Hi, guys!
I am sitting in NY here, meeting with potential investors. Yesterday we had more constructive conversation with Chris Salter, and I realized, that many people has little to no knowledge about how music literacy came to existence, how all of it was developed during all of this years and how it influenced culture and our lives, and now is effecting lives of our kids.
‘…After 5000 years, you can’t get rid of it ( music notation HH) no matter how illogical it is.’ Chris Salter
The Grand Staff, music notes, their names were created just 1000 years ago by a monk Gvido from Arezzo (991/992 – after 1033) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_of_Arezzo . It is very logical, but its logic hadn’t been discovered 'till now.
I will explain about this invention a little later. First, we have to understand, how people managed without it.
Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but didn’t achieve a developed and rich musical language all at once. The first works appeared long before music literacy. They passed from one rule to another, and were very simple and not too thought-out.
History hasn’t accurately preserved a single melodic saga or score that accompanied the Greek Tragedies. From the epoch before musical literacy, only folklore has been preserved – short compositions, limited in volume and plain in substance.
Think, for example, of the holiday song “Carol of the Bells.” It is likely that this melody is several thousand years old, derived from an ancient Ukrainian folk chant, “Shchedryk” (picked up and arranged by Ukrainian composer Leontovich in 19th century) The four-note melody was made simple for the sake of repetition, and has thus survived in the villages of Ukraine for ages.