Music only exists when it’s performed - when you play a tune or sing a song. But composers need to capture their tunes so that they can pass them on to others to perform.

The simplest way of passing music on to others is to play or sing it to them while they listen. That’s where our project starts. We move on to look at early written notation - the beginnings of what became our modern, very sophisticated, system of musical notation.

Then we see how modern composers can both keep to the rules of notation and break them when it suits their purposes. And finally we’ll see how children discover for themselves ways of recording the music that they create.