Many traditions around the world employ different notations for writing their music down. It is never necessary, obviously, to read these notations in order to understand the music or to love it; indeed, many traditions have no notation at all. However, written music examples can help clarify many points about musical style — even ones not written down by their creators — and it will help if you can learn to follow the music examples in this book in an approximate way. The following brief survey of Western musical notation can be used for study or review or reference.

As we have seen in our discussion of musical elements, time and pitch are really the only ones that can be specified (and therefore notated) with any precision. Think of pitch and time as coordinates of a graph on which music is going to be plotted. The resulting pitch/time grid is quite close to actual musical notation, as shown in the diagrams below.