“Nisi enim ab homine memoria teneantur soni, pereunt, quia scribi non possunt”
for unless sounds are held in the memory by man they perish, because they cannot be written down
Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, III, XV.
This quote has often been held up as evidence for the start of musical notation; because (so it seems), once notation is invented in the form of neumes and the musical staff, sounds can be written down.
This is of course a false, or at least very naive view. Notation only writes down certain lexical or semantical parts of the musical sound. I think Isidore was perhaps contrasting the world of sound, with the world of language – language is by its nature organised in semantic or lexical units, which can be assigned graphic symbols and so utterances can be preserved in writing.
But the world of sound is a sensory continuum. For the past century or so, sound has been able to be written down by the use of mechanical transponders, i.e. microphones; the written sound is in the form of a waveform etched onto wax or shellac or vinyl, or more recently chopped up and represented digitally. But even a stereo recording only captures the sound world at two specific points – sound is a 3-D phenomena filling a room or a space, and so far no way has been invented to my knowledge of writing down the totality of sound phenomena in any enclosed space.
I was, I now realise, very lucky to have been brought up in a living indigenous music tradition that to this day does not use conventional staff notation at all. I have seen fragments of performances transcribed into staff notation, but never for the use of practitioners – it is simply irrelevant, not done. The musicians do use a couple of different geometric and numerical tablatures, but these are not used in performance, only for composition, teaching, memorisation and record-keeping. The performance is entirely free from any written notation.
