Music in Medieval Manuscripts (Cristina Tamer ’15) - From Tablet to Tablet: A History of the Book
▻https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/from-tablet-to-tablet/final-projects/music-in-medieval-manuscripts
Music Notation through the Ages
Long before the first musical notation appeared in medieval manuscripts, the ancient Greeks had developed a highly complex and sophisticated system of notation which could record both vocal and instrumental music as well as indicating rhythm, but it was lost, as indicated by the lack of any musical notation in manuscripts until the ninth century (Yudkin 1989, 25). Although their method of recording music was lost, Greek theories on music theory survived and were an important part of medieval music theory. Thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato studied, classified, and wrote about music, discovering that musical intervals could be expressed as mathematical ratios (Yudkin 1989, 23). Much of their work was transmitted to medieval readers through the works of the Roman author Boethius, whose book De Institutione Musica was used in schools and universities for around a thousand years and was very influential (Yudkin 1989, 26). 