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In past numbers of the Annual of the British School at Athens and elsewhere I have tried to deal with some of the questions connected with Byzantine Music, and, having brought to a close my studies of the Round or Later Mediaeval System, I am unwilling to leave the subject without giving my views on the abstruse and difficult problem of the older notation.The later forms of the Linear or Neume System have a visible likeness to the earlier forms of the Round System already familiar, and hence all investigators seem to have started with the idea that the general principles of decipherment could be transferred from the later to the earlier stage, or, in other words, that the task simply consisted in the interpretation of certain interval-signs possessing fixed value. But of the two scholars who have published their researches in this field, Gastoué and Riemann, neither has been able to carry this principle through, and their proposed solutions fail to give us such a chain of interval-signs as we are tempted to expect.

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