In music notation, a ligature is a graphic symbol that represents two or more notes that are written and sung in a single gesture, and on a single syllable, primarily in use ca. 800-1650 AD. The actual notation and meaning of ligatures has changed significantly throughout the history of western music, and their precise interpretation has been a subject of debate among musicologists for over a century.
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History
Plainchant
The early notation of plainchant, particularly Gregorian chant, used a series of shapes called neumes, which served as reminders of music that was taught by rote rather than as an exact record of which notes were to be sung. These neumes were in use from the 9th through the 11th centuries AD for most plainsong, and differed by region[1]. Due to their malleable nature, there were no hard and fast rules for the lengths each note was supposed to last, or even how high or low the intervals between notes were to be.
De mensurabili musica
A treatise on notation named De mensurabili musica was copied around 1260. In this treatise, the anonymous author proposed that, much in the same way that poetry of the time was based on a series of modal rhythms, music should also be set up in this way. The notation of these modes was accomplished primarily through using ligatures in varying lengths and with varying degrees of complexity, where the rhythms would be derived from context. For most of their notated history, this was the purpose of ligatures: to indicate the rhythmic mode[1].
Franco of Cologne
Around 1250, a music theorist named Franco of Cologne published a treatise on music entitled Ars cantus mensurabilis. In this treatise, Franco proposed that note values should be set up objectively, so that when looking at the notated music, a musician would be able to tell what notes were being sung or played, and the duration of those notes, with some degree of certainty. Ligatures were used for this as well, as they had become more or less standardized through the practice of the rhythmic modes.
Both of these treatises had a profound impact on the styles of Léonin and Pérotin, and through them the Notre Dame school of polyphony.
Usage
As far as the look of ligatures, they can have two basic shapes: box (square), or oblique (angled). Additionally, some ligatures have tails that either point up or down, similar to how tails on modern note heads point up or down. While primarily contextual, the system of ligatures in use from the 13th to the 16th century is fairly standardized, if not objective. All ligatures of this period have the following principles in common:
- All ligature notes are either the length of a longa ("L"), a breve ("B"), or a semibreve("S").
- All ligatures have at least two notes.
- For ease of discussion, ligatures of different lengths have different names. A ligature with two notes is called a binaria; one with three notes, a ternaria; one with four notes, a quaternaria; and one with five notes, a quinaria. Larger ones are possible, but rare.
- If a ligature has three or more notes, all notes in the middle (the mediae) are B.
- A downward tail changes the value of the note where the tail occurs, either from L to B or, less commonly, from B to L.
- An upward tail indicates that the next two notes are to be a series of S.
- Tails at the end of a ligature would indicate an additional note be sung or played, called a plica, that was not part of the ligature. This was especially common with the rhythmic modes to accommodate in practice what could not be accomplished within the very strict theoretical basis for modal music[1][2].
Alternate interpretations
Most scholarship on ligatures is focused on period from the 13th to the 16th centuries. Prior to this period, ligatures were far less standardized; a quaternaria ligature that, under the above rules, would mean a series like SSLB would simply mean BBBB [3].
Transcription
In transcribing to modern notation, where no compound graphs as ligatures exist, editors usually indicate by a hook, a bracket/brace, or (less often in polyphonic music) a slur those notes that were combined into a ligature. In order to avoid confusion, many scores that are transcribed purely for performance do not include any additional notation to indicate that a particular note originally belonged to a ligature, as most of the methods to show this have separate meanings in a performance capacity.
References
- ^ a b c Apel, Willi (1953), The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, pp. 87-94, ISBN 9780840005267
- ^ Godt, Irving (January 1976), "Reading Ligatures from Their Ground State", Early Music (Oxford University Press) 4 (1): 44-45
- ^ Parrish, Carl (1978), The Notation of Medieval Music, Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, p. 70, ISBN 9780918728081
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