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18/09/2019

What does neumes mean in music?

What does neumes mean in music?

neume, in musical notation, a sign for one or a group of successive musical pitches, predecessor of modern musical notes. Neumes placed on the staff showed exact pitch, allowing a singer to read an unfamiliar melody. Even within western Europe, differing systems of neumes were used in different geographical regions.

What are heightened neumes?

In the early eleventh century, Beneventan neumes (from the churches of Benevento in southern Italy) were written at varying distances from the text to indicate the overall shape of the melody; such neumes are called “heightened” or “diastematic” neumes, which showed the relative pitches between neumes.

What are Liquescent neumes?

A form of neume associated with plainchant to indicate certain consonants and diphthongs. The singer produces a semi-vocalized sound when moving from one note to the next.

What are simple neumes?

The simplest neumes were the punctum (Latin for point, dot) and the virga (rod). Both denote single, discrete pitches, punctum standing for a relatively low, and virga for a relatively high tone. Pes (foot, step) is a two-note neume denoting a step up, while clivis (hill) indicates a step down.

What is the definition of monophonic in music?

monophony, musical texture made up of a single unaccompanied melodic line.

What is the use of neumes?

6.3. Neume Notation. Most neume notation is used to set music to an existing text. The syllable is the fundamental unit of structure, with the neumes themselves serving as a means of “sonifying” the text.

What is the meaning of neumatic?

[English] A style of plain chant that sets one syllable of text to one neume. A neume is a symbol that denotes two to four notes in the same symbol, thus each syllable is sung to two to four notes. This style is opposed to syllabic, in which each syllable has one note, and melismatic, where one syllable has many notes.

How do you describe Gregorian chant?

Gregorian chant, monophonic, or unison, liturgical music of the Roman Catholic Church, used to accompany the text of the mass and the canonical hours, or divine office. Gregorian chant is named after St. Gregory I, during whose papacy (590–604) it was collected and codified.

What does polyphonic in music mean?

polyphony, in music, the simultaneous combination of two or more tones or melodic lines (the term derives from the Greek word for “many sounds”). A subcategory of polyphony, called homophony, exists in its purest form when all the voices or parts move together in the same rhythm, as in a texture of block chords.

Where does the word neume come from in music?

Neumes. A neume (sometimes spelled neum) is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The word entered the English language in the Middle English forms “newme”, “nevme”, “neme” in the fifteenth century, from the Middle French “neume,” in turn from…

How are the neumes written in the Gregorian chant?

“Gaudeamus omnes,” from the Graduale Aboense, was scripted using square notation. By the thirteenth century, the neumes of Gregorian chant were usually written in square notation on a staff with four lines and three spaces and a clef marker, as in the fourteenth–fifteenth-century Graduale Aboense shown here.

Why was neumatic notation used in medieval music?

Neumatic notation was later used in medieval music to indicate certain patterns of rhythm called rhythmic modes, and eventually evolved into modern musical notation. Neumatic notation remains standard in modern editions of plainchant .

What kind of notation is used for neumes?

This variant is also known as Hufnagel notation, as the used neumes resemble the nails (hufnagels) one uses to attach horseshoes. “Gaudeamus omnes,” from the Graduale Aboense, was scripted using square notation.