PROPOSED NEW SYSTEMS OF NOTATION As regards the many new systems of notation which have been proposed during recent times, it must be remembered that al though the staff notation (as we call the system of two separate staves of five lines each) was originally invented at a time when the unequal temperament system of tuning prevailed (see TEM PERAMENT), yet this old notation developed and is now employed in conjunction with equal temperament, from which it can never really be dissociated. Hence, for practical purposes, and theoreti cal implications apart, the result is the same, whether we write G sharp or A flat, for instance. For while some musicians still refuse to accept equal temperament save as an unavoidable com promise and you find such declaring that they "never think of the keyboard" when composing, yet the notation which they are compelled to use has no means of showing any finer divisions than equal temperament affords. The existing notation is not capable, for instance, of showing the difference between the real natural major third of the horn and the major third of the tempered keyboard.
It is possible that a means of doing this may be devised in time. If so, it may perhaps follow the system adopted by Anselme Vinee in his Principes du Systeme Musical et de l'Harmonie (Hamelle, Paris, 1909), in which he applies various marks (tiny curves, dashes and crosses) to the notes of the staff notation to indicate these extremely small variations in pitch.
As music became more and more chromatic, the complexities of notation increased tremendously by the multiplication of signs for what was practically the same sound. Thus C sharp, D flat and B double-sbarp have three different signs, but, in equal tem perament, only one sound. Hence, during the last quarter of a century or so, many attempts at a simplified form of notation have been made either by improving the old staff system or by the invention of an entirely new system.
H. Orsmond Anderton, a London composer, proposed, in his Simplified Notation, a new method of representing the chromatic signs called "accidentals" by substituting a line through the head of the note for the sharp or flat sign ; thus D sharp and D flat A Spanish pianist and composer, Manuel GuervOs (1863-19o2), invented a system by writing the two staves (pentagrams) now called treble and bass into one "decagrama." He replaced the F and G clef (see CLEF) by a C clef resting on his 6th line. A German musical theorist, Hermann Stephani, went further in the reduction of lines. In 1905 he invented a system of notation
which was entirely confined to the treble stave, all the higher and lower sounds being indicated by various octave signs. This system he called Einheitspartitur (unit-score) and he published in it the overture to Schumann's Manfred.
The acceptance of atonal music naturally makes for a system which shall ignore the difference between C sharp and D flat, D sharp and E flat, etc., and one of the chief apostles of that music, Josef Matthias Hauer, has published works with a special kind of atonal notation (Goll, Vienna).
Walter Hampton Thelwall, a London civil engineer, from 1893 onwards gradually evolved a system known as the Thelwall system, which uses two staves of seven lines each, the two staves reading alike, and the system involving a complete acceptance of the dodecuple principle, which divides the octave into 12 equal parts. Thelwall adopted for these the Roman numerals I. to XII. and his thick middle line is always the note VII., i.e., middle C. In order still more to destroy that back-lying feeling of C major, he calls F sharp I. He repeats his seven-line stave for every octave, dotting in the upper staves as required, the octaves all being numbered—the bass octave 4, the tenor octave 5, the treble octave 6, and so on.
An Argentine musical theorist, Angelo Menchaca, invented a new system, an exposition of which was published in 1904 under the title of Nuevo Sistema teorico grafico de la Musica, by Pleyel, Lyon & Co., Buenos Aires. In this system the staff is dispensed with altogether and the sign ..<:j represents the sound Sol. This note sign is written (or printed) in various positions for the various notes; and short and long stems represent the high or low octaves. The length of a note is shown by a point. (A full ex planation of the system may be seen in Dent's Dictionary of Mod ern Music and Musicians, 1924, p. 352.) Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) invented a new notation and pub lished Bach's Chromatic Fantasia in it (Breitkopf and Hartel). Jean Hautstont, a Belgian composer and theorist (b. Brussels, Dec. 13, 1867), devoted himself to the reform of musical nota tion, and invented his Notation Autonome (Paris, 1907), which he applied in his Solfege (Paris, 1913). The system is based on the classification of sounds according to their vibration numbers, taken in conjunction with the physiological development of the human ear. In 1921 a society for publishing music in this nota tion was formed in Brussels.