Graphic Notation vs Staff Notation
図形楽譜 / 五線譜
Both sit in Notation Systems, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Graphic Notation
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The scores Cage and Cardew drew when they abandoned the staff: shapes, lines, map-like pages. Opening performance to interpretation rather than instruction, the score itself became visual art.
Staff Notation
Notation that fixes pitch to a coordinate, running from Guido's invention of the line to the five-line staff. Time reads left to right and pitch up and down, a flat design still in use after a thousand years and the longest-lived format in information design.
| Graphic Notation | Staff Notation | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1950s– | 11th century– |
| Family | Notation Systems | Notation Systems |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | The staff abandoned / Instruction by shape and line / Pages open to interpretation / The score as artwork | The five-line coordinate system / Time running left to right / Clefs and key signatures / Bars dividing time |
| Best used for | Handing improvisers a map instead of a list of instructions · Making the page of a piece into a figure worth hanging on a wall | Engraving parts a player can follow at sight, spacing designed first · Stacking several voices so an ensemble reads them vertically aligned |
| Type | Few kinds of sign, with the range where one shape holds one meaning | Uniform head and stem weight, accidentals given clear space ahead |
| Composition | Show which direction on the page carries time before anyone plays | Bar width proportional to duration, page turns placed at rests |
| Material | Line weight mapped to loudness, kept dark enough to print clean | Thin staff lines, note heads printed darker than the spaces |
| Caution | Freedom claimed without a key or any agreed convention scatters interpretation across players, and the score gets treated as a doodle. | Setting every bar to the same width breaks the link between spacing and duration, so fast passages jam and sight readers fall out. |