Glosses on Music and Grammar and the Advent of Music Writing in the West

This chapter explores the relationship between ancient treatises on grammar, specifically those of Donatus and Martianus Capella, and the intellectual and artistic ferment of the Carolingian era that gave rise to the system of musical notation. It illustrates various grammatical terms with terminology and descriptions drawn from both the theory and practice of music. As perusal of Keil's Grammatici Latini reveals, however, most of the Latin grammarians, from Varro and Quintilian through Donatus and Priscian, describe accents in terms of pitch inflection, translating them from the Greek. These accents are treated by the grammarians in the same way that their Greek counterparts were, despite fundamental differences between the two languages. The lexical and prosodic difficulties of Argiletum notwithstanding, a few glossators deal directly with the main point of Martianus' text, namely the proper inflection of Argiletum and the placement of all three accent signs to convey it.