A beginner can grasp musical notation; its rules are simple and consistent, and the conventions are well-documented and reasonably straightforward. This blog post should be evidence of that: the beginner who wrote it clearly has the basics of notation down, and there are no inaccuracies at least with regard to the notation.
A beginner can't grasp the motivations behind the design of musical notation, and I don't expect a beginner to grasp the motivations behind the design of any complex system. That does not make the system absurd.
Maybe the notation is optimized for efficiency for experts, at the cost of beginner-friendliness. Maybe it's representing something genuinely hard. Absurdity is possible but not the only possible reason.
If a beginner can't immediately grasp mathematical notation, or a programming language - or a native language for that matter - is that evidence that it is, in fact, absurd? The musical notation has evolved (toward some local optimum) to be useful for practicing musicians and composers, at the expense of having a learning curve.
Programming languages are a lot easier to grasp. ;)
The oldest programming languages are only 50 years old, whereas the oldest music notation is at least 4000 years old.
Most programming lanuguages haven't crossed any spoken languages, but modern music notation & terminology has been heavily developed by countries all over Asia and Europe.
This is a big reason why musical notation seems so weird at first, especially to engineers, because it is a legacy that comes from a different time, a different context, in a different language. The people who developed musical notation had different math, different logic and different musical motivations than we have now.
Think about this for a while and it starts to feel like a miracle that musical notation works at all, not to mention how well it works.
Programming languages were developed by people nearer to us in every way, and made to be logical and simple, so it makes sense that they're easier to grasp quickly.
Can't speak for the parent, but as far as I can recall, I did. Well, maybe not literally immediately, but to me, the syntax was generally the easiest part of learning a programming language. (It probably helps that they are often very similar to each other.)
The only things that were hard were forgetting to write semicolons after statements in C (I have previously mostly written Pascal), and C declarators — but even the latter were easy after I learned that "declaration reflects use".
Well, in our programming world new languages seem to come out every week, trying to find better ways to write programs. By this standard a new way to encode music is long overdue.
In that metaphor, coming up with a new way to encode music is like releasing a new programming language and then asking everyone to write their own compiler for it. Not impossible, but it would have to be a hell of an encoding!
Maybe not as many as programming languages, but new notations do appear time to time. It's just that none has ever got as popular as the traditional notation, I guess.
I mean, it's generally agreed that English as a language has accrued so much historical baggage that it's shed any elegance or coherence it may or may not have once had. It would honestly be surprising to me if the same thing didn't happen to musical language.
well a beginner can't really grasp shorthand or kanji either, right? A beginner not being able to get things means that the learning curve is higher.
Most musical notation is meant for non-beginners, right? And a lot of the beginner confusion is from features that are useful for advanced users. So there's a tradeoff.
There might, of course, be changes to be had. But a lot of beginner confusion is because the higher-level abstractions are needed.
A good example in mathematical notation is order of operations. Why not just do left to right? Or just going with Polish Notation?
Standard order of operations work well for people working with large formula, because they allow you to write many common things without many parentheses. But mandatory parentheses + left-to-right only would be easier for beginners.
A beginner can't grasp the motivations behind the design of musical notation, and I don't expect a beginner to grasp the motivations behind the design of any complex system. That does not make the system absurd.