Visual or Symbolic? Best Practices for Encoding Neumes

The roots of Western musical notation can be traced back to neumatic scripts, found in manuscripts containing plainchant traditions dating from the ninth century onwards. Neumatic scripts are the precursor to modern musical notation, but they differ in their intensity of focus on the textual content—and therefore the semantic meaning—of the chants themselves. Every graphic mark, every part of each neume, is made in service of a nuanced and highly regulated way of declaiming each syllable, but unlike modern musical notation, the symbols do not always correspond to something inherently musical outside the given chant, such as an absolute pitch or an overarching metric or rhythmically repetitive structures. Here, we look into the encoding challenges presented by these early neumes and explore best practices for effectively representing them in MEI schemas, considering both their graphical and symbolic dimensions.
We will examine two case-studies in particular: the oriscus and the quilisma, to show how these neume forms relate to each other in term of appearance and performance. The third case-study, the curved and straight tilts, gives us an opportunity to discuss the graphical sophistication of early neumatic scripts.