Our whole music culture has grown out of our folk traditions. We
can trace our whole understanding of melody, phrase, and musical
expression through song. We are so limited now by thinking that
you can only make the sounds that you can write. And that’s
backwards, because you can make hundreds of sounds and the
writing is like froth on the top of the wave. You can only write
the least important part. – Alice Parker Music represented
symbolically is regarded as more acceptable than music which
happens in real time as sound. We have fallen under the sway of
a strange inversion in which symbols are regarded as more real
than the realities they represent. Music (or art, literature,
science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works
arranged in a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as
having not only an independent existence, but a higher existence
than a performance. The strict division into groups of creative
musicians (composers), performing musicians (singers, players),
and passive listene