Byzantine musical notation

Kenneth Whistler

2003-10-07 00:25:54 UTC

Post by Nick Nicholas
(Resend)
I can't really find the answer to this question online, especially
because the proposal documents for it don't seem to have been posted to
anubis.dkuug.dk. Furthermore, this is not actually an area I know
Byzantine musical notation consisted of three stages, Middle Byzantine,
Late Byzantine, and Modern. Obviously the first two are only of
scholarly interest, and only the last is in productive use in Greece.
Does the repertoire in Unicode cover all three? I suspect it does, and
that the ekphonemata first up in the table are the Middle Byzantine
symbols; but I'd like to make sure. Furthermore, does the scheme
encompass the variants of Byzantine notation used outside Greece, e.g.
in Russia?

Nobody in the UTC, that I know of, really knows the answer to
that. The encoded set of byzantine musical symbols is simply
the set that was provided by the Greek national body to WG2.
The documentation, then, as now, was very, very thin. The Greek
justification was basically that this was a Greek standard
and had to be incorporated. Nobody got to question any of
the details, and when we went to try to document such basic
facts about the notation such as which symbols are used on
which of the 3 "stripes" and which characters can subtend or
supertend others, we just got insufficient information to
proceed.

The answers are apparently available in the heads of the people
who created the Greek standard, but the editors of the
Unicode Standard, to date, have been unable to come up with
sufficient details from ELOT or anywhere else to really
answer your questions. If you manage to shake loose any answers,
let us know. ;-)

--Ken

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