For hundreds of years, people have been searching for ways to write music down on a piece of paper. While there have been great advances from the squiggles above the text in early chant manuscripts, enabling us to become more and more precise about how to replicate music, I believe that it is not possible to confine music to black and white notation.

While everyone generally acknowledges that information, thoughts and feelings can be conveyed in written words, how many people have had the joy of having an email or text message misunderstood? Even with the spoken word, tone, volume, inflection, and even body posture can add or completely change the meaning of a group of words. One of my favorite stories is about a language teacher who is explaining that in some languages double negatives make a positive while in other languages, a double negative remains negative, but there is no language where two positives make a negative. From the back of the room, a student pipes up, "Yeah, right."

Tone and inflection can make a huge difference in the message conveyed with words. I even understand there are some languages where the same combination of sounds pronounced with different inflection become completely different words! While our music notation has become more precise over time, I do not believe we will ever manage to capture all the intricacies of tone and inflection on the printed page.