A substantial but concise history (twenty pages) of the systems of Western musical notation, c.900-c.1980, presented in chronological order with many music examples and a short bibliography. It originally appeared as an article in the 2-volume, New Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Denis Arnold, published in 1983.
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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. 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 Arabic Music Theory Bibliography (650-1650) Project, the Early Black Musicians, Composers, and Music Scholars (505-1505 CE), and the Bibliography of Slave Orchestras and Ensembles. 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). One thing to keep in mind with music notation is Sandeep Bhagwati’s (2013a and 2013b) idea of Notational Perspective: the idea that all notations have a universal AND a context-dependent feature which shapes what’s stable over time and what is malleable.
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