4 ideas
When a culture's music exists only as oral tradition, killing or scattering the community that carries it erases the music permanently — there is no notation, recording, or artifact to reconstruct from. The Yezidi songs die not from lack of interest but from the physical destruction of the human vessels that memory requires.
Music communicates meaning that language cannot capture — it functions as an 'all-enfolding language' that conveys emotional and spiritual content directly, bypassing the referential limits of words. What resists verbal articulation can still be transmitted through sound.
A policewoman found an old man peering into houses, asked his name, and when he said 'I'm Bob Dylan, I'm on tour,' she assumed he was lying and detained him. Fame is context-dependent: recognition depends entirely on the observer's frame of reference, and a legend can be invisible to someone outside it.
The development of music notation is a history of information technology — the invention of ways to store, transmit, and standardize sound across time and distance. Reading music history through its notation systems reveals how a symbolic infrastructure determines what compositions are even possible to preserve and reproduce.