Wednesday 5 January 2005 — This is close to 20 years old. Be careful.
Last Sunday’s investigation into musical navigation demonstrated to me once again just what an ad-hoc hodge-podge music notation is. It’s developed over centuries, with odd symbols mixed together with abbreviations of Italian words, and so on. But even with its flaws, it’s so well established that no one would propose changing it, right? Wrong.
The Music Notation Modernization Association is proposing exactly that. They have a set of detailed criteria that they used to evaluate over 500 different proposals, winnowing them down to a few dozen.
These notations have merit, but let’s get serious here: there’s no way music notation is going to change. There’s just too much music already out there, with too many people already trained on the current system. If we can’t manage to change English spelling, we aren’t going to be able to change music notation.
On the same topic, it had to be out there, but I had never seen it: MusicXML.
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