Notation Systems for Microtonal Music: Writing What Lives Between the Notes

The music described across this site — Turkish makam, Persian dastgah, Arabic maqam — depends on pitches that Western staff notation was never designed to express. Quarter tones, Holdrian commas, mutable intervals that shift with melodic context: these are not ornamental details but the substance of modal identity. The history of notating this music is a history of creative adaptation, competing systems, and a persistent tension between what can be written down and what can only be learned by ear.

The problem: twelve notes are not enough

Established Western staff notation divides the octave into twelve semitones. Middle Eastern and Central Asian modal music uses intervals that fall between those semitones — the neutral seconds and thirds that distinguish a makam from a Western scale. Any notation system for this music must solve a fundamental problem: how to represent pitches that have no symbol in the European tradition.

Established Three broad solutions emerged across the region's traditions, each reflecting different priorities: the Turkish comma-based system aims for theoretical precision, the Persian system adds two practical symbols to the existing staff, and the Arabic system rounds to the nearest quarter tone. Before any of these modern approaches, however, Ottoman musicians developed entirely independent notation systems — and for centuries, many considered notation unnecessary altogether.

Before the staff: Ottoman notation systems

Ali Ufki (17th century)

Established The earliest known attempt to notate Ottoman music using Western staff notation came from Wojciech Bobowski (1610-1675), a Polish musician captured and brought to the Ottoman court, where he converted to Islam and took the name Ali Ufki. His Mecmua-i Saz u Soz ("Collection of Instrumental and Vocal Works") transcribed several hundred Ottoman compositions into European staff notation — the first time anyone had done so. Two manuscript copies survive, held by the British Library and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

Attested Ali Ufki's transcriptions are invaluable historical documents, but they also illustrate the cost of forcing one tradition's notation onto another's music. Standard staff notation could not capture microtonal intervals, and the transcriptions inevitably simplified what Ottoman musicians actually played.

Kantemiroğlu (early 18th century)

Established Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), known in Ottoman sources as Kantemiroğlu, took a different approach. Rather than adapting Western notation, he developed an original letter-based system derived from the Ottoman Turkish alphabet. His treatise Kitabu Ilmi'l-Musiki ala Vechi'l-Hurufat ("Book of the Science of Music According to Letters"), presented to Sultan Ahmed III around 1703-1704, preserved 350 instrumental compositions — each pitch represented by a specific letter, allowing more direct encoding of Ottoman interval structures than Western notation could provide.

Attested Kantemiroğlu's collection remains one of the most important sources for reconstructing Ottoman instrumental repertoire. Modern ensembles continue to perform from his transcriptions.

Hamparsum Limonciyan (early 19th century)

Established The most widely adopted pre-Western notation for Ottoman music was developed by Hamparsum Limonciyan (1768-1839), an Armenian court musician serving Sultan Selim III. Between 1813 and 1815, Limonciyan adapted the older Armenian church notation known as khaz for Ottoman secular music, using 45 pitch symbols covering roughly three octaves, with separate duration symbols above each note.

Established Hamparsum notation became the dominant system for transcribing Turkish and Armenian music throughout the 19th century, preferred over a competing system by Abdulbaki Nasir Dede, and was instrumental in the survival of thousands of compositions. It remained in wide use until European staff notation replaced it in the 20th century. The Armenian Apostolic Church continues to use it today.

Modern notation systems

Turkish: commas on the staff

Established When Turkey adopted Western staff notation in the early 20th century, the challenge was expressing intervals measured in Holdrian commas — the 53 equal divisions of the octave used in Turkish theory. Rauf Yekta Bey (1871-1935) introduced a modified notation system using specialized accidentals to represent microtonal inflections, first published in his 1922 encyclopedia article "La musique turque." His system was adopted by the Istanbul Conservatory in the 1920s and 1930s.

Established The Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek (AEU) system that superseded Yekta's approach retained the same principle — Western staff notation augmented with microtonal accidentals — but refined the symbol set. The AEU system uses ten accidentals in total, six beyond the standard Western sharp and flat:

Attested This system provides fine-grained control — a 1-comma accidental versus a 5-comma accidental is a real and audible difference in makam music. But as Signell documents, practiced intonation does not always match the AEU grid. Performers treat the notation as a guide, not a prescription, and the actual pitch of a given perde varies with melodic context, regional style, and individual training.

Persian: koron and sori

Established Persian music took a more minimal approach. In the early 20th century, Ali Naqi Vaziri (1887-1979) published the first transcription of Iranian music using Western staff notation in his instruction book Dastur-e Tar (1913). To handle microtonal pitches, he introduced just two new accidental symbols: the koron, which lowers a note by approximately a quarter tone, and the sori, which raises a note by approximately a quarter tone.

Established The koron is written as a vertical line with an open triangular head; the sori resembles a "greater than" sign crossed by two vertical lines. Both were added to the Unicode Standard (version 14.0) as U+1D1E9 and U+1D1EA, enabling their use in digital music software.

Attested Vaziri also proposed dividing the Persian octave into 24 equal quarter-tone steps. This proved controversial. Farhat and later scholars argued that Persian intervals are not equal quarter tones: the moteghayyer (mutable pitches) in dastgah music shift depending on melodic direction and context, and fixing them to a 24-tone grid distorts the music's essential character. Vaziri's equal temperament theory was largely rejected from the 1960s onward, even as his koron and sori symbols remained in standard use.

Arabic: the quarter-tone compromise

Established The 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music proposed standardizing Arabic notation around 24 equal quarter-tone divisions of the octave, adding half-flat and half-sharp symbols to the standard Western accidental set.

Established The 24-tone framework is explicitly understood as a notational convention, not a description of actual intonation. As Touma emphasizes, practiced Arabic intonation involves microtonal shadings that the quarter-tone grid cannot capture. The notation is a "conceptual map" — sufficient for identifying which maqam a piece is in, but not for specifying the interval subtleties that distinguish a skilled performance from a mechanical one.

Practice This pragmatic approach requires only two additional symbols beyond standard Western notation, making it accessible to musicians trained in either tradition. The cost is reduced precision — the difference between a 150-cent and a 160-cent neutral second, audible and musically significant, is invisible in 24-tone notation.

Oral tradition: what notation cannot capture

Established All three traditions maintained robust oral transmission systems alongside — and in some tension with — written notation. In the Ottoman tradition, meşk was the master-student teaching practice through which repertoire, ornamentation, intonation, and style were transmitted directly, without notation as an intermediary. In Persian music, the radif — the canonical repertoire of melodic models — was transmitted from master to student in the same way, and was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009 specifically as an oral tradition.

Attested The tension between notation and oral tradition is not merely historical. Notation captures pitch and rhythm but struggles with the elements that define modal identity: the characteristic ornaments, the subtle timing variations, the way a skilled performer bends a pitch differently depending on whether a melody is ascending or descending. The seyir of a Turkish makam — its characteristic melodic path — can be described in words and approximated in notation, but it is ultimately learned by listening and imitating, not by reading.

Practice This is why every notation system described above coexists with a tradition that insists notation is not enough. The Turkish AEU system specifies intervals to the nearest comma, yet Turkish musicians still learn makam primarily through meşk-derived pedagogy. Persian koron and sori symbols appear in published scores, yet the radif remains an oral tradition. Arabic quarter-tone notation provides a common written language, yet maqamat are, as Touma writes, "mostly taught orally, and by extensive listening."

The limits of any system

Practice No notation system fully solves the problem this music poses. Turkish comma notation is the most precise but implies a fixed temperament that does not match actual performance practice. Persian koron and sori are elegant and practical but collapse a spectrum of microtonal shadings into a binary quarter-tone-or-not distinction. Arabic quarter-tone notation is the most accessible but the least precise.

Each system embodies a different theoretical commitment. The Turkish approach says intervals are specific and countable. The Persian approach says two extra symbols are enough if the rest is learned by ear. The Arabic approach says notation is a map, not the territory.

Practice For students of this music, the practical lesson is clear: learn to read the notation system of the tradition you are studying, but do not mistake the notation for the music. The pitches that live between the frets — the quarter tones, the comma-shifted intervals, the mutable pitches that change with melodic context — are transmitted by ear, and always have been.