James Bridle, in his recent conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being, describes language systems and their limits in a way that applies to music notation, too.
Pictograms describe the world as it actually is. If you draw a picture of a thing, you are referring to that actual thing. And slowly, even though those pictograms came to represent, by ancient Egyptian times pictograms, they start to represent concepts more than things, but they are still rooted very much in pictures of actual things. Once the script becomes kind of Latinized, it actually refers to the sound of language. The letters are not things themselves, they’re ways of pronouncing words that mean other things.
So that the whole language, which is also how most of us think, but not all of us, crucially, starts to remove itself and become something that refers only to itself and only to the human. And so it takes this kind of immense effort [….] Because we’re kind of fighting this kind of prison of language that we’re stuck within that is constantly trying to separate us from the world.
James Bridle, in conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being
I think this, in a nutshell, is why so many musicians get frustrated with notation, and young musicians struggle to maintain musicality as they learn music literacy.
Music notation, like non-pictogram language, is so removed from the music itself that it becomes harder to connect directly with it. It’s an incomplete and imprecise system. It’s a prison that constantly tries to separate us from the actual music.
It’s also the best system we’ve got. Just as language, for all its limitations, empowers us to do so much, so music notation enabled so much creation.