The five-line staff that we use to write and read music is a relatively new invention in history. Human beings had been writing words for millennia before they began to systematically transcribe their musical sounds. Western music notation, as we know it today, started around 1000 AD was a way for church musicians in Europe to remember the tunes to their chants. If ancient civilizations knew how to write out words, why did it take so long to come up with a system for writing music?
Actually, written systems for remembering tunes and melodies did not just suddenly emerge in Europe during the Middle Ages, and the five-line staff was not the first system for writing music. Other cultures had been doing it for a
long time, often with marks added to lyrics--called neumes--that gave some indication of melodic movements. But staff notation brought a level of precision that allowed musicians to record their melodies and rhythms in detail. Previous methods of transcription were not as specific about which exact pitches were sung, what keys were used, or how the rhythms sounded.
Christopher Page, in his book
The Christian West and its Singers, says this level of care in remembering and transmiting songs came from the Roman Catholic pope. Starting in the 9th century, the bishop in Rome (that is, the pope), exerted control throughout the churches in all of Western Europe, especially those among the northern Germanic tribes. The musical staff, invented by Italian musician
Guido of Arezzo, became a way to standardize worship music across many different language and culture groups, allowing Rome to control how chants and hymns were performed throughout the continent. The five-line staff became one of many attempts at
cultural standardization, one of countless innovations that led to the creation of Europe as a united entity of Germanic and Roman cultures.
