Eleanor Selfridge-Field and Edmund Correia, Jr.
© 1994 Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities
Reproduced by the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music by permission


Category 5. Early Music

Type 3. Neumes and notes in mensural and colored notation.

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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