WAY OF INDICATING TIME IN MUSIC.
The following rough mixture of Notes and Queries may serve to excite attention to the subject. The merest beginner is aware that the letter C, with a vertical line drawn through it, denotes common time; in which he will take the C for the first letter of common. The symbols of old music are four: the circle, the semicircle, and the two with vertical lines drawn through them. After these were written 2 or 3, according as the time was double or triple. And instead of a bar drawn through the circle or semicircle, a central point was sometimes inserted. All these are true facts, whether connected or unconnected, and whether any implication conveyed in any way of stating them be true or false. The C, with a line through it, certainly did not distinguish common time from triple. Alsted, in his Encyclopædia (1649), says that it means the beginning of the music; without any reference to time. Solomon de Caus, known as having had the steam-engine claimed for him, but who certainly wrote on music in 1615, found the circles, &c. so variously used by different writers, that he abandons all attempt at description or reconciliation.
May I suggest an origin for the crossed C? In the oldest church music, it often happens that the lines are made to begin with a vertical line impaling two lozenges, with a third lozenge between them, but on one side. It is as if in the three of diamonds the middle lozenge were removed a little to the left, the upper and lower ones sliding on a vertical line until they nearly touch the removed middle one. Now if this figure were imitated currente calamo, as in rapid writing, it would certainly become an angle crossed by a vertical line; which angle would perhaps be rounded, thus giving the crossed semicircle. Has this derivation been suggested? Or can any one suggest a better?
But, it will be said, whence comes the full circle? It is possible that there may have happened in this case what has happened in others: namely, that a symbol invented, and firmly established, before the partial disuse of Latin, may have been extended in different ways by the vernacular writers of different countries. This has happened in the case of the words million, billion, trillion, &c. The first, and the root of all, was established early, and while no vernacular works existed, and it has only one meaning. The others, certainly introduced at a later time, mean different things in different countries. May it not have been that the variety of usage which De Caus notes, may have arisen from different writers, ignorant of each other, choosing each his own mode of deriving other symbols from the crossed semicircle, obtained as suggested by me? I am fully aware of the risk of such suggestions—but they have often led to something better.
M.
Minor Notes.
A smart Saying of Baxter.—In his Aggravations of Vain Babbling, speaking of gossips, Baxter says: