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dfltryesterday at 8:42 PM2 repliesview on HN

The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.

Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.


Replies

nwatsonyesterday at 9:22 PM

The choir director at my church, Michael Dodds (UNCSA), covers the early development of musical notation, "From Modes to Keys in Early Modern Music Theory" [0]. Currently on sabbatical at Cambridge. Once in a while during rehearsal he will give an impromptu lecture on music history, always interesting.

[0] https://a.co/d/0bLcrlyE

odyssey7yesterday at 8:53 PM

> learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go

A certain Amazon Web Services comes to mind…