Music notation is intrinsic in the composition and performance of Western art music and also in its analysis and research. The process of writing about music remains underexplored, in particular how excerpts of music notation are selected and arranged in a written text, and how that text describes and contextualises the excerpts. This article applies 'semantic gravity' from Legitimation Code Theory to characterise notational excerpts and their integration in a written text, by focusing on how closely they are connected to a particular performance or generalised across performances. It illustrates these concepts with case studies of tertiary students' research projects to reveal how different purposes drive different notational usage when writing about music. This provides insight for music educators on how to support writing about music and the use of notational quotes.