Music is quite possibly the most culturally universal thing on the planet. Every known culture has music. A lot of people have this idea that western music is “modern” and other cultures’ music is “primitive”, this is of course horse-figs. Music made in China or Tobega today is as contemporary as music made in the West today – they are both made today.
So Bach got it wrong when he used tribal music as the intro to “The rites of spring” to give it a “primitive feel”, the reality is that music he took inspiration from was just as contemporary as the music he was creating (for that time), this doesn’t change that he created one of the better symphonies, it does mean that what he intended to achieve with it was impossible in that way.
Music is a universal, but there is no universal music. Every culture has a different musical scale. Music notation as we know it, can in fact only be used to write down western music, and even then only those newer than the 1500’s or so.
This is because for starters, western music before that used completely different scales (which ones we don’t know for sure, but some of them like Gregorian chants still survive). And worse, it cannot even truly represent all western music since then.
A good example is guitars, notation can and does efficiently encode most known classical guitar pieces (with only a few exceptions like some Spanish balads that incorporate moments of using the guitar box as a percussion instrument – slapping it – in between the notes). Classic guitars however have only two ways they can be played, strumming or chords, both of which notation knows about.
Electric guitars on the other hand add several other techniques. For starters there’s “choking” (what Hendrix invented), where the guitar is played like usual, but the notes are pressed right up against the guitar-base – this doesn’t work on classical guitars because the notes would be too soft, but electric guitars have amps. Notation has now way of indicating -play this A right up against the head, yet it gives your songs a very different emotional feel.
And that’s not the worst of it.
Now try sliding, sliding is a technique where electric guitarists press the strings flat using a hollow object of some sort, a short metal pipe can work but beer-bottles are often employed. Sliding causes the slide-object to vibrate a note in harmony with the chords played – effectively you’re playing two instruments at once in harmony now – try writing notation for THAT one.
And that’s not even the most important electric guitar technique of all – what electric guitarists are most famous for is the “rapid strum” where the same note is played over and over so fast that it sounds like it lasts for a very long time, usually introducing a “howl” sound into the note.
Metal-players particularly love the howl as an emotive expression. But notation has no idea what to make of that, since no other instrument can be played that way, a a violin with a six meter bow would maybe come close.
So guitarists, especially rock-guitarists tend to prefer writing their songs down as riffs.
