3 ms·
One sentence that struck me was "Notation is an intricate symbolic diagramming language for visualizing an often much simpler musical concept." Now if you remo
by cabalamat 16y ago
One sentence that struck me was "Notation is an intricate symbolic diagramming language for visualizing an often much simpler musical concept."
Now if you remove the word "musical", it's true of notation in general. Any notation should reflect the structure of the thing it is notating; if music notation is typically more complex than the "often much simpler musical concept" then I would say musical notation is broken and should be changed.
Is musical notation broken? I've no idea, I don't know enough about it to say.
- cwfreeman 16y agoFrom their point of view, it is much more complex than any given musical concept because it has to encode such a wide variety of musical concepts. The musician playing it doesn't (intentionally) pay attention to the complexities that Lilypad is talking about. (I've never noticed stem lengths or stem directions when playing, but they're important to keep things legible.) It's comparable to fonts: the study of fonts is pretty intricate, regardless of whether you're writing a grocery list or "One Hundred Years Of Solitude".