Quotes About Notation

The three and twentieth of March [1623] [The Reader should remember that the English year began on the 25th March]

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

I found reading musical notation frightfully boring.

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.

Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation.

Musical rests

People have always been recording what's going on around them in one form or another.

Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.

Diphthongs are indicated by combinations of hooks and circles.

In any book, it is impossible to avoid some mistakes, some confusion, some incorrectness of language, and some misuse of notation. If you find any such things in the present book, then correct them or improve them for yourself, or write your own book.

A trick of vocabulary: we say to develop a photograph '; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of in-sistence (of the insistent gaze). This brings the Photo-graph (certain photographs) dose to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the pos-sibility of a rhetorical expansion.

Design is also sloppy because it's hard to know when your design is good enough. How much detail is enough? How much design should be done with a formal design notation, and how much should be left to be done at the keyboard? When are you done? Since design is open-ended, the most common answer to that question is When you're out of time.

SQUARE ROOT AND PLUS AND MINUS SYMBOLS (1525)

We never notate our music, so you can try to replicate it, but you don't really have it.

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

In the seventeenth century the pound sterling was divided into twenty shillings (shortened to s.), and a shilling was divided into twelve pennies, or pence (shortened to d.). So an amount might be expressed as £2 10s 6d, or £2/10/6d.

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.