But before we take a look at the first notations, there's another development we have to consider. In Switzerland, at the Sankt-Gallen abbey, one of the monks, Notker the stutterer (what's in a name?), had come up with a mnemonic device to remember the incredibly difficult melismas (a string of notes on one syllable). Melismas mainly featured in the Kyrie and the Alleluia, where both 'e' and 'a' received a sheer endless jubilation. Notker proposed to provide syllables to every note of the melisma, which would no doubt help the singers to remember the melody. This idea gave birth to the so-called tropes and sequences. A famous example is the Kyrie from the second mass, where Notker added a text to the 21 notes of the 'e': Kyrie, fons bonitatis, Pater ingenite, a quo bona cuncta procedunt: eleison. As we said before, the technique was mainly intended to be some kind of mnemonic device, but it was to become a real singalong. The technique was adopted all over the continent, and the repertoire was soon infested with tropes and sequences. The system afflicted the original rhythm of the melisma, but Notker did not really care about that.
¶Luckily, other people did. Around the same time, we notice the somewhat hesitant development of a neumatic notation, a kind of shorthand, above the texts of the antiphons. They indicate the rhythm and global structure of the songs with remarkable precision. These manuscripts are called adiastematic, as they do not contain any information as to pitch or melody. The first references to either of these aspects were to appear only in the 11th century, in the so-called diastematic manuscripts. At first, the melody was roughly indicated above or underneath a line that had been carved into the parchment. Later on, the writers introduced the use of 2 and even 4 lines. More importantly, they also started to use C- and F-clefs, indicating the place of the semi-tones. At last, the melodies were preserved for the future generations. About time, by the way, because the spectre of decay had been looming over the repertoire ever since the beginning of the millennium. In the 12th century the melismas were shortened and the Cistercians even came up with the idea of dropping all notes that were somewhat higher or lower that average, limiting the number of notes to 10. They even had a biblical argument for it : had it not been written in the psalms that King David himself had said that he had praised the Lord on his lyre with 10 strings? Well, then ...
¶And things were to get even worse in the following centuries. The rise of polyphony, introducing the mathematical relations between notes (either half of double, enabling the singers to keep up with eachother), literally wiped out the subtle rhythmical elements of Gregorian chant. The final blow is dealt by the Humanists, who revise the texts and correct the accents, claiming to follow the rules of Ancient Latin. The virtuoso repertoire of the 8th and 9th centuries is completely ruined. The symbol for this deterioration are the greasy printed notes in the 1871 Pustet-edition. It this boring and uninspired repertoire that is made obligatory in 1894 by pope Leo XIII and which can still be heard now and then in outdated parishes, employing sadly underpaid organists.