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,”  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, while at the same time something must be lost from its previous incarnation. Just as one can draw a continuous line from Anglo-Saxon or Old English, from over 1000 years ago, to Middle English and then to Modern English, interweave the one thread of English into the branching network of closely and more distally related dialects of Celtic languages (Irish, Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, Breton), trace creative hybrid variations of modern English dialects migrating around the globe today (American, Australian, Indian, South African), so too can we understand the development of Western music notation as a branching tree of languages and dialects, some highly and some distantly related, some dead and some alive, some on the brink of extinction, but each with evolutionary advantages and disadvantages particular to itself.
By tracing the evolution of these musico-genealogical characteristics, we could, as biologists can do today with animals, trace the record of survival traits and functional necessities and frivolities in this “living system” of musical communication. In this way, the death of notations, the mutation of new advantageous (and perhaps ultimately disadvantageous) traits in that notation, and the grafting of external tools to make more efficacious the imprinting of sonic meaning all stand as a record of musical thought, 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 