Neume
Early note sign above Latin text.
What it means
Neumes are the signs of the earliest Western notation. They stand above the Latin text and indicate how the melody moves to a syllable — upward, downward, as a single note or as a group of several notes. In their oldest form they do not fix the pitches exactly: they recall a melody one already knows, instead of communicating it for the first time.
In the notation
The basic forms are few: a sign for a single higher note, one for a single lower note, plus two-note groups for upward and downward movement — the descending one is called the clivis — and connections of three or more notes. Additional strokes and appended letters contain indications about performance and movement. The spellings differ considerably by region. With the emergence of a line as a reference pitch, and later of a multi-line staff, the pitches became unambiguous; from this the square notation developed, in which the signs stand as squares and diamonds on four lines. With heads stacked one above another, one reads from bottom to top: with the pes, the lower note stands at the bottom and is sung first.
Musical use
This script was carried by monophonic liturgical chant. Its task was not to convey an unknown melody but to secure one learned orally and to promote agreement between churches. From the need for exact pitch indication the staff system arose; from the need for exact duration indication, later, mensural notation — the whole of later musical notation goes back to these beginnings.
The neume is to be distinguished from the ligature: this too groups notes together, but additionally fixes their duration.
The oldest neume sources date from the ninth century.
Performance practice
Sing a multi-note neume as one movement on one syllable, not as a sequence of individual notes — the weight lies at the beginning, the rest follows on. Read notes stacked one above another, as with the pes, from bottom to top; only then does the next group follow. And orient the phrasing by the text: word stress and units of meaning determine the performance here, not a metric measure.