UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Between the 11^th and 12^th century the Carolingian chants communities produced new practices of notating melodies.
Until the end of the 10^th century, each scriptorium was characterized by individual writing conventions: some neumatic families provided approximate indications of pitch; others emphasised performance indications with a wide use of significative letters; while certain notations transmitted agogic and performative indication by using loop and ring forms.
At the beginning of the 11^th century, concurrently with the Gregorian reform, Guido of Arezzo took the methods of musical treatises as a model and developed a system of lines and letter clefs providing the notation of precise pitch indication. These new writing principles were embraced uniformly but with local variations in neumes shapes.
Different strategies were developed by the neumatic families to introduce the new graphic system: some traditions gained new neumes from external influences; others adapted their neumes to the new staff principles. The result was an early phase of a new music writing convention shared by the majority of the territories - although the single neumatic traditions continued to use their peculiar neumatic forms until the square notation. The different notations acquired a new detailed indication of pitch, an element subject to change in the oral tradition due to the different chant communities and their singing conventions. Nevertheless, this had an impact on the earlier music writing practices. 
My dissertation project aims to investigate to what extent the introduction of precise diastemacy influenced the earlier music writing conventions. In this regard, I aim to determine the dynamics underlying this transformation and, specifically, how the notations behaved when came in contact with the staff system. To do so, I analyze the neumatic evolution of the Italian sources from the Lower Po Valley. Peculiar focus is placed on the Ravennate tradition of the 11^th and 12^th centuries.