 aesthetic, and function as incubated and tested in the crucible of history, filled with changing and challenging environmental systems: political, aesthetic, theological, philosophical, epidemiological, etc.
In modern musical education, we are often sheltered from the somewhat tumultuous sea on which our system of notation floats; at any instance, a wind – perhaps whimsical, perhaps prophetic – might push our ship off the course we surely believed we were on. Many young students of music are not even aware (often as a consequence of their teacher’s similar lack of awareness) that the system of notation and the systems communicated through this notation are highly arbitrary and not actually that old, only coming into the full-flowering of their modern version but about a century ago.  Even in the 19th century, dialects of Western music, which had been communicated for over a millennium via notated and un-notated oral traditions were coming under siege by modern demands to “evolve.”
Canntaireachd (pronounced more-or-less as “can’t-are-rock;” Scottish Gaelic for “chanting”) was the ancient form of musical “notation” used in the Scottish Highlands to communicate the traditional “high-art” bagpipe music of medieval Scotland, Piobaireachd (also spelled Pibroch, both pronounced more-or-less as “pea-oh-brahk,” meaning “bagpiping”), also commonly known as Ceol Mòr (“big music”). While most of Western Europe’s high-art scene fell to the aesthetic gauntlet of harmonically tertian-based polyphony by the 15th century, this form of monophonic composition, first appearing in records between the 9th and 11th centuries, persisted under continuous practice and development to the Early Modern Age.  Piobaireachd are long and relatively complex works in the form of theme-and-variations and were traditionally transmitted orally by way of Canntaireachd, which is a systemized collection of abstract vocalized syllables, which communicate not only the pitch of particular notes but also the intricate embellishments and irregular rhythmic nuances of the music. 
Figure 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d: Top, the canntaireachd for the well-known (and my favorite) piobaireachd “Maol Donn” (Brown Cow), also known as “MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart” from Volume I of Colin Campbell’s manuscript. "Nether Lorn" from 1797. Middle, the "modern" re-notation of the above canntaireachd. Bottom-left, a video from YouTube of the performance of the canntaireachd. Bottom-right, a recording from YouTube of the whole piobaireachd on bagpipes.
By the 19th century, industrialized Europe with all of its developments in musical communication was reaching Scotland’s Highlands. Consequently, this antiquated form of musical encoding began to be challenged by the seemingly streamlined and cross-cultural powers of Western Europe’s preeminent form of musical notation (the system of 5-lines, 4-spaces, black and while circles with various stems, and rhythmic hierarchies well-known today).  At this time, the Piobaireachd Society proposed a competition to develop a new way to notate traditional bagpipe music that would reflect modern music notation. Many proposals were made, but Angus MacKay’s  version using the standard five-line-four-space staff was the winner and ultimately authorized and published by the Piobaireachd Society. Many at this time and even scholars to the present day consider this re-notation oversimplified, with inaccurate standardizations of rhythm and time and the over-editing and full removal of exceptional and complicated embellishments, which were present in notated Canntaireachd.  While medieval bagpipe music gained a powerful language of cross-cultural and cross-instrumental communication (able to be read, understood, and appreciated by anyone with a modicum of musical training), there was an ultimate sacrifice that had to be made to conform to the standard system. In this adoption of a new notation of language, part of the language’s original character was lost.
While many music students might be familiar with the history of Gregorian chant notation in the West, and how this lang