Musings on Music Notation
I ran into my banjo-playing friend Marcia Peterson at the grocery store on Sunday morning and we had a brief discussion of the relative merits of standard music notation versus tablature, which I got to thinking more about in the few days since.
For those who don't know, tablature is a music notation system used primarily (exclusively?) by string instrument players that grew out of the folk music world in the 1960s.
Traditional music notation is an incredibly rich visual communication system that has evolved over centuries. In a glance the musician can see the key center and meter of the piece of music, and the pitch and duration of each note, and some indication of added expressions such as trills, slides, relative volume, etc. The notation is used on most all instruments - in the software world we would call it a platform independent standard (like HTML, or Java).
Tablature, on the other hand, is supposedly easier to read, and it shows the musician where, on a particular stringed instrument, on the neck to place your fingers to produce the desired notes. It loses, however, a great deal of the richness of the information expressed in traditional notation, most notably the details of the duration of the notes. Using the software analogy again, it is a platform-specific standard (sort of like.NET).
In order to read regular music notation, you need to learn the correspondence between the notes you play on a particular insturment with the notations on the page. Once you've learned (and internalized that) my personal opinion is that music notation is no harder to read than tablature, and may actually be easier. Be that as it may, the use of tablature is certainly widespread (just take a look at OLGA, the Online Guitar Archive).
This conversation with Marcia, and a miserable experience trying to send a friend some sheet music (more on that later) led me to wonder why there isn't a widely accepted standard markup language for online music notation. There are a couple of popular notation software packages, most notably Finale and Sibelius, but no standard format that can be used, for instance, to represent music notation in a web page. If anybody knows of such a markup language effort that is really happening, please let me know.
Leave a comment