Yesterday I learned a lot from the first episode of British composer Howard Goodall's new 5-part series "Big Bangs." For instance, I didn't realise the significance of Guido Monaco of Arezzo, who invented the principles of music notation in the eleventh century. Goodall also commented on the way computer tools like Sibelius will have as profound an influence on music composition and publication as the invention of printing. The series has an accompanying book: "Big Bangs" - Hardcover - 224 pages; Chatto and Windus; ISBN: 070116932X The other Big Bangs in this series are: opera, equal temperament, the piano, and mechanical recording. Here's the first episode blurb from: http://www.channel4.com/ Howard Goodall's Big Bangs: Notation After the successes of Organworks and Choirworks, HOWARD GOODALL is now expanding his television repertoire to examine five seismic moments in the development Western classical music. In this new series Goodall argues convincingly that without these moments - or Big Bangs - music would not have evolved over the past millennium from the simplicity of medieval plainchant into the polyphony of musical riches we have today. The first programme, Notation, looks at the growth of the world's most accurate system for writing music. In the opening sequences Howard says: "In around 1000 AD a great leap was made from memory to the page. Music began to be written down. A thin trickle of notes became a river, then a flood. So much music of such diversity came bursting forth that it is scarcely possible to believe that it all stems from a dramatic breakthrough made by just a few monks all those centuries ago. The fact that our music can be easily written down is fundamental to its success and spread. None of the world's other musical cultures have ever developed a comparable notation. This is the beginning of a unique story". Goodall enables the viewer to appreciate just how radical were the inventions of 'neumes' and the all-important 'thin red line'. In an interesting experiment, Howard plunges the choir of Salisbury Cathedral into the dark ages before notation when Gregorian chants had to memorised and then passed from person to person. Howard sings a tune to the head chorister, who in turn sings it to another chorister, who then sings it to another, and on and on. A whole choir later and not surprisingly a completely different tune returns to Howard. Celestial extracts of Gregorian chant and Allegri's Miserere Mei Deus, show how the structure of the five-line stave notation opened the door to increasingly elaborate composition. And as British saxophonist COURTNEY PINE demonstrates, even contemporary jazz improvisation is rooted in notation. James Kearney [log in to unmask]