Herbert Brün (1918 - 2000), pioneering composer of electronic and computerized music, returned many times to the unassuming phrase, “A language gained is a language lost,” [1] in writings and speeches throughout his latter career at the University of Illinois. The history and concern of notation of any kind is provocatively summed in this quotation, as musical notation is itself a cypher for the communication of a language, and each version of notation that has been created throughout Western music history can simply be understood as representing a living or historical dialect of this language’s development; with each successive layer of evolution, a new aspect to its communication is gained
By the 18th century, Europe was fervently attempting to classify and dissect the world through the rediscovered power of the natural sciences; independent in many spheres from the intellectual tyranny of medieval theology, philosophers were emerging critically questioning the human institutions incubated under feudalism and theocracy during the European Dark Ages; rediscovered from Classical Greece, the perspective and dramatic arts, rhetoric, empiricism, mathematics, and many other fields of thought contained in the Trivium and Quadrivium returned to preeminence under broader and freer education and printed text. At the epicenter of this burgeoning enlightenment, Leonard Euler (1707 – 1783)
