Notation
The various signs used to represent music to the eye, as staff, clefs, notes, rests, etc. The earliest attempts at the representation of musical sounds of which we have any knowledge were made by the Greeks, who used the letters of their alphabet, modified in various ways to represent the series of sounds they employed. Their series of sounds is supposed to have begun on the note A, first space in the bass clef.
From this system music has retained the name of A for this sound. The next development was the adoption of a series of signs called neumæ. These signs, although curiously complicated, were yet very defective in precision, being inferior to the letters as indications of pitch. The great want, both of the letter system and the neumæ, was that neither gave any indication of the duration of the sounds. The next step was the adoption of the staff. At first use was made only of the spaces between the lines, and, as notes had not yet been invented, the syllables were written in the spaces; this gave exactness to the relative pitch of the sounds but no indication of their duration. The next step was to use the lines only, indicating the sounds by small square notes called points. The letter names of the lines, of which eight was the number, were indicated by Greek letters placed at the beginning. This, though an improvement on the plan of dislocating the syllables, was still wanting in that no duration was indicated. This desideratum was secured by the invention of the notes, attributed to Franco of Cologne. Invention was now on the right track. The expression of pitch and relative duration were now determined with exactness. The system of notation now in use is substantially the same, modified and improved to meet the requirements of modern musical complexity.