If we treated notation the way some Christian fundamentalists treat the Bible – if we said that anything that isn’t in the score shouldn’t be in the performance – then computer-controlled synthesizers would by now have put performers out of a job: it takes a machine to perform the music literally, mindlessly, without expression. But we don’t treat notation this way. The fact that the notation doesn’t care about subtleties of temporal or dynamic shaping doesn’t mean we don’t care about them. And if our notation simplifies the music by eliminating these things, that is because it is in the nature of notations to simplify. A notation that tried to put everything in would end up being far too complicated to read. (Again ethnomusicologists have experience of this; Charles Seeger, the pioneer of North American ethnomusicology, invented the melograph, a device that transcribed every smallest nuance of timing, dynamics, and pitch, but the resulting graphs are so complex that nobody has ever really figured out what to do with them.) All notations miss things out, then, only different things. You can see this from the history of Western ‘art’ music.