ABSTRACT
Back in notation’s infancy, seven letter names were quite sufficient to represent the music. And the staff was merely a gleam in the eye of Guido of Arezzo, a Benedictine monk of the eleventh century. Guido recommended first one, then two, color-coded lines as visual guides against which his choristers could gauge the highness or lowness of the symbols, called “neumes,” then used to indicate voice inflections when chanting. The hexachord system provided only an accounting of the pitches available to medieval musicians. The actual basis of their music is suggested by the church modes, seven-note patterns involving half steps and whole steps. Meter is the grouping of a steady succession of pulses into patterns of accented and unaccented beats. The feeling for it dates to antiquity. Throughout history, two basic types of meter have been favored—binary and ternary.
