Category 5. Early Music
Discrepancies between the prolation expected and the prolation actually used (e.g., duple instead of triple) were often signalled by reversal of color.
In Ex. #33, showing music from fourteenth-century France, stemless black notes have multiple values, dependent in every case on the context.
Reverse color notation lingered into the Baroque era. In Ex. #34, an early seventeenth-century balletto by Frescobaldi, we see filled whole notes and void eighth notes.
Ex. #33. The reverse color notation shown in this illustration by Don Giller was produced with HB Music Engraver and Adobe Illustrator. It appeared in Computing in Musicology 7 (1991), 154.
Ex. #34. This illustration was produced by Etienne Darbellay using Wolfgang. It appeared in Computing in Musicology 6 (1990), 103.
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