The Armenian Neume System of Notation

Robert At'ayan was an Armenian musicologist, and this Curzon Press book, translated and annotated by Vrej Nersessian from At'ayan's original 1959 Armenian study, is the most systematic modern scholarly study of khaz, the medieval Armenian neume notation system used from the eighth century through its decline after the fifteenth. Its strength is that At'ayan worked directly with the surviving khaz manuscripts as a specialist in Armenian musicology, and Nersessian's translation made that foundational study accessible to English-language scholarship for the first time. Its limit is that it is a technical study of the notation system itself, so a claim about the actual sound or performance practice of the chant it once recorded, which remains only partly reconstructable, needs a source addressing that separate and harder question.