How may we encode rhythm in musical notation? In the last chapter you explored the very first approach in medieval music history as you familiarised yourself with some aspects of modal notation. This chapter pursues the course taken as it addresses one of the most important steps in the history of medieval notation.

A pivotal shift in the representation of temporal duration was experienced during the second half of the 13th century when a new way of measuring musical time arose in music theory and practice: rhythm was codified in the shape of notation figures and no longer deduced from an abstract numeric principle.

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