What Is Music Notation?
“Music notation” is a contradiction in terms. Music is heard, while notation is seen. Notating music is thus a translation from one sensory modality to another. Yet in any translation, some information is bound to become lost. “Written music” is thus an oxymoron. Music is sound, not black notes on a white page. We classical musicians tend to be trained with the implicit ideology of textual literalism — some even going so far as to say that the sloppier Beethoven’s handwriting, the more impassioned the music — over music as sound, which is by its very nature immaterial. Yet were it not for written music, we would have neither a preserved musical tradition nor many of its largest and greatest works. After all, a novel isn’t composed solely in the author’s mind, nor is an entire symphony in its every detail. Yet sound defies writing down. In practice, very little of it can be written, and what can has been condensed, for all its complexities, into as simple a music notational system as
