The Order Of The Chapters Is Significant

Labanotation has some complex aspects to it, one of which is the intricate set of dependencies between the various concepts. It's often the case that in order to understand one Labanotation topic, you need to understand something else first.

One of the goals of this text is to identify the foundational aspects of Labanotation, the parts that don't rely on any other ideas, and present them before the others. This way a layperson coming fresh to Labanotation would be able to start to educate themselves, without the sense of encountering something that had arbitrary rules that couldn't be understood.

Each chapter, therefore, introduces topics that either stand entirely alone, or depend only on material that has already been covered in previous chapters.

This can be a problem if you're primarily interested in a topic that's covered in a later chapter. It's quite possible that, without reading the previous chapters, you won't be able to understand what's in the chapter you're interested in.

For that reason, if you're not already very familiar with Labanotation, the best way to read this text is in order, chapter by chapter.

Each Topic Is Centralized As Much As Possible

Although this text tries to explain everything as clearly as possible, it doesn't oversimplify the topic. If a given topic is very large, then the chapter covering it may be very long.

This could be annoying if you're anxious to get beyond a particularly long chapter in order to get to the topic you're really interested in.

The benefit of centralizing each topic, however, is that it becomes trivial to find what you're looking for. It's not the goal of this text to present an easy or quick introduction to Labanotation. The goal is to make Labanotation as available and accessible as possible, to anyone interested in plumbing its fascinating depths.

As it turns out, Labanotation doesn't lend itself to this approach. Many aspects of Labanotation are interrelated, and trying to understand any single one of them will inevitably require a consideration of the others.

When there is no way to avoid fragmenting a single topic across multiple chapters, I still give that topic its own easily accessible, centralized chapter. But instead of describing the topic in that chapter, I give clear links to all the chapters where that topic is discussed. It's not unlike an index entry in a traditional book. But I try to keep the need for them to a minimum.

You Can Help

If you find a part of the text that's wrong or incomplete, or that confuses you, or that should link to another related section, it would be very helpful if you'd let me know. Send an email to zacharyb@gmail.com, with "labanotation.net" in the subject line, and let me know what your issue is. Don't forget to include the URL of the page you're talking about, so I won't be confused.

I subscribe to the philosophy that this text will get a lot better if it has people who care about it, trying to help it improve. A thousand heads are better than one.

What are some ways you could help improve this site?

• Identify some confusing or ambiguous text
• Identify someplace that describes Labanotation wrong
• Figure out a cleaner organizational structure for any part of the text
• Fix "TBD" links wherever they may be
• Identify links that should be included in a section, that for whatever reason got missed

That's just a few. Another way to help would be to let me know about chapters or sections that you find particularly useful and clear. If I know where the good parts are, I won't need to wonder so much about whether to revise them, and I'll be able to focus my attention elsewhere.

Of course, no one has to help, and everyone is more than welcome to use the text without contributing any feedback. That's why it's here!