Why does the musical stave have five lines?
May 15th, 2008 | Published in Music History, Music Theory
Hold your hand side-ways in front of you and count your fingers and thumb. It adds up to five. There’s the reason. To find out how, we need to jump in a time-machine and travel back to France 1250 years ago.
We’ve landed in the rich and immensely powerful Frankish court of Charlemagne in the 8th century. Art and music are being revitalised and christianised under the auspices of the Catholic Church of Rome. New chants and tropes are being developed to be used in worship throughout the realm, to synthesize existing Latin and Gallic traditions.
The age of the illuminated manuscript
We’ve arrived in the glorious age of the illuminated manuscript. The printing press is seven centuries away in the future. Written knowledge in the form of books can only be duplicated by costly and time-consuming practice of the carefully copying documents by hand.
The beautifully decorated manuscripts produced are rare and extremely precious objects, owned and prized by the few. Only a handful of the rich and powerful - or highly-educated clerics - have the reading skills to access the knowledge that they contain.
When the Carolingian musical liturgy (know in modern parlance as Gregorian chant) was disseminated to abbeys and monasteries throughout the kingdom, each religious house is likely (lucky, even) to have received just one copy of the relevant manuscript. This, in turn, could be re-copied under Papal licence, but it would have been an interminably slow process.
The cantor teaches the choir
With no hymn-books to use, how did the cantor (choirmaster) teach the choir? The largely illiterate members of the choir learned the music aurally, by listening and imitating. The cantor would sing the melody, line by line, for the choir to repeat. In this way, the choral singers memorised the structure of the music.
With the introduction of the new Gregorian chant, a great deal of fresh and reworked material had to be mastered. Consequently, it is no great surprise that the cantors developed a form of sign language (probably based on a pre-existing system) to aid the memory of the choir-members.
The cantor’s musical sign language
The cantor held one hand up in front of him, spread out sideways, with the palm facing in and the fingers and thumb spreadeagled (just like the five lines of the musical stave as we know it today). The fingers and the spaces between were used to represent the pitch of each note, the thumb at the top being higher-pitched than the little finger at the bottom.
There were separate notes for each finger and for the spaces between the fingers. By pointing with the index finger of the other hand to the appropriate finger or space on the spread hand, the cantor could indicate the required pitch of the following note.
The duration of the note could be easily be shown by the length of time the cantor held his index finger in the same place. It is only a small step to graphically represent the fingers and the thumb of the Carolingian cantor as horizontal parallel lines on parchment or paper.
The development of written musical notation
Interestingly, the earliest versions of European musical notation utilised only four lines rather than five. It is possible that in the cantors’ sign-language, the thumb was employed to indicate whether the melody was about to go up or go down, and was therefore not used directly to denote pitch.
Initially, then, there were two rival systems of musical notation. In relation to the early development of railways, think narrow-gauge versus wide-gauge, and in terms of computer platforms, think Windows versus Apple-Mac.
At the end of the day, one system wins out and rules supreme. The advent of the printing press in the 15th century revolutionised the dissemination of information of all types, and a more efficient and standardised system of written musical notation was required.
In terms of the musical stave, the five-line version gradually gained precedence as it allowed a wider range of notes to be represented. As a method of writing music down, it has never been bettered. We still use it to this very day.
The musical sign language used by cantors in French monasteries in the 7th and 8th centuries is the precursor of the five-line stave. Following on from the arrival of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the representation on the printed page of the cantor’s hand, already standardised in manuscript, was adopted, adapted and redeveloped, eventually resulting in the five parallel lines of the musical stave as we know it today.
