In con­ven­tional prac­tice, the no­ta­tion mainly con­tains play­ing in­struc­tions on how to use the mu­si­cal in­stru­ments, for ex­ample speci­fy­ing the pitch of the ba­sic tone; its over­tone struc­ture, how­ever, is not in any way noted down. In a con­ven­tional score, only lim­ited in­for­ma­tion about the spec­trum of over­tones can be gath­ered from the in­stru­men­ta­tion; thus only a lim­ited spec­trum of over­tones is real­ized in the ac­tual per­form­ance.

We can pre­sume that in for­mer times, in the early days of this form of lim­ited play­ing in­struc­tion, mu­si­cians had a far greater po­ten­tial of in­ner enli­vened fan­tasy at their dis­posal, and had a sub­stan­tially greater for­ma­tive will than the mu­si­cians of to­day. And in all like­li­hood this mu­si­cal wealth was per­ceived and ap­pre­ci­ated with due re­spect by the lis­tener of that time.

How else can we ex­plain the impact that a ma­gi­cian of his in­stru­ment had like, for ex­ample, Paganini who, through his mi­racu­lous play, made his au­di­ences ask them­selves se­ri­ously whether he ac­tu­ally ex­isted as a hu­man be­ing, or whether he was only a figment of their imagi­na­tion (they even rushed on stage and touched the vio­lin­ist to de­ci­sively an­swer this ques­tion).

Only the enli­vened fan­tasy of such mu­si­cians jus­ti­fies his­tori­cally a no­ta­tion so lim­ited as the con­ven­tional one, which is still in gen­eral use to­day.

Later, how­ever, the world gave up the for­mer, rather phi­loso­phi­cal, in­ner way of de­scrip­tion and, dur­ing the last cen­tu­ries, went through a radi­cal change to­wards a con­crete, outer de­scrip­tion of pri­mar­ily physi­cal phe­no­mena. Thus, the mu­si­cian of to­day ex­pects a simi­lar pic­ture of gross, sci­en­tifi­cally exact defi­ni­tions in the scores. He even con­siders it a great ideal not to de­vi­ate in any way from this ap­par­ent outer form of de­scrip­tion; and, try­ing to ad­here as closely as pos­si­ble to this seem­ingly fixed in­for­ma­tion, he sim­ply thinks as a child of his time.