There’s no need to imagine the history and conception of music as beginning and ending in western Europe. The history of music is far older, richer – and stranger than that. Here’s a glimpse of some of that and more resources to help broaden our sense of what music can be.
Hey, I’m glad to switch on the Brandenburg Concerto now and then! There’s something romantic about wandering around the cities where the music I played as a kid came from. But even lovers (and players) of Western European music will discover a more complex, non-standardized, non-Eurocentric view that would make the music experience in general deeper. Look, literally the guy most associated with the critique of Orientalism – Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said – is also a major force in understanding late Beethoven. If anything, understanding western European concert music as the edge of a sea of history rather than some kind of objective musical truth is liberating.
And now that we have any sound at our disposal through synthesis and technology, we might just find ancient Iraqi approaches to string naming or Chinese drum notation could even seem freshly relevant. Developers of MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, Lilypad, and Dorico, I hope you’re reading this, too.
I’ve talked about the incredible website by Jon Silpayamanant before. But his notation site comes at an important time. On one hand, musical traditions are disappearing and being homogenized. The very value of creativity is thrown into question by big data-powered generative models, which are, by their fundamental nature, normative. On the other, we’re riding a wave of the greatest explosion of notational possibilities ever, from electronic systems like Xenaki’s UPIC to the “hundreds, if not thousands of examples from the 20th century to today” comprising new notations and software. (I think including software, thousands is still too low.) There’s a list of those, too:
by Peter Kirn of Create Digital Media (CDM)
Read the full piece here: https://cdm.link/2024/03/music-notation-on-a-4000-year-timeline/
Mae Mai 
It’s a pity that ‘NOTUS Music Notation’ that I created since 2016 is not yet mentioned although there are already 4 textbooks and several other piano publications to learn to play piano with it, that the system is used in several music schools in Belgium and also privat piano teachers are using it. NOTUS has 87% less note places to learn. NOTUS is based on practice. There is also already a specific NOTUS Stradella Bass accordion notation and drumkit notation. Also microtones to 1/8 tone are easy notated.
You can find all information here: http://www.notus.world and here :https://drive.google.com/file/d/10gb72DY90YQytmMa9taEENCLj9A_w38U/view?usp=sharing
and here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/17oTqgZwhzuZ3FL_WdteMeE-iNtlTergV/view?usp=sharing
And you can contact me: erwin.clauws@notus.world
Thanks!
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Thank you for bringing your NOTUS to my attention. I have added it to my notation timeline.
Please understand that I am working on the timeline by myself and have yet to add many hundreds of music notations from all around the world to it.
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Thank You, very fine!!
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