How We Learned To 'Capture' Music

St. Isidore of Seville once said, "Since sound is a thing of sense, it passes along into past time, and it is impressed on the memory... For unless sounds are held in memory by man they perish, because they cannot be written down." But a new book by Harvard professor Thomas Forrest Kelly, titled Capturing Music: The Story of Notation, tells of how music was eventually written down. Kelly calls this development "one of mankind's technological triumphs."

Thomas Forrest Kelly will be appearing with the Blue Heron Renaissance Choir at the First Church in Cambridge this Saturday.

Thomas Forrest Kelly, professor of music at Harvard University and author of Capturing Music: The Story of Notation.