Klavarskribo - a case study

Given several centuries of clever proposals, why is it that none have caught on? Well actually, one did, at least in one geographic region. It’s called Klavarskribo. To date, It is the only Alternative Notation to be adopted by a significant audience. So let’s take a deeper look to understand how and why it achieved its success.

From Wikipedia:

“Klavarskribo (sometimes shortened to Klavar) is a music notation system that was introduced in 1931 by the Dutchman Cornelis Pot (1885–1977) [Netherlands]. The name means "keyboard writing" in Esperanto. It differs from conventional music notation in a number of ways and is intended to be easily readable.”

Klavar solves the three main challenges with Traditional notation. Its staff lines represent the black keys of the keyboard and the spaces in between represent the white keys. Thus, like the keyboard, every octave is consistent. Since there are staff positions to explicitly define all twelve degrees of the chromatic scale, there is no need for key signatures to implicitly define sharps and flats. In stark contrast to Traditional Notation’s horizontal timeline, the Klavar time dimension is vertical. This permits the sheet music page on the piano stand to line up visually with the keyboard. Each element of the design is intuitive and easy to read but clearly targets keyboard players.

The history of Klavar summarized here is based on Wikipedia and a two-part documentary on YouTube (see weblinks at the bottom of this page). It is a fascinating story of the dedication of Cornelis Pot that led to its success in the Netherlands and other northern European countries. The documentary also provides a nice summary of the history of sheet music notation.

It began in the 1930s by selling correspondence courses and paper sheet music by mail. Today it has a huge catalog of scores available for sale in PDF format on their website. Their catalog includes scores for all musician skill levels.

For Cornelis Pot, getting Klavar into the music mainstream was a lifelong project and dream. Being a wealthy industrialist in the Netherlands, he had the financial means to fund a project staff to develop correspondence courses to teach students how to play keyboard instruments with Klavar. The project also set up a printing facility to produce a large Klavar inventory of piano and organ sheet music for sale via the public mail system.

To promote his inventions, he invited the “press” to his facility to view demonstrations of the notation as well as various mechanical devices he designed to record and play it back. He also sponsored concerts by musicians using his sheet music to advertise is efficacy.

Over time, the notation became popular and eventually the Netherlands public schools incorporated it into their music education curricula. This established Klavar in the mainstream world of music in the Netherlands. By the 1970s there were tens of thousands of users throughout Northern Europe.

And one can still purchase sheet music on the website in PDF format. However, Klavar has still not reached a significant worldwide audience. Perhaps had the internet been available during Mr. Pot’s lifetime (he died in 1977), it might have more widely spread to other regions.

Having said that, a vertical timeline (as well as other design elements) may be just too radical for most traditional music schools and instructors to accept. In math and engineering domains, a timeline is usually depicted horizontally from left to right. And generally, people tend to think of tones as going up and down, not side to side. Furthermore, Klavar's focus on keyboards may make it less attractive to players of other instruments (even though it would still simplify note identification, just without the mapping to a different instrument).

In any case, the story of Klavar does illustrate the means by which a dedicated promotor can overcome the traditional barriers to get a notation into the mainstream. And it also demonstrates that there are three essential elements for a new notation to succeed:

Sheet music
Instructional materials
Advertising and promotion

But even though there exists this large inventory of Klavar sheet music on paper (and PDF), the ongoing Klavarskribo Foundation recognizes the importance of technology and so now it also offers an app to display virtual sheet music on electronic devices (currently only available on Windows however). App users can enter and edit their own scores or they can convert MusicXML and MIDI files obtained from other sources. In addition, the Klavar user community communicates via two Facebook groups. And from their Facebook groups I see posts from those who identify as lifelong players of Klavar.

Thus, after almost a century, it would appear this Alternative Notation continues to have an active audience and one that uses the internet and social media to support the user community.

Web links

Klavarskribo Documentary – Part 1 (1974)

Klavarskribo Documentary - Part 2 (1974)

Klavarskribo history page on the Klavarskribo website