[LAU] Reading music (was Qtractor vs Rosegarden)

Stephen Doonan stephen.doonan at gmail.com
Wed Nov 12 17:26:26 EST 2008


Bob van der Poel wrote:

> I've got to chime in on this point! Completely agree. To me, at least, 
> not knowing how to read music is just like being a novelist and not 
> being able to read English (fill in your language).
> 
> The sad thing is that folks have a conception of music reading be "very 
> hard". It really isn't ...


In my case, music reading was hard because my eyes have different focal 
planes. The harder I tried to focus, the more it looked like the notes 
were dancing on the page.

When I learned my piano recital piece at 12 years old, an Impromptu by 
Schubert, I was lucky. My mother had a recording of Vladimir Horowitz 
playing the  same piece, so I used the recording to learn the piece by 
ear, except that I learned and played it a half-step higher than it was 
written (it was written in B-flat). I learned that many years later when 
a friend played the same piece in what I thought was the wrong key.

I think that there was at least one benefit in not learning to read 
music, and that is that my concept of music was not overly set or 
influenced by the conventions of sheet music. I learned more about 
sound, especially harmony. I learned that a key signature for example is 
  mostly just a notational convenience, ever since the equal temperament 
system of tuning gave us a complete 12-tone chromatic scale. Most of the 
music since Bach's time depends upon this "keyless" tuning and its 
introduction of much more complex and rich harmonic possibilities.

I'm sorry to be babbling. :-)

Best wishes,
Steve



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