Notation Through Time

Neumatic Notation

Neumes comes from the Latin word neuma, meaning gesture. This is one of the earliest forms of musical notation. The words were placed below the neumes; this indicated the melody of each syllable. Neumes did not tell its "readers" exact pitches or intervals, but they did give an idea of the melodic contour. Therefore, they could not be read by anyone who did not already know the melody.
For this assignment we were instructed to notate a simple melody, which was Mary Had a Little Lamb, using neumatic notation. Aside from the fact that I do not have perfect pitch and I was not sitting at a piano, this assignment was pretty simple. The neumatic notation system makes the most sense to me, out of every other nontraditional style of musical notation. Aside from a few small aesthetics, there's not a huge difference between this system and modern western musical notation.