Musical notation is any system used to visually represent auditorily perceived music, played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of symbols, including notation for durations of absence of sound such as rests. The act of deciphering or reading a piece using musical notation, is known as "reading music".
In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and analysis. Notes may be visually communicated by writing them in musical notation.
A dagger, obelisk, or obelus† is a typographical mark that usually indicates a footnote if an asterisk has already been used. The symbol is also used to indicate death or extinction. It is one of the modern descendants of the obelus, a mark used historically by scholars as a critical or highlighting indicator in manuscripts..
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their names, that vary between British and American English. "Brackets", without further qualification, are in British English the (…) marks and in American English the […] marks.
Liber Abaci is a historic 1202 Latin manuscript on arithmetic by Leonardo of Pisa, posthumously known as Fibonacci.
The Ketuvim is the third and final section of the Tanakh, after Torah ("instruction") and Nevi'im ("prophets"). In English translations of the Hebrew Bible, this section is usually titled "Writings" or "Hagiographa".
The Masoretes were groups of Jewish scribe-scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily in medieval Palestine in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq (Babylonia). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes (niqqud) on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions, and cantillation of the Hebrew Bible for the worldwide Jewish community.
Hebrew cantillation, trope, trop, or te'amim is the manner of chanting ritual readings from the Hebrew Bible in synagogue services. The chants are written and notated in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic Text of the Bible, to complement the letters and vowel points.
It is a custom among religious Jewish & Messianic communities for a weekly Torah portion to be read during Jewish prayer services on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. The full name, Parashat HaShavua, is popularly abbreviated to parashah, and is also known as a Sidra or Sedra.
A neume is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation.
Byzantine music originally consisted of the songs and hymns composed for the courtly and religious ceremonial of the Byzantine Empire and continued, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, in the traditions of the sung Byzantine chant of Eastern Orthodox liturgy. The ecclesiastical forms of Byzantine music are the best known forms today, because different Orthodox traditions still identify with the heritage of Byzantine music, when their cantors sing monodic chant out of the traditional chant books such as the Sticherarion, which in fact consisted of five books, and the Irmologion.
The Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, using the Masoretic Text and Tiberian vocalization. According to its colophon, it was made in Cairo in AD 1008.
Cheironomy or chironomy is a form of music conducting, typically with choral music and choral groups (choirs), where the use of hand gestures directs musical performance. In the modern artform, conductors tend to hoist batons for indicating melodic curves and ornaments.
Free time is a type of musical anti-meter free from musical time and time signature. It is used when a piece of music has no discernible beat. Instead, the rhythm is intuitive and free-flowing. In standard musical notation, there are seven ways in which a piece is indicated to be in free time:
- There is simply no time signature displayed. This is common in old vocal music such as Gregorian Chant.
- There is no time signature but the direction 'Free time' is written above the stave.
- There is a time signature and the direction 'Free time' written above.
- The word FREE is written downwards across the stave. This is mostly used when the piece changes to free time after having had a time signature.
- Instead of a time signature, a large X is written on the stave.
- Note heads alone are used, without time values
- The passage is marked "recitativo" or "parlando"
Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura was a French organist, music teacher, composer and music theorist. Her main work was in the field of musicology.
The book Octoechos is a liturgical book containing a repertoire of hymns ordered in eight parts according to eight echoi. Originally created in the Monastery of Stoudios during the 9th century as a hymnal complete with musical notation, it is still used in many rites of Eastern Christianity. The book with similar function in the Western Church is the tonary, and both contain the melodic models of an octoechos system; however, while the tonary serves simply for a modal classification, the octoechos is organized as a cycle of eight weeks of services. The word itself can also refer to the repertoire of hymns sung during the celebrations of the Sunday Office.
Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative lack of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
Hebrew orthography includes three types of diacritics:
Meteg is a punctuation mark used in Biblical Hebrew for stress marking. It is a vertical bar placed under the affected syllable.
The Babylonian vocalization, also known as Babylonian supralinear punctuation, or Babylonian pointing or Babylonian niqqud Hebrew: נִקּוּד בָּבְלִי) is a system of diacritics (niqqud) and vowel symbols assigned above the text and devised by the Masoretes of Babylon to add to the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible to indicate the proper pronunciation of words, reflecting the Hebrew of Babylon. The Babylonian notation is no longer in use in any Jewish community, having been supplanted by the sublinear Tiberian vocalization. However, the Babylonian pronunciation as reflected in that notation appears to be the ancestor of that used by Yemenite Jews.
