Black music’s essence cannot be preserved in musical notation

Evidence

What you’re hearing in what we call Black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that, like the spirituals, can really happen only off the page—not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, break beats, or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. Writing down the asides and ad-libs and overdubs and yelps and wails, the extended solos, the mumbled running together of rhymes seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand, the flowers wilting under hot water that Zora Neale Hurston was talking about. It’s not that Black music isn’t written. It certainly is. But so much of its glory can’t be captured in recorded notes alone. That results from spontaneity. It resides between the notes, in personalities, in grunts, sighs, gestures, timbre, inflections, phrasing. You wouldn’t be trying to capture the arrangement of notes, per se. You’d be trying to capture the uncatchable: the spirit. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1143