This treatise provides recorder performers and teachers with a guide to understanding the unconventional notation symbols encountered in Music for a Bird by Hans-Martin Linde and Sieben Stücke Für Altblockflöte by Markus Zahnhausen. Given the context of the overall history of notation, it argues that the idiosyncrasies of the unconventional notation symbols encountered in the recorder repertoire of contemporary composers such as Linde and Zahnhausen are by no means an anomaly. Throughout history, notated scores have functioned merely as incomplete guides to the reconstruction and the realization of musical works. Along with the decoding of these instructions, a host of acculturated meanings have always been taken for granted on the part of the writers of such guidelines. In the light of the modernist crisis and the resultant exacerbation of the gulf between composers and their audience, however, it would seem that the need for such acculturated intervention is greater then ever before. This treatise serves to bridge the gulf between the works of Linde and Zahnhausen on the one hand, and the average performer and teacher of the recorder on the other, by offering an analysis both of the meaning of the unconventional symbols these works contain as well as of the method according to which they should be executed on the recorder.