The Page and the Pulse: Western Notation and the Erasure of Global Traditions

For centuries, five lines on a page have shaped the boundaries of what is considered “serious” music. Western staff notation, developed during the medieval period and standardized through the Enlightenment, is not merely a system of transcription—it is a system of value. What it can notate, it can preserve. What it cannot, it often silences.

Across much of the world, however, music has thrived outside the page. In the polyrhythmic drumming of West Africa, the modal improvisations of Arabic maqam, the flexible tuning of Indonesian gamelan, or the intricate ornamentation of South Indian Carnatic music, oral tradition has served as the primary vessel for transmission. These musics are not lesser because they are unwritten. They are living archives—fluid, embodied, and often inseparable from the cultural, spiritual, and communal contexts in which they exist.

Yet when global musical traditions attempt entry into institutions shaped by Euro-American norms—conservatories, competitions, curricula, grantmaking bodies—the ability to conform to Western notation becomes a gatekeeping mechanism. A piece without a score is harder to analyze, to teach, to archive. And thus, often, harder to fund, program, or canonize.

This bias has consequences. Composers from oral traditions are often pressured to notate their work in staff notation to gain access to festivals and residencies, sometimes flattening the nuances of their traditions in the process. Dissonances that arise from alternate tuning systems may be labeled as “mistakes.” Performers may be discouraged from adding microtonal ornamentation or improvisation if it strays from the written page.

In music education, the divide is even more stark. Students trained in Western notation are often placed at the center of pedagogical models, while those whose musical backgrounds emphasize aurality, movement, or call-and-response are described as “informal” or “non-traditional.” The result is a hierarchy in which literacy means legitimacy—and literacy is narrowly defined.

Efforts to confront these biases are underway. Ethnomusicology departments, intercultural performance labs, and community-led music schools are experimenting with alternative models of notation—from graphic scores to audio-based pedagogies. In some cases, institutions are questioning whether every musical tradition must be notated at all. What would it mean to teach a music whose knowledge is meant to be passed hand-to-hand, voice-to-voice, breath-to-breath?

This is not a call to discard notation. Western staff notation is a powerful tool—capable of tremendous precision and abstraction. But it is not neutral. It encodes a worldview, one in which fixed pitch, regular rhythm, and harmonic progression are prioritized. To present it as universal is to mistake a lens for a landscape.

If classical music is to truly become global, then institutions must look beyond the page—not simply to transcribe other musics, but to reexamine the assumptions underlying the act of transcription itself. Because what cannot be written can still be known. And what lives beyond the staff may yet change the shape of the staff itself.