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BYZANTIUM Byzantine Neumes: A New Introduction to the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation. By Christian Troelsgård. (Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, Subsidia vol. 9.) Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011. [142 p. ISBN 9788763531580. $86.] Music examples, tables, illustrations, appendix of manuscript facsimiles, bibliography, indices, reference card.
Motivated by the Solesmes reconstructions of Gregorian chant in the late nineteenth century, the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae (MMB) was inspired to achieve a similar goal. Several of the original members of the MMB realized that there were problems in the original transcription methods of H. J. W. Tillyard, Carsten Høeg, and Egon Wellesz; later these same problems were mentioned by Oliver Strunk. Some of the more volatile complaints, however, were coming from Greek scholars such as Grigorios Stathis, who had come to work with Jørgen Raasted and ultimately convinced him that there were serious problems with the transcriptions of medieval Byzantine music into Western staffnotation. More precisely, in 1985 Raasted informed this reviewer during a conference in Vienna that he was working on a solution for this project. The following year he wrote an article on this topic offering his ideas on how the transcription process could be revised (Jørgen Raasted, "Thoughts on a Revision for the Transcrip - tion Rules of the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae," Cahiers de l'Institut du Moyenâge grec et latin 54 [1986]: 13-38). Un - fortunately, Raasted was not able to complete his dream, but he leftsketches for his student and successor, Christian Troels - gård, to bring this work to fruition. Consequently, Troelsgård's aim in this volume is to bring up to date Tillyard's Handbook of the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation (Copenhagen: Levin & Munks - gaard, 1935), and, although Troelsgård does not state this explictly, perhaps to bring forth again the MMB Transcripta series, which had been halted since 1958 because of the growing concern of issues surrounding transcriptions into Western staffnotation.
Troelsgård covers a wide array of information, beginning with a brief introduction on the history of Middle Byzantine or "round" notation. This is followed by discussions on the relationships between words and music; chant transmission before neumes; various types of Byzantine musical notations; problems of sizes of intervals and...