Antiphonary of St. Benigne - William of Volpiano's Contribution To The Evolution of Musical Notation

William of Volpiano's Contribution To The Evolution of Musical Notation

William of Volpiano's innovation of the notation system did not change the habits of central French neume notation, it just added an own alphabetic pitch notation. Often it was not clear how the letters refer to the neumes. Letter groups usually refer to the group of a ligature, but sometimes neumes were added as well to the letters to help the reading cantor for the coordination.

Among the monastic reforms of Normandy William of Volpiano was an important protagonist among the local abbots, but his alphabetic notation was only used over the following centuries in the Norman monasteries of his school, but never in the later Italo-Norman manuscripts which were rather influenced by the Aquitanian school (a few manuscripts used central French neumes, but without alphabetic notation). Within the Cluniac Monastic Association, the cantors of the following generation like Adémar de Chabannes who was taught by his uncle Roger at Saint-Martial Abbey of Limoges (Aquitaine), developed a new diastematic neume notation which allowed to indicate the ligatures, even if they were separated by the vertical disposition according to their pitch class. His innovation was imitated by Italian cantors, first in Northern Italy than in other reform centres of the 11th century like Benevent and Monte Cassino. During the 12th century one are two lines were added to help the scribe and the reader for a constant vertical orientation.

After the first generation of fully notated neume manuscripts in the last decades of the 10th century, the particular notation system represent a transition between the adiastematic and diastematic neumes. During the 11th century a lot of local traditions, different from the chant repertory of the Roman-Frankish reform, were codified the first time in diastematic neumes: Old Beneventan chant (Beneventan neumes without lines), Ravenna chant (Beneventan neumes), Old Roman chant (Roman neumes without lines), Ambrosian or Milanese chant (square neumes on a penta- or tetragramm).