Spatium

What it means

Spatium — Latin “space between” — designates the space between two staff lines. Together with the lines it forms the grid of pitches: line and space alternate and designate consecutive natural notes. A notehead in a space is thus determined just as precisely as one on a line; both are positions of equal standing in the staff.

In the notation

The five-line staff contains four spaces, counted like the lines from bottom to top. Added to these are the space below the lowest and above the highest line, as well as all further ones resulting from ledger lines. The distance between two lines is at the same time the unit of measure of music engraving: head size, stem length, size of accidentals, and spacing are all based on it. The four-line square notation of liturgical chant accordingly has three spaces.

Musical use

For reading, the alternation of line and space is the actual aid to calculation: two neighbouring positions give a second, two lines in succession a third, line to the line after next a fifth. Whoever has these patterns in view reads intervals as images rather than as calculation problems. In the study of notation of early music, the term is also common, because positions must be named precisely there — for instance when describing a neume or a ligature.

The five-line staff has four spatia; in the treble clef, the notes F′, A′, C″, and E″ lie there. The spaces are often memorized through mnemonic words. The position of the notehead, on the line or in the space, determines the pitch.

Performance practice

Practise recognizing intervals by the image: a head in a space to a head in the next space is always a third, regardless of which notes are meant. Use this with leaps, instead of naming both notes individually — an interval can be grasped faster than two names. If you write notation yourself, take care to place heads unambiguously in the space or on the line; a note in between is not legible.