature above comes from a mid-11th century copy and is preceded by descriptive text (as translated by Warren Babb):

Let specimens also be written down of both tone and semitone from any chant, distinguishing the six strings, whose place is taken by the lines, and always with a notation between the strings as to where there is a tone and where a semitone.

Those two intervals are marked on Boethius’s 15-stringed instrument as Tonus and Semitonus. Hucbald abbreviated them as T and S, and their arrangement on the six-stringed variant means that its lowest string was a C. As already noted, the diagonal lines in his notation show the direction of the melody and the duration of each note is implicit in the text.

The differences between this and daseian notation are manifest in two treatises by the same anonymous author(s); Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis. The first is the work referred to alongside Hucbald’s at the outset of this post. (A translation of both by Raymond Erikson is cited below, except for my consistent rendering of the Latin word chorda as string, where he alternates between it and line.)

The definitive daseia were decorated forms of a so-named ancient Greek diacritical mark. They were devised for the symbolic identification of notes and are first attested in Musica enchiriadis, where their design is discussed at length. The following illustration from a 10th- or 11th-century German copy shows them as adjuncts to the T and S labels for the separating intervals. They are no longer spaced proportionally, as both Boethius and Hucbald did, supporting the suggestion that Musica enchiriadis was written later than De Harmonica Institutione.

Transcribing the daseia from bottom to top into staff notation gives:

The text then introduces a different graphic arrangement on a five-lined staff, again without the proportional spacing of the equivalent Hucbald drawing (which he explicitly noted to be an important detail):

…let some strings, as it were, be extended straight out from the individual symbols for the tones positioned in order. Moreover, let the strings stand for the pitches these symbols signify. On these strings any melody may be represented.

It went a step further with a parallel unlined representation along the top of the staff (showing the plainchant Sit nomen domini):

I have attempted to illustrate these things in two ways for clearer understanding, both linearly, as with strings, and also by attaching symbols to the individual syllables.

The author continued with an adaptation of the daseian staff to the representation of polyphonic music. This was again the first vehicle of its kind but the present discussion will stop at the monophonic form. The parallel distillation of a single voice into a sequence of symbols indicating pitch, placed above the syllables of a sung text, further strengthens the notion of the lined system being intended for instrumentalists.