It seems to have escaped someone's perception that music does not consist of blobs and lines on paper, but of sound and silence. There are practitioners of the musical arts who post here, who sometimes notate and sometime do not notate their music. I am given to understand that such revered progenitors as JS Bach, WA Mozart and L v Beethoven were also adept at creating music without notating it.

Penderecki's notation of his Threnody tells the performers what to do, that's all that can reasonably be asked of musical notation. The sounds resulting from following the notation, not the notation itself, comprise the music, surely? If SCGrew fails to recognise a performance of Penderecki's Threnody as music, I don't think the problem lies in the notation, but in SCGrew's appreciation of what his ears communicate to his brain. It is the confounding of music with musical notation which I was challenging, albeit by citing improvisation, without notation, as a valid form of music-making.