As long ago as 1971 Mantle Hood wrote, in The Ethnomusicologist, of “the chronic problem, transcription of non-Western music, and the chronic solution, ‘doctored’ Western notation.” With the recent resurgence of interest in cross-cultural and comparative music analysis, the “chronic problem” has not gone away, yet efforts to find new and better solutions seem to have dwindled. While dance studies, linguistics, and organology have long benefited from purpose-made written-descriptive systems (Labanotation, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the Sachs-Hornbostel instrument classification system respectively), world music analysis continues to adopt and adapt the prescriptive notation of one tradition as a descriptive notation for all the others, resulting in distortions and limitations that are generally acknowledged but regarded as inevitable.

This paper proposes an alternative to the “chronic solution” of a kind that was envisaged by Hood as a remote future possibility, and that I argue has now become feasible: a “Laban Solution,” meaning a newly devised notation system designed from the outset to represent any kind of musical sound organization as efficiently as Labanotation can represent bodily movement. I describe a system called “global notation,” under development since 2016 with the aim of providing a consistent and easily learned set of conventions whereby users can specify any information about sound that may be wanted for the purposes of the notation and only that information.

I illustrate how, by making all information optional, global notation offers advantages not only as a descriptive notation but also as an “aesthesic” one—one that can represent what is perceived by listeners as well as what is intended by composers and performers. To demonstrate that global notation should be particularly useful for studies that compare music from more than one tradition, I focus on one such study—Michael Tenzer’s 2011 article “Temporal Transformations in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Augmentation in Baroque, Carnatic and Balinese Music”—and re-notate its examples in global notation, which I suggest might help make insights such as Tenzer’s accessible to a wider readership. I then present some ways in which the Laban Solution of global notation can combine with what Hood called the Seeger and Hipkins Solutions—respectively, mechanical/computerized transcription and knowledge of indigenous notation systems—in working toward the ultimate “Composite Solution” that Hood dreamed of. I conclude by inviting input from interested readers to help develop global notation into a form that will achieve its full potential benefits of accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility.

Keywords: Notation; transcription; global notation; comparative analysis; Western classical music; gamelan; Karnatak music; Asian music

Contributor Information:

Andrew Killick is a Reader in Ethnomusicology at the University of Sheffield, UK.

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