In many ancient traditions and contemporary settings, music is not written out for the performance. It’s worked out among the musicians, maybe by a lead composer type all at once, or by the group over a period of time. The piece or song is memorized and maybe at some point has a life outside that group of musicians, so it becomes like an oral tradition of storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, let’s say you wanna write that down. Seems reasonable that you’d try to do this with the tools you have, which is staff notation invented for western orchestral music. But unless the musicians in question were also trained in this method and<\/em> set out to follow the rules as such, you are going to end up with a crude approximation<\/a>. Two examples I’ve been really interested in over the years is traditional Balinese Gamelan and the 80s-90s work of punk\/art rock group Sonic Youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n