Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

'
388 SCOEE SCORE
glance. The English name is derived from
the practice of dividing the music by bass or
lines scored through the entire series of staves.
The Latin term, Partitura cancellata owes
its origin to the compartments or CancelU, into
which the page is divided by the vertical
scorings. The word Score, though often misapplied
in the present day to what is more
correctly called a ' short ' score, a ' vocal ' score,
or a ' piano ' score, should properly be reserved
for the system which presents on separate staves
:all the parts that are to be performed simultaneously.
The oldest known form of score
would seem to be that in the pseudo-Hucbald
Musica EncMriadis, a treatise of the 11th
century. A specimen will be found in vol.
iii. p. 397a.)
An interesting early score is in the Brit. Mus.
Harl. MS. 978,—the volume which contains
the famous Reading rota Sumer '
is icumen in.
Below the three voice-parts here shown there
is a supplementary quadruplum, written on a
separate stave, which has no concern with our
present purpose. This composition shows that
within about ten years of 1226 the essential
feature of a score was realised in England.
In ArundelMS. No. 248, fol. 153a, 1546, 155a,
and 201a, there are two-part compositions regularly
scored on staves of eight and nine lines. In
the last of these, now nearly illegible, two
staves, each consisting of four black lines, are
separated by a red line. In the other case
the staves consist of eight uniform and equidistant
black lines. The following is from
fol. 155a of the MS., and the lower part of
'
the same facsimile is another hymn Salue
uirgo uirginii,' for three voices, on a stave of
twelve equidistant black lines. The MS. dates
from about the middle of the 13th century.
score of the same kind, about the same date, is
referred to by Ambros as being in the Bibliotheque
Rationale, Paris. w. s. B.
It will be observed that in these examples
care is taken that the notes which synchronise
in time are in the same vertical line. In the
rota (see the facsimile in the article Sumer is
lOUMEN in) in the facsimile given in vol. iii.
p. 324, and in the 15th century carols edited
A
by J. A. Fuller Maitland and W. S. Rockstro,
although the parts are superimposed, yet there
is no attempt to make the page really a score.
One of the first printed scores, properly socalled,
is that of Cipriano de Kore's madrigals
of 1577 ; and one of the first printed orchestral
scores, if not the very 'first, was that of the
'Ballet comique de la Royne' (Paris, 1582).
From the system then adopted to the complicated
scores now in use, the process is one of