Studies in music history Book

This gets down to the nuts and bolts, or rather the pens and inks, of how early European composers wrote out their music. In theory, one voice of a polyphonic composition was supposed to come first (which voice depended on which theorist you asked) and the rest were supposed to be structured around it. In practice, as Owens argues from surviving manuscripts with rough drafts and corrections on them, the composers would often start with working out different temporal sections of the music and then figure out how to join them, with some composers starting with one voice like the theorists said and others working on all of them at once. I learned the word "tablature" from this book. If I understood right, it means notation specially adapted to a particular kind of instrument so that it directly encodes information about what you have to do to the instrument to play the music, instead of being a pure representation of pitch, duration, and rhythm, like what I think of as normal musical notation. According to this book, and it sounds like Owen was originally one of the first to say so, early composers only wrote in score format, with all the voices lined up one on top the other, when they were composing in tablature. Otherwise they wrote out each voice in a separate place. I'm not in a position to tell whether the conclusions are right, but the author is certainly thorough in laying out the evidence. It was also interesting to learn that composers had to either use special erasable tablets (slate, wax, etc.) or scrape off the surface of the paper when they wanted to erase something, because there were no good pencils yet.