Notation
As is standard in the Dominican notational tradition, MS 24 uses square noteheads on a four-lined staff. A movable C clef appears at the beginning of each line and in the middle of a line whenever moved. There are light pencil markings that were added to the manuscript after copying, presumably by whomever was using the book as a means to indicate how the text and the music are connected. In this image, the climacus and virga neumes are isolated. The climacus is a set of three noteheads, the first perpendicular to the staff and the two that succeed it turned ninety degrees. The virga neume is a single square notehead with a tail. It is sung similarly to the punctum neume (isolated below) and is equivalent to a modern quarter note.
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The square notation used in MS 24 very closely resembles Parisian square notation of the 13th and 14th centuries. There are two instances of a porrectus flexus neume, which is notated with an “N” shaped stroke, where the angled section is drawn with a thicker stroke than the vertical strokes. The porrectus flexus neume isolated in this image would have been sung as four separate notes; the first two marked by either end of the angled stroke, and the subsequent two written as typical square noteheads. Sung similarly to the porrectus flexus, the torculus neume circled in this image consiste of three connected square noteheads, sung from left to right. The words are written in ink below each system in a gothic font.
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Isolated in this image are the C clef which appears in the middle of a line of music, along with three types of neumes: the punctum, the podatus, and the clivus. The punctum neume appears as a square with no tail, and, like the virga, is rhythmiclally equivalent to a modern quarter note. The podatus neume is written as two noteheads, one on top of the other. Podatus neumes are sung beginning with the bottom note and ending with the top note. Clivus neumes are also written with two noteheads, but the noteheads are staggared and read from top to bottom.
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