Dick, that may be the way it was initially developed, but it worked so well for other instruments that it was very quickly adopted by all musicians in the Western European tradition as THE standard method of notation.

Singers can sight read from the current more generalized system than they could from, say, lute tablature. The current system graphically displays note and interval relationships, whereas, if a singer didn't already play the lute, they could not get that kind of information directly from looking at lute tablature,

Pianists, violinists, cellists, clarinetists, players of the French horn, organists—and generally wander through the whole orchestra, band, choir. Then take a look at the "fake books" used by jazz musicians.

The song collections by the Lomaxes, Cecil Sharp, Carl Sandburg, and many, many others. I've got nine feet of this kind of material on my book shelves. Hell's bells, even John Jacob Niles!

As I keep saying, it works. Other cultures have their own systems, and as has been noted, some of them are adopting standard Western notation as the basis of their systems, then adapting and modifying to their particular needs (such as writing it from right to left, which is what they are used to). Not unlike certain standard orchestral instruments, refered to as "transposition instruments" with which the musician reads in one key, but the music comes out in another (CLICKY).

As to ash-canning the present system of notation in preference to someone's "new and brilliant idea" (spawned, perhaps, by their own inability, or reluctance to spend the time and effort to adequately learn the existing system) would, I think, be a pretty hard sell to the millions of musicians who have been using and getting along fine with the current system.

All those musicians you'd have to retrain, all those shelves of books and stacks of sheet music you'd have to transcribe to the new sustem, then reprint. . . .

And the guy who plays a Bb clarinet would really be up a tree!

Don Firth