Many people feel that western notation makes it unnecessarily hard to read music. If we want to sight read, learn music theory or just practice an instrument, surely there's a better way? Right? This has been a hot topic for almost 1000 years... AND I PUT IT TO BED RIGHT HERE!

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Subtitles by Pentameron

CHAPTERS

00:00 Setting the stage
09:26 Notation must die INTRO!
15:12 Ancient Greek notation
19:40 The history of western notation
31:57 Chromatic staves
36:15 The piano roll
42:54 Clefs (and resistance to change)
44:42 Muto method
46:45 Notation & the aristocracy
48:25 Tablature
51:40 Guitar Hero
52:51 Klavarskribo
54:08 Other types of keyboard notation
55:47 Musitude!
1:01:18 Dodeca
1:03:01 Accessibility
1:04:31 Farbige Noten
1:06:49 Jullian Carrillo's system
1:08:26 The best of the rest
1:11:52 Where can we go from here?


BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Julian Carrillo: Sistema General de Escritura Musical (Mexico City: Ediciones Sonidos 13, 1895)

Charles Francis Abdy Williams: The Story of Notation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903)
https://archive.org/details/storynota...

Willi Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 9001600 (The Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1953)
https://archive.org/details/notationo...

Gardner Read: Source Book of Proposed Music Notation Reforms (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1987)


ARTICLES AND BLOGS

A timeline of music notation Jon Silpayamanant (this is a wonderful resource with circa 900 notation systems covered)
https://silpayamanant.wordpress.com/t...

Adémar de Chabannes, Carolingian Musical Practices, and Nota Romana James Grier Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 4398. University of California Press

Musical Clefs and their Abolition, T. L. Southgate The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 30, No. 559 (Sep. 1, 1889)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3360190?...

Cross eyed pianist on the topic of notation being ‘elitist’. https://crosseyedpianist.com/tag/elit...

The Muto Method
https://mutomethod.com/en/score.html

Proposed redesign of piano sheet music
  / howidredesignpianosheetmusic  

Musitude
https://musitude.com/

The Modes of Ancient Greek Music
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40288...


VIDEOS

Reconstruction of Greek music, led by Professor Armand D'Angour    • Rediscovering Ancient Greek Music (2017)  

Offertorium: Jubilate Deo universa terra
   • Offertorium: Jubilate Deo universa terra  

An introduction to mensural notation
   • Mensural notation  the basics  


OTHER LINKS

Daseian notation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daseian...

Style similar to Nonantolian notation
https://unipub.unigraz.at/obvugrscri...

Mensural notation wikipedia page (which is very good)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensura...

Database of highres scans of early Christian music
https://www.ecodices.unifr.ch/en/lis...

Mensural notation scan: Missae partes decantari solitae: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus et Agnus Dei cum notis musicalibus
https://search.onb.ac.at/primoexplor...

Mouth pictogram imagery by pch.vector https://www.freepik.com/freevector/m...