The preceding post examined the first system put forward in the USA for writing music without the graphic complexity of conventional staff notation, published in 1785. It used letters numbers and a few common typographical symbols. The present post takes a look at a method with the same purpose, based solely on the numerical representation of notes. It was published in London in 1638, with a claim of having been devised ca. 20 years earlier.

William Braythwait presented it in a compendium of 27 sacred pieces he culled from a larger collection published by Georg Victorinus in Munich, in 1622 (1st ed. 1616), both titled Siren coelestis (Celestial Siren). The upper half of the earlier title page is reproduced on that of the compendium, which is advertised further as “the easiest method of teaching and learning music by far.” (All translations in this post are my own.)

Braythwait explained this method and the rationale behind it in a narrative adjunct to the music, adding further detail in 1639 (also changing the spelling of his name to Braithwaite). He represented the seven notes of a diatonic scale with the Arabic numerals 1‍–‍7 and the octave with diacritical marks. This was also a basic feature of an earlier Spanish tablature that first appeared in a text titled Libro de cifra nueva para tecla, harpa, y vihuela (Book of new numbers for keyboard, harp and vihuela) published by Venegas de Henestrosa, in Madrid, in 1557 (to be discussed further in a separate post).

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.