Timeline of Music Notation

This timeline of music notation is by no means complete and should be treated as a work in progress. I regularly come across a couple dozen or so music notation systems a month now, often quite by accident while doing research in other areas, and as many of those intentional [or not] searches fall into regional clusters it made more sense to start documenting them as such. This means that this Music Notation Timeline page gets updated far less frequently. <br> I’ll only be updating this intermittently while I focus on several other annotated text documents of the timeline (separated primarily by region) and populating the database with examples. The timeline will eventually be incorporated into a Global Music Theory resource which will include other projects like the <em>Arabic Music Theory Bibliography (650-1650) Project</em>, the <em>Early Black Musicians, Composers, and Music Scholars (505-1505 CE)</em>, and the <em>Bibliography of Slave Orchestras and Ensembles</em>. <br> With literally hundreds, if not thousands of examples from the 20th century to today, that may very well be divided into a separate project especially as a number of new notations are being developed directly as notation programs and software (see the Non-CWN Music Notation Software list for many examples). <br> One thing to keep in mind with music notation is Sandeep Bhagwati’s (2013a and 2013b) idea of <em>Notational Perspective</em>: the idea that all notations have a universal AND a context-dependent feature which shapes what’s stable over time and what is malleable. <br> <em>PUBLISHED 2/4/2017; UPDATED 4/30/2023</em>