And what are the crotchets and quavers that the cleaning women have to contend with (or quarters and eighth-notes, as they would be if St Trinian’s were in America)? What are they for, what work do they do within our musical culture? You might say that they serve three distinct functions. One, the most obvious, is conservation: like photographs, they stop time in its tracks and give a stable, visible form to the evanescent. The second is almost equally obvious: they are a means for the communication of music from one person to another, for example (but it is only an example) from composer to performer. The third is less obvious but at least as important as the other two: in many traditions, notation is integral to the conception of music, to the ways in which composers, performers, and others who work with music, imagine or think about it.