When, how and why was music first notated?

And how did this notation develop

from the medieval, through the Renaissance, to the Baroque periods?
Notation was invented as a means of stabilizing chants as melodies being sung
were purely dependant on memory and learning aurally there would be a risk
that melodies would subject to change. There on, when a song was written down,
it would assure that each piece was sung correctly every time it was performed.
Notation created a sense of consistency and assurance among the performers.
Medieval singers start learning pieces by oral transmission, which was the
process of hearing a melody being sung and then remembering it. They often had
to remember hundreds of melodies and sometimes seldom even performed.
Many of the chants were sung by memory through the process of rote learning.
The earliest evidence of notation manuscripts was found in the ancient Greek
ages around the late ninth century. Signs were created called neumes; meaning
gesture in Latin). You would often see the neumes placed on top of the words or
syllables to either ascend or descend a melodic phrase, a repeated note, or even
the rhythm or suggested performance manner. What the neumes did not do was
notate the specific pitch of each note therefore being unable to be sung without
hearing the melody beforehand; oral transmission was needed in this case.
In the 11th century, Guido of Arezzo created the musical system called tonic solfa. There are six syllables called the solmization syllables: ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la.
These six syllables are derived from the first six phrases of the hymn Ut queant
laxis. This development was called the hexachord system. Later on, the octave
scale replaced the hexachord as the new terms si and ti were added. si was added
above la, and ut was replaced with do. Followers of Guido introduced the
Guidonian hand; it was used to determine the pitches of the hexachord system. It
aided students in learning how to sing intervals. Each part of the hand was
assigned to a role of a note and by pointing to different parts of the hand.
Diastematic or heighted neumes were introduced in the tenth and eleventh
centuries these neumes made a clearer sense of the interval directions and
pitch contour. This form of notation was not used everywhere as it was thought
to have interfered with the subtle performance elements in neumatic notation.
Horizontal lines were then scratched into the existing manuscript to orientate
the neumes to their respective pitches. There were two lines and then another
two lines; one in red indicating C and one in yellow indicating the note F. Neumes
were then re-arranged to settle to this new formula. This resulted in music being
set free from the turmoil of oral transmission. The new system notated notes
accurately and thus, was sung much more precisely without the dependence on
hearing the song beforehand. This revolutionary idea was the birth of the 5-lined
music staff we used today.
In the 13th century, musicians at the Notre Dame in Paris introduced rhythmic
modes, which made it possible to define the duration of notes with ligatures. By
combining a series of long notes and short notes together to create a series of
different patterns, or also known as a rhythmic mode. The long notes were
labelled L meaning Long and the short notes labelled B meaning Breve. For

example mode 1 consisted of LB, which was a crotchet, and a quaver (in modern
terms) and mode 3 consisted of LL, which was two dotted crotchets. There were
only six different rhythmic modes at the time which were used but to prevent
lack of intonation and monotonous melodies, the rhythmic modes were flexible
and could be combined with other modes or broken into shorter phrases.
Ligatures were used to prevent confusion in the melodies and indicate the
rhythmic modes and phrasing. This innovation spread far across Europe, it gave
music a new way of living and a clearer vision for those learning melodies.
Rhythmic modes become hard to use on motets in the later thirteenth century, as
the core element of motets were that each syllable needed a separate note to
function ideally. Rhythm got increasingly complex due to the vast variety of
rhythm, thus a new system called the Franconian notation was developed. It
allowed much more variety and freedom amongst composers. Note shapes
indicated note durations.
Shortly after the Franconian notation, came the Ars Nova notation, which gave
life to new rhythm and meters by simplifying the note values therefore giving
more flexibility to composers when writing. What contrasted against all the old
systems was the stunning accuracy of the pitch and rhythm in this new system.
One could notate a piece exactly as intended and it could be passed onto cities
and therefore interpreted as the original composer intended.
Coming toward the end of the sixteenth century, notation had been redefined
over the centuries. With the introductions of bar-lines, ligatures were not longer
needed. Diamond-shaped notes that were being used in the renaissance period
transformed into round-shaped notes as commonly used today. Music notation
had evolved its final forms, giving a new shape to music. It has now been
revolutionized by the western society today.