As far as Western music is concerned, that began to change around the eighth century C.E., when Roman Catholic clergy invented a notation system for the modal, single-voiced Gregorian chants sung in church. From that first system, invented for the purpose of preservation and dissemination of those early airs, grew the encompassing metagenre of classical music as we know it today, whose primary, unifying, and distinguishing trait is its literacy—“perhaps the West’s signal musical distinction,” as the historian and musicologist Richard Taruskin has put it.
