Notation
System for fixing music in writing.
What it means
Notation is the written fixing of music. It records what is to sound — pitch, duration, combined sound, volume, articulation — and thereby makes music transferable across time and distance. It is never complete: no notated text determines everything, and every performance supplies what the signs leave open. This gap is no weakness but the space in which interpretation takes place.
In the notation
Today's musical notation rests on a few basic elements: the staff, which maps pitches spatially; the clef, which fixes the reference point; noteheads, stems, and flags, which designate durations; accidentals, time signature, and barlines. To these are added signs for volume, articulation, tempo, and manner of playing. The system has grown over centuries and is not logical in all its parts — that the same whole note seems different in length depending on the time signature, and that a slur can mean both binding and sustaining, are consequences of this history.
Musical use
The development proceeded in steps: neumes record the course of a melody, the staff makes pitch unambiguous, mensural notation measures duration, music printing spreads music in large numbers. Alongside this, other systems always existed — tablatures, which aim at the fingering rather than the sound, letter and number notations, and, in the twentieth century, graphic notations that suggest sound courses rather than individual notes. Large parts of the world's music, moreover, get by without writing and are passed on orally.
The history of notation reaches from the neumes of the Middle Ages through mensural notation and tablatures to today's five-line staff.
Performance practice
Read a notated text as an instruction and as a testimony at once: it says what is to be done but leaves unsaid much that the music of that time brought with it as a matter of course. With older music, check which signs the edition has from the editor and which come from the source. And get into the habit of skimming the whole text before playing — clef, key signature, time signature, repeats, and tempo markings first, before the first note comes.