the beatles confuse anon

Read Richard Taruskin’s first volume of the history of western music. Near the start he discusses the difference between oral musical traditions that used protonotation for reference, versus the fully written out 12 tone scale that became the basis of a literate tradition. The latter was not developed until the mid Middle Ages. Protonotation was not necessarily used to “learn” music. For example early church singers learned orally and only referred back to symbols which represented a section of a melody. (Gary Tomlinson, probably the only true ‘evolutionary musicologist’ and scholar of renaissance music, also often discusses the difference between connotative gesture calls, an “analog” connection to a concept, emotion, or an entire protomusical phrase, versus discrete pitch, a “digital” manner of organizing pitch at the minuscule level). This isn’t to say that it was a clean break, for a few reasons. The two existed simultaneously in different areas; Protonotation still relies on discrete pitch perception, of course, and today people still often learn “literate” music orally (i.e. everyone knows happy birthday, conductors/instrumental teachers sing through things and teach by example, and of course the Beatles is another interesting example). It is usually difficult to determine where notations from antiquity fall on this sliding scale but I would argue they are much closer to protonotation. For example, Roman comedies had performance instruction (modes and rhythm) inscribed into the meter. But this doesn’t actually give much information. The specifics of playing Tibia for different events/plays still would have been taught orally and had allegedly been an Etruscan tradition for time immemorial. What we CAN say is that fully formed musical literacy with note-by-note notation allowed for easier access to a much wider world of musical possibility. The most specific ideas could be transmitted over geographical distance and easily disseminated to every literate-music-playing citizen. Any literacy of this kind is bound to create self-referential development (think of Darwin’s theory of evolutionary logic opening the door to fine-tooth studies and details, or the invention of the electron microscope). So no, they are not the same. But the Beatles had the advantage of operating in a world where musical literacy had existed for hundreds of years and pushed an overall understanding of music to a certain point. If anything, their anti intellectual method of composition and it’s subsequent popularity was in part a reaction to over-formalized musical literacy that had caused an artificial separation between audience and product. It’s no accident that postmodern academic music like Boulez and John Cage was considered “important” at the same time the Beatles were popular.