This tradition, witnessed to in theoretical treatises as well as iconographic depictions in churches of Late Byzantium and its periphery, was a fundamental component of melody making in Byzantium but evidently fell out of practice as the choirs of the imperial chapel and Hagia Sophia in Constantinople were disbanded. For example, Byzantine treatises refer to cheironomy, literally “hand-law”, which was a type of “gestic notation” (Troelsgård) by which the choir directors would elicit responses from singers by utilizing signs and gestures created especially with the fingers. Performance was also regulated by means other than the notated score. There were apparently a set of well entrenched performance conventions which singers in Byzantium learned orally and from which performance details related to rhythm, ornamentation, tuning, and expression were derived.
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Although Byzantine notation developed the ability to describe melodies with this degree of precision, the notation offered incomplete information around various other details of performance. In other words, Western diastematic notation indicated pitch by means of heightening its neumes on a staff of 2, 3, or 4 lines, whereas diastematic Byzantine notation – called “Middle Byzantine Notation” – consisted of neumes which indicated the intervallic distance from the note immediately preceding. The family of Palaeobyzantine notations eventually gave way to a fully diastematic notation around the middle of the twelfth century, which, while now specifying intervallic distance, still retained its relative or digital character, unlike the system of Gregorian chant which began to develop along the co-ordinate system. These early notations (referred to as “Palaeobyzantine”) were primarily mnemonic in character, the specific neume groups describing ascending and descending movement and stereotyped phrases, but without precision in the description of the intervals (adiastematic).
![byzantine chant notation byzantine chant notation](https://image1.slideserve.com/3487496/music-notation-l.jpg)
![byzantine chant notation byzantine chant notation](https://d3i71xaburhd42.cloudfront.net/0e61ba2431c831b421e4a439a179ef5c28f29a27/2-Figure1-1.png)
The first manuscripts containing melodic chant notation date to the ninth century, around the same time we find notated manuscripts of Gregorian chant in regions such as Gaul and Rome.