History
The Staff as we know it today originated from musically annotated text, through the Gregorian Chants around the 12th to 13th centuries. Until this time, symbols were used in conjunction with text to represent pitch. However, when the chants were written, people began to use lines to represent pitch, in addition to the pitch symbols above the text. While at first only one line was used, eventually the system expanded to four lines and used mainly dots among those lines to represent pitch. However, different numbers of lines were used throughout Europe for different instruments. France soon began to incorporate five lines into its music, which became widespread by the 16th century, and was the norm throughout Europe by the 17th century. The names of the staff in some languages, such as the Italian pentagramma, reflects the importance of five lines. In 1342, the first music staff was made. It consisted of four lines and three spaces instead of the modern five and four. Five lines staff was made in Italy by Ugolino of Forlì.
Read more about this topic: Staff (music)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)