ABSTRACT
In many traditions, music-making is essentially an oral-aural activity. Musicians learn their craft through the apprentice model and performing traditions are passed on orally and through supervised practice or occasions for the community to join the singing and playing. The written traditions are far less ubiquitous, often serving as little more than memory aids, reminding the performer of melody contour, at times perhaps structure and sometimes also duration. These notations, found primarily in the East (e.g. China, India), tend to rely on alphabetic or numeric symbols to indicate pitch, generally through reference to scale degree similar in principle to the Western solfege system. In certain versions the spacing of symbols implies meter or the length of notes (e.g. Chinese gongche notation). Drumming patterns (e.g. in Indonesia) also tend to be notated with vocables that are used to remember a sequence. The slightly more complex system of tablature notation is able to indicate pitch as well as duration by notating hand positions on staff representing the strings of the instrument. The horizontal placement of changes implies the temporal unfolding of the music. The Japanese Koto notation similarly indicates primarily means of production and only indirectly the sound produced (Bent et al., 2014). What these notation systems have in common with the Western or European notation tradition is the “prescriptive” rather than “descriptive” nature of the practice (Seeger, 1958). The notation is a visual analogue of sound imagined; a record of the musical piece that the performer should bring to life rather than a transcription of what or how the performer is playing. Although the symbols can be used to transcribe performances, they did not evolve for this purpose and generally remain far too rigid for recording the subtle variations in timbre, pitch, and duration typical of human performance of music. An exception is the Japanese shakuhachi notation tradition. It is entirely different as it reflects playing instructions—what timbre to produce, how to glide from note to note, and so on (Wikipedia, musical notation).
