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 t

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 man