Continue drafting your essay. Find a further book or article relevant to your topic and post a short synopsis (at least 200 words) on your blog about it.  Add this to the draft of your Annotated Bibliography.

The article ‘The Graphic Notation in Chinese Traditional Music Notation History’ has provided some excellent insight into my research, particularly about the various forms that graphic notation has emerged within ancient Chinese history. It has also made evident that research of the instruments that these graphic scores were written for (primarily the Chinese guqin) is imperative.

My short synopsis:

This paper by Liu Ming Qing and Lee Chie Tsang Isaiah details the use of graphic notation across Chinese music history. It argues that these visual systems functioned simultaneously as educational aids, preservation methods, and expressions of philosophical and aesthetic values. Its wealth of historical examples makes it particularly useful for my forthcoming essay.

From the drum notation of the Zhou dynasty, which used circles and squares to represent rhythm, to curve notation systems like Sheng Qu Zhe from the Han dynasty, which schematically traced the rise and fall of pitch, the paper traces the long tradition of encoding musical gesture through visual marks. Systems like the guqin’s Jianzi Pu notation detailed not only finger positions and plucking techniques but also subtler qualities of tone, expression and articulation.

For my essay exploring the connections between orthography and graphic music notation, this paper is valuable on two levels. It provides concrete historical precedent for thinking about visual marks as carriers of embodied, performative meaning, and it reinforces the broader argument that writing and musical notation have never been entirely separate concerns.