William F. Buckley's Music Notation System: As Controversial as His Politics

Let all the intellectual and casual political analysis about the late William F. Buckley commence. But when I heard the news he passed away on February 27--I instantly was taken back to an old magazine I used to subscribe to in the 80's and 90's for pianists called Keyboard Classics. Buckley wrote a special article just for the magazine in the early 1990's that complained about the methods taught in reading music. His claim was that finger substitutions and the indications when to cross under one's finger under when playing scales was too confusing and that all basic notation in all the hundreds of years in music was downright terrible. Maybe Buckley just had a differently-wired brain from other people who've learned effectively how to read music through the classic notation system. In fact, essays are still being written on music websites pondering what it was that confused Buckley so much. Yet, his amendments to the classic system are still intriguing.

Leave it up to Buckley to take one old system and revamp it into something more colorful and interesting. You might say it's appropriate that Buckley revamped the Republican Party to being a red state. In the case of his music notation system, he made notes on the page...well, literally red. That didn't necessarily turn musical notes into conservative Libertarians--unless you consider the liberation of the old guard in music writing to be a form of Buckley's politics. But it wasn't just the color red that Buckley used on notes where a black dot used to be. He basically devised a whole color-coded system that would supposedly enable people to create better mnemonic devices in reading musical scores.