(Lat.: ‘point’, ‘dot’).
A term with several meanings, the commonest of which relate to Western medieval notations. In the oratorical terminology of classical Latin, however, ‘punctum’ signified a short clause or brief section (e.g. Cicero: Paradoxa stoicorum, prooem. §2; De oratore, ii, §41, 177; Ausonius: Idyllia, 12, prooem.), and this meaning was also taken up by some medieval writers on music (§§3 and 4 below).
(1) In Western chant notations the punctum was a neume signifying a single note. It was nearly always written as a dot, and it usually represented a note lower than those on either side (see Notation, Table 1).
(2) A single note of music. 13th-century theorists used ‘punctum’ to mean not only a note written alone, but also a note joined to others in a ligature.
(3) From the mid-12th century onwards ‘punctum’ is found in many monastic statutes, always in strictures regarding the phrasing of psalm-singing (see Inflection). Here it seems to signify a unit less than a half-verse, that is, a phrase or clause. (The words ‘punctatim’ and ‘punctando’ mean ‘in phrases’, ‘phrased’ etc.; see Van Dijk.)
(4) In a well-known passage in the treatise by Anonymous IV, ‘punctum’ is used as the equivalent of Clausula: ‘[Perotinus] fecit clausulas sive puncta plurima meliora’. This does not agree with classical usage, where ‘clausula’ had the quite specific and different meaning of ‘cadence’ (see, besides Cicero, Quintilian: Institutio oratoria; Quintilian did not use the term ‘punctum’). Nor did theorists up to the middle of the 13th century equate punctum and clausula; for instance, the St Martial Anonymous (ed. Seay) used only (2) above, and Johannes de Garlandia likewise, although on one occasion he seems to have meant the tenor note in a piece of organum, implying a phrase of several notes in the duplum part above (Reimer, ii, 36–7). The only places where ‘punctum’ signifies ‘phrase’ are in those parts of Johannes’s treatise designated by Reimer as unauthentic. In the treatise by the Anonymous of St Emmeram (ed. Sowa, and Yudkin) ‘punctum’ still means a single note. Anonymous IV, however, used both meanings side by side, sometimes in the same sentence (Reckow, i, 83, l.7; 86, l.20). The author specifically identified ‘punctum’ as a term that instrumentalists used for clausula: ‘quidam dicerent: post primam clausulam notarum, quod alii nominant proprie loquendo secundum operatores instrumentorum punctum, et dicerent tunc: post primum punctum’ (Reckow, i, 56). ‘Clausula’ here had its less specific meaning of ‘phrase’.
Johannes de Grocheio used ‘punctum’ to mean a single note only once, and the expression ‘finis punctorum’ to signify the vertical stroke denoting the end of a section in a composition (Rohloff, 1943, p.55). But in his discussion of the textless stantipes (see Estampie and Ductia) he called the individual sections of these pieces puncta (singular punctus). He said that each punctus consists of two parts, identical except for their endings, called respectively apertum (‘open’) and clausum (‘closed’). Grocheio seems to have thought six puncta were standard for the stantipes and three for the ductia, but he mentioned some stantipes of seven and some ductiae of four puncta (Rohloff, 1943, p.52). Pieces such as these are not rare in medieval music (e.g. lai, estampie and dansse real) and the word ‘punctus’ itself is found by the various sections of two pieces in the Robertsbridge Manuscript (GB-Lbl Add.28550) exactly according to Grocheio’s usage. The first piece has four puncta, the second five.
Both ‘clausula’ and ‘punctum’ survived in keyboard music. Several short exercises in a 15th-century Breslau manuscript (PL-WRu I F 687) are called ‘clausula’; and six short imitative pieces in the 16th-century Mulliner Book (GB-Lbl Add.30513) are entitled ‘Point’.
See also Anonymous theoretical writings; Clausula; Theory, theorists.
H. Sowa, ed.: Ein anonymer glossierter Mensuraltraktat 1279 (Kassel, 1930)
E. Rohloff: Der Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheo (Leipzig, 1943)
S.J.P. van Dijk: ‘Medieval Terminology and Methods of Psalm Singing’, MD, vi (1952), 7–26
M. Huglo: ‘Les noms des neumes et leur origine’, EG, i (1954), 53–67
A. Seay: ‘An Anonymous Treatise from St. Martial’, AnnM, v (1957), 7–42
P. Arbogast: ‘The Small Punctum as Isolated Note in Codex Laon 239’, EG, iii (1959), 83–133
W. Waite: ‘The Abbreviation of the Magnus liber’, JAMS, xiv (1961), 147–58
F. Reckow: Der Musiktraktat des Anonymus 4 (Wiesbaden, 1967)
W. Apel: Geschichte der Orgel- und Klaviermusik bis 1700 (Kassel, 1967; Eng. trans., rev. 1972)
E. Reimer, ed.: Johannes de Garlandia: De mensurabili musica (Wiesbaden, 1972)
E. Rohloff: Die Quellenhandschriften zum Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheio (Leipzig, 1972)
K.-J. Sachs: ‘Punctus’ (1975), HMT
J. Yudkin, ed.: De musica mensurata: the Anonymous of St Emmeram (Bloomington, IN, 1990) [incl. trans. and commentary]
DAVID HILEY