According to some, recording has made musical notation useless. For Chris Cutler, this is a political and ideological issue: the bourgeois tradition of Euro-classical music, in his observations, is opposed to popular music into an extreme dichotomy, and is destined to fail. I just partly agree with that, not completely, but it is not my intention to discuss this here. Goebbels does not use written scores for all of his pieces, and when he does, it is with a descriptive, not prescriptive, intention. Befreiung des Prometheus, firstly made as a radio piece and then, years later, as a staged concert, is fully 'written', but it is not scored – that is because of the many things happening in the piece that cannot be written down (also musical things, such as grooves or manipulated noises). Again, it resembles the normal activity of groups and bands in popular music (even when members in groups do read music, they prefer to communicate in other ways while rehearsing: it is quite normal). As a consequence, as Goebbels wrote to me: "My scores don't represent enough information for a performance".

In addition, I would say that they do not represent enough information for an analysis, too. Here's some bars from the piece Befreiung (not to be confused with Befreiung des Prometheus).

By reading the violin part, we could imagine a virtuoso part, with every cultural connection to virtuosity on violin coming to our minds. But as we listen to it, even if we knew that it's a distorted violin, we might find difficult to recognize it. It sounds like a guitar – maybe as played by Fred Frith (who worked with Goebbels in The man in the elevator)? Or by a heavy metal musician? We would never imagine it by reading the score, and the same works for musicians. It means that musicians and musicologists dealing with Goebbels' music must be aware of his approach to composition, nearer to that of popular musicians.