The Spirit of Gregorian Chant - Church Music Association of America

40 THE SPIRIT OF GREGORIAN CHANT
the alphabetic system of letters, which, following the order in which
they are grouped, serve to represent different articulations or syllables.
This is our contemporary Occidental system, based on alphabetic
characters of which the number tends to diminish and
the form to become more and more unified.
Everything points to the fact that musical notation must have
passed through identical phases. In its first or ideographic state,
the melodic course must have been represented by a graphic line
of which the sinuosity figured the inflections of the voice, or if not,
the undulations of the musical gesture, for at the beginning simultaneous
movements of the human body accompanied collective song.
The first neums (Gr. neuma, nod, or sign) resulted most likely from
the progressive breaking up of this ideographic line into veritable
musical syllables, designed to be sung with a single emission of the
voice. Little by little, the spirit of analysis, applied to this instinc
tive and traditional mode of notation, erected an actual system,
based on the ascending and descending movements of the voice or
of the gesture, that is, on the acute and grave accents. The last
transformation was the division of these neums into distinct notes,
in the same way that the letters of the alphabet had come about.
This was effected by means of the diastematic system, in which the
neums were localized on horizontal lines, determining their relative
intonation through relation to a fixed tone.
Our musical notation is, then, like our writing, the logical
result of natural and progressive evolutions common to all graphic
representations of human thought. Our alphabetic system of notes
proceeded from a syllabic system of neums, which themselves evolved
out of a primitive ideographic system of which there remain but
few documents. 1
The human spirit seems to have an innate tendency to represent
tones as contained in a straight line, and it is from this natural
phenomenon that in ancient as well as in modern language one finds
such expressions as "scale," "degree," "interval," from high to low
i Cwrs., Cb. HI.