Perspectives of Musical Notation in Composition and Musical Performance
According to Philip Tagg and Richard Middleton, musicology and to a degree European-influenced musical practice suffer from a 'notational centricity', a methodology slanted by the characteristics of notation.
Notation-centric training induces particular forms of listening, and these then tend to be applied to all sorts of music, appropriately or not. Musicological methods tend to stress those musical parameters that can easily be notated...they tend to neglect or have difficulty with widened parameters that are not easily notated. Examples include the unique vocal style of Joni Mitchell and the String Quartets of Elliott Sharp. Because of conventional musical notation limitations, many present-day composers in various genres prefer to compose music that is either not notated, or notated only through the computer language of digital recording.
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