Musical notation is a high level language. It gives you a program that you can run on any instrument. And it gives you the ability to modify it with relative ease.
When playing clarinet in high school I felt that notion is this archaic thing that we’re stuck with because of the morons in the past. But I’m realizing it’s this beautifully refined language, developed over centuries.
Western musical notation is not useless for denoting the music of other cultures, but it's also not very good and is frequently quite bad. If you think of western musical notation as "the system", you're at risk of remaining ignorant of the beautifully refined languages, developed over centuries, in other cultures.
It's also a highly abstract language that seems to frequently, somewhat like Javascript, lead its users to have very little familiarity with what is going on at lower levels.
These many years later, I still don't quite get it, but do of course realise there must be some sort of point to it all. High level language? Yes, I get it. Bach wrote in Python, not C. Time to revisit.
Just for clarification, I asked because GP said:
> You can’t quite run it on different hardware: unlike on a piano, the note does not uniquely determine how something is played on, say, a guitar.
> Of course, on top of that, you also have a wide range of ways to modify how you play on a guitar.
Yeah, same with the piano. And I think, with most of all instruments.
This is not possible for a guitar (and others) because there is no unique mapping between the note on the sheet and the position on the instrument.
I know it's not really suited for e.g. non-western or modern quarter-tone music. But since I don't play the guitar I would like to understand the reasoning behind your qoute:
> You can’t quite run it on different hardware: unlike on a piano, the note does not uniquely determine how something is played on, say, a guitar.
Is that more clear?
It’s not.
You seem to have trouble with the concept that the vast majority of instruments does not yield a recognizable melody simply by pressing the right button at the right time. All of those musicians are doing just fine, thank you very much.
Tabulatures come with their own limitations though. They're mostly a far less portable way to express western music. They also lose a lot of meaning. Is a note part of a particular chord or melody line? A lot of this is not visible in tabulatures.
Now I play the banjo, where a number of open tunings are commonly used, which allows fast rhythms with minimal fretting.