Brainstorming on the Encoding of Eastern Music Scripts, Middle-Byzantine Neumes as a Case-Study

The effort to encode neumatic scripts has primarily focused on Western European repertories, with little attention given to the neumes employed in the East. To address this gap, we propose to raise awareness on some methodological issues that have hindered modern scholars from encoding Eastern neumes. Our case study is the Middle-Byzantine music script, employed from the mid-12th century to about 1815 across a large geographical area encompassing mainly Eastern Europe and part of the Middle East. This music script has been chosen since it has many points of contacts with Western neumatic scripts but, at the same time, its basics differ radically from what we encounter in the West. Indeed, music scripts in the East are of the ‘articulatory’ type, serving as a guide on how to make music, almost similar to a tablature style of notation. In Western neumatic scripts instead, the performance is captured mostly within the neume.
Compared to the encoding of Western neumes, the encoding of Byzantine neumes in a machine-readable format entails further challenges. Middle-Byzantine neumes are rich in metadata; thus their encoding should include 1) information on historically informed practice, which is available through musical treatises, manuscripts, and the oral tradition of Byzantine Chant; 2) the names of the neumes in Greek, possibly with transliteration, translation, and etymology. This article contributes to the ongoing discussions on encoding of non-Western early music, particularly the Middle-Byzantine neumatic script, and encourages a collaborative effort to find the most effective way to encode Eastern neumes in general.