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NOTATION
Pitch Notation
      The notation system also did not spring up overnight. In the ancient Greek, Oriental and Jewish traditions, ekphonetic notation was in use as early as 200 BC. This was actually a system of grammatical accents indicating inflections in language or liturgical texts. Over the next 700 years, a more graphic way of suggesting pitch developed. Monks and scribes writing with ink and a quill or bamboo stick tried to find a symbolic way of representing the music they were singing. Because the shape of the quill or stick was flat, a square or diamond shape could easily be produced with a single stroke, so this stroke was used to represent a single note. Squiggly lines known as neumes moved up and down to approximate the rise and fall of melodies. Neumes were used for another 500 years before anyone thought of placing them on a staff line to provide a starting reference point. First a one-line staff was used. Later, two lines were used to show two separate voices, one low and one high, with neumes on each line to represent each vocal part.  By 1200 AD, staves of two, three or four lines were  common. The tendency to add more and more lines became too cumbersome when 14 or 15 lines were needed for choral or instrumental music. One of the compromises that was reached around 1460 was the practice in German keyboard tablature of writing the right-hand upper part as notes on a staff and writing the left-hand lower part out by letter name. These letter names for the notes had been in partial use before the staff when they were used to identify a starting position or to clarify the notes in neumes or church modes. Oddo of Clugny, music theorist, wrote in 950 AD about this new system of letter notation which used -ABCDEFG-abcdefg to name the seven scale tones in several octaves. Letters were used to define a fixed position for each pitch, especially after keyboards came into use. Interestingly, the Spanish keyboard tablature used one staff line for each part in four-part writing and then wrote all of the notes using only the numbers 1 - 7 for the seven scale tones on each line.

Rhythm Notation
      Meanwhile, rhythmic notation was evolving as well. With a tilt of the pen, the square black note became a diamond shape. The square "breve" was used as a single note or breath, the diamond became the "semi-breve" and had a value half as long (half a breath.) By 1320, Philippe de Vitry, "the Father of Notation" had standardized the method of creating even shorter note values in duple and triple divisions by adding stems and flags to the note heads. In 1450, the standard black "breve" had a white version that was used for longer time values. Many imaginative variations flourished between 1450 and 1600, but by 1600 rhythmic notation as we know it today was pretty well established.