This article was written in response to Alex Couch’s fascinating piece How I’d Redesign Piano Sheet Music, published July 1 on Medium. Alex is evidently a very talented designer, and he must be commended for his thought-provoking take on an alternative method of communicating music. I’d like to state my respect for Alex’s hard work, and emphasise that everything included in the following article of mine is simply my opinion and my honest response to his idea. I’m keen to keep the conversation moving forward.
First, a brief timeline of mankind’s attempts to visually communicate audible messages.
7,000 Years Ago: The Tărtăria tablets are created at a Neolithic site in Romania. Bearing incised Vinča symbols, these tablets are held by many modern day scholars to be the earliest examples of symbols drawn by early humans to convey meaning. A decisive interpretation of the symbols on the tablets is not agreed upon.
6,000 Years Ago: The earliest definitively known examples of writing for the purposes of recording data are developed in the Zagros region of Iran. Sheep herders use clay tokens with a “+” symbol baked into them to represent one sheep per token.
5,000 Years Ago: Originating in Sumer (modern-day Southern Iraq), one of the earliest known systems of writing is developed. Referred to as cuneiform script, it is originally developed as a system of pictographs. Over time, these pictorial representations grow into a complex system consisting of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic, and syllabic symbols.
4,000 Years Ago: The earliest form of musical notation is created, inscribed on a cuneiform tablet that was created at Nippur in Sumer. The tablet displays fragmentary instructions for performing music that was composed in harmonies of thirds and was written using a diatonic scale.
3,000 Years Ago: The oldest verified alphabet is developed. Derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants. It becomes one of the most widely used writing systems and is spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolves and is assimilated by many other cultures. Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Coptic alphabets are all eventually developed as variations of the groundbreaking Phoenician alphabet form.
2,000 Years Ago: The oldest known entire piece of music including musical notation is created in the form of the Seikilos epitaph, a Hellenistic Ionic song in Phrygian octave species. The melody and accompanying lyrics written in ancient Greek musical notation are engraved by a mourning man on the tombstone of his wife near Aydin, Turkey. Due to the integrity of the inscription and the notation used, the Seikilos epitaph can be read and played in the modern day as a complete piece of music.
1,400 Years Ago: The Latin language and its writing system is brought to Britain by Augustine of Canterbury together with the Christian religion. Contemporaneously, a form of neumatic notation begins to develop in the monasteries of Europe as a mnemonic device for writing down Gregorian chant, using symbols known as neumes; the earliest surviving musical notation of this type is in the Musica disciplina of Aurelian of Réôme, from about 850 AD.
1,000 Years Ago: The founder the four-line musical staff, the Italian Benedictine monk Guido d’Arezzo, teaches the use of solmization syllables based on a hymn to Saint John the Baptist. Guido uses the first syllable of each line — Ut (later changed to the more easily-singable Do), Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La — to read notated music in terms of hexachords; the syllables are not note names, and each can be applied to any note.
800 Years Ago: The French composer Pérotin helps to develop early polyphony. His Alleluia Nativitas is composed, featuring three parts, the top two using five-line staffs (which would become the standard staff used in modern times) and the bottom part using the tradition four-line staff.
500 Years Ago: The Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, an anthology of polyphonic secular songs, is published by Ottaviano Petrucci of Venice, Italy. It is the first book of polyphonic music ever printed using movable type, and features early examples of clefs being used to indicate the range of pitches covered by a five-line staff.
200 to 300 Years Ago: During the 17th and 18th centuries, now-familiar values such as key signature, note form, and time signature, begin to be standardized. A host of European classical composers pioneer staff notation that is used to prescribe the performer the pitch, speed, meter, individual rhythms, and exact execution of a piece of music, leaving less room for practices such as improvisation and ad libitum ornamentation. Their work leads to music being considered by May musicians as a primarily written art form, whose dynamics and feel alone are left for the performer to interpret.
4 Years Ago: LOL is added to the Oxford English Dictionary, along with OMG, FYI, and the symbol ❤.
Following the groundbreaking innovations pertaining to musical notation that occurred during the years 1500 to 1900 AD, the art of committing music to written form has remained much the same. Notation is used to document and explain even the most complex pieces of music; Aldous Huxley said in 1931 that “after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” and staff notation is an extraordinarily successful manner of expressing, quantifying, and teaching music itself.
In modern notation, the basic principles comprise a five-line staff which is populated with a series of notes and then read left to right. Each note is placed vertically on the staff lines to indicate its pitch, going from lowest to highest, and each note carries a value that determines the duration for which it is intended to be played. Preceding the staff is a clef which determines the pitch of the notes on that staff, and a key signature, which indicates whether there are any sharps or flats in the key, and if so, which notes carry those values. Lastly, the time signature indicates both the note value that constitutes one beat and the number of beats per bar of music. Directions to the player regarding tempo, dynamics, and expression appear above or below the staff, and for vocal music, lyrics are written. Short pauses and retakes can also be added, as well as markers for when to begin, repeat, and end.
Using these universal symbols and rules, everything from the most basic musical compositions such as the traditional folk song Greensleeves, to the most complex, such as Franz Liszt’s La Campanella from his Grandes études de Paganini, may be played by those with the ability to read the music and the physical dexterity to play them, in the exact manner intended by the composer. The beauty of musical notation is that it contains every single element that an instrumentalist needs to know in order to master the piece; there is no room for error if one follows the instructions properly. It is also an extraordinarily beautiful form when enjoyed visually; handwritten classical manuscripts are works of art. Everything on a sheet of notation is a direct instruction; the only thing that is left for the player to do is follow the instructions precisely, and attempt to capture the mood or feel of a piece. This last point is crucial, because the reputation of instrumental masters, such as the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, or the late classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, rests not only on their physical ability to play a piece technically well, but on their connection, understanding, and conveyance of the true emotional heart of a given piece of music.
In the timeline above, we see a brief selection of the myriad shifts, developments, and about-turns that visual communication, the written word, and musical symbology have undergone throughout the course of history. The beauty of this process lies in the end results; for the past few hundreds of years, for instance, the English language has functioned as a well-oiled machine that is constantly updated but nevertheless running on the same old trustworthy engine. Musical notation is in the same boat; an exemplar of a method of communication that is so all-encompassing that it maintains the same level of practicality and relevance today that it did 300 years ago. It can teach anybody on any instrument any piece of music in the shortest time and most complete manner, and most every piece of popular music has already been published as notation somewhere or other. When a flutist in an orchestra prepares for a concert of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, a percussionist in an ensemble prepares to score a motion picture, a session guitarist sits down to record a part for the newest Taylor Swift song, or a vocalist writes down the words and lyrics for a TV commercial’s jingle, they can all rely on musical notation as we have it today, and are all guaranteed to have every piece of necessary information to enact a flawless result.
Of course there is a learning process involved in reaching the ability level of sight reading notation (playing a song correctly even as you read it for the first time) or indeed in being able to read any music from simply a sheet of staff notation, at any pace. However, playing an instrument in the first place is a skill that similarly takes effort and dedication to master, and this does not lessen the value of doing so; fingers must be taught to hold shapes and move particular ways, just as eyes must be taught to follow the staff and the mind must be taught to comprehend the information. Though, it must also be noted, sheet music is often exaggerated in terms of difficulty; millions of children over hundreds of years have mastered the necessary basics, and those who do begin to learn notation are often surprised by the rate at which the fundamentals can be learned. Many musicians — this writer included — became proficient at their instrument and learned many songs through non-notational means years before they entertained the notion of learning to read a chart, due largely to unwarranted intimidation.
It is true, however, that for the average person at home only interested in learning to play a couple of their favourite songs, there is no need to learn to read notation. For those to whom the ability to read notation is an unnecessary skill, meaning casual hobbyists, the internet has already made available a dizzying array of learning materials, from comprehensive written direction to video instruction; alternatively, a pair of ears and some time will assist you in learning almost anything.
If a beginner feels compelled to learn Let it Be on piano, a simple YouTube search will yield thousands of results which will communicate audibly and visually the correct timing, finger placement, and technique. A video instruction like this will teach a beginner a song in an exponentially shorter time than any form of written music will. Alternatively, those uninterested in pursuing an education in notation may also Google the chord names used in any song along with how to hold them on a piano, or learn a song by ear, playing along with Let it Be on piano until they find the chord shapes that sound right. This latter method is one that has been employed for generations by those with access to a piece of recorded music and the patience to work the chords out for themselves; it is also a remarkably more beneficial method in the long run, because it will serve the secondary purpose of training that player’s ear.
Though tablature in one form or another has existed since the 1300s as a means of denoting finger placement on stringed instruments, materials such as modern guitar tablature — which is an extremely common learning method with beginner or hobbyist guitarists, and is trumpeted by many as a legitimate alternative to notation — prove problematic. Tablature is a simpler but inferior format when compared to notation; it conveys no sense of rhythm, melody, feel, or tempo. Methods such as this aim only to tell people where to put their fingers and then figure out the rest for themselves.
Players using other instruments such as piano or voice do not have shortcut methods like tablature and — beyond beginner level — must instead follow the traditional route to learning through notation, which may perhaps seem like a curse at the outset but can in fact be a blessing in disguise; ultimately, being required to understand the basics of sheet music from the get go is something to be thankful for. Most likely the majority of intermediate guitarists playing today are unfamiliar with anything but tablature, whereas the majority of intermediate pianists will have a solid foundation in sheet music; one is a valuable universal skill, the other is not. As such, if a pianist hands out a piece of music he or she has written to a band and all but the guitarist know how to read it, the guitarist will be left behind and unable to join in; meanwhile, if the pianist composer were to rely on a piano-based system of tablature, they wouldn’t even be able to write down their song for anyone else in the band’s use. Using insular, non-universal methods quickly grows problematic and creates language barriers in written music where there need be none.
If a guitarist is caught in the middle ground between those for whom a few YouTube lessons will suffice to teach them what they want to learn and those who would like to master their instrument with time, formats like tablature serve mostly to slow down their progress in learning the infinitely more valuable skill of sheet music, while also encouraging imperfect and incomplete renditions of the compositions they learn. Ultimately, years spent relying on tablature to learn inferior versions of songs could be better spent on building a wonderful skill; many players are wasting time and energy on delaying the inevitable need for notational knowledge, if they want to progress past a certain point with their musical education. Not to mention that through learning notation a musician can start to compose and write down their own material and share it with others. To understand sheet music is a worthy investment of time and effort for those whose interest runs deeper than YouTube lessons and who would otherwise settle to use tablature.
There is a reason that both the masterful composers and everyday hobbyist musicians of old relied on notation and almost certainly saw much more polished results than are generated by today’s commonly distributed tablature. Similarly, there is a reason that despite tablature’s prevalence for over 700 years, it has never been used by composers in place of notation or favoured by professional musicians bent on mastering a piece. Too often in today’s world we are given to indulge that which is easier, quicker, but ultimately less beneficial; the integrity, documentation, and communication of music should not be lessened by such inclinations.
Alternatives to notation run the risk of becoming viewed as replacements to notation over time. To read and write sheet music is a privilege handed down to us through centuries of hard work, and to continue in that tradition is a skill worthy of a bit of extra effort. It is painful to think that if an easier-option format like guitar tablature were to become even more widely accepted, and developed in new systems for other instruments to the point that musicians began to leave behind only a sheet of tablature to represent a composition, that the only record of a great piece of music left for future generations could be an incomplete facsimile of what it should be; no one would ever really know how the piece should sound. Shortcut methods to learning are steps backward, not forward; think of the lesson that would be lost if an English Literature professor instructed his students to read the SparkNotes for Moby Dick instead of the actual novel.
Forms of communication must be preserved once they are perfected. Much as modern language represents a dramatic improvement in complexity and usefulness over the early attempts made by our ancient forebears, notation as we know it today is the result of hundreds of years of painstaking research, innovation, and refinement. Experimentation with established forms is to be commended when it serves to improve upon that which needs to be improved upon or provide an alternative to that which needs an alternative, but staff notation has remained almost entirely unchanged for the past couple of hundred years because it just works — perfectly. Any attempt to supplement, substitute, or diminish musical notation’s acceptance as the standard form of communicating music is an unnecessary endeavour that could hamper future musician’s ability to properly communicate with one another, and perhaps even one day lead to the demise of one of humankind’s great communicative achievements. After all, you don’t water down, blend, or substitute 1959 Don Pérignon if you happen to have some at your disposal, even to make it easier to swallow.
