I am inspired by the person bold enough to ask if we really need different keys.

My question is: why do we need to divide written music up into bars?

What purpose do the bar divisions serve to a person reading music in order to know what to play? Would playing be any different if there were no time signatures and the notes of various lengths were just written one after another?

I know that guitar chord changes tend to coincide with new bars, and I know that drumbeats and toe taps fall into a pattern of hitting the same beats in each bar. But I would suggest that that happens naturally in response to the melody and doesn't need to be written down. If a group of non-musicians clap along to a song in 4/4, some will clap beats 1 and 3, and some will clap beats 2 and 4, but nobody will clap every third beat. The rhythm is inherent in the melody, and nobody needs to be told it's in 4/4.

I started to think about this when I found sheet music to Danny Boy on the internet. The person offering it had the note corresponding to "Oh" as the first beat in a bar, rather than having "Oh Danny" as a pick-up and "boy" as a first beat. I knew this was wrong because the chord changes didn't match up with the bar changes, but I realized that it didn't affect my ability to find out what notes to play or how long to play them - which is the point of writing music, isn't it?

Marion