Re: Reading music

[D T e i c h e r <shuffling@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rob really hits the nail on the head here (as usual). 
On a practical level, if you want to play
professionally, learning to read music is an important
element of being successful.  If you just want to be a
great artist and don't have a desire to learn to read
music and don't need to learn it in order to make a
living playing music, it may or may not further your
artistic aspirations depending on who you are and what
you want to do.

When I was a boy, I studied classical piano for many
years.  Later, I studied classical flute for many
years.  In both cases, it was "required" that I read
music and, of course, I did.  I found the attitude of
my music teachers too dogmatic on this point, however,
and felt that the insistence on reading had its
downside.

One of the things that really attracted me to the harp
was the fact that it had a strong tradition of playing
by ear.  I once experimented with reading music on the
harp, but, at the time, I decided it was (for me) a
dangerous thing to do as I was trying to unlearn a lot
of my earlier musical education.  However, if I was
ever going to try to play harp professionally, I would
certainly learn to read music on the harp.

Some people seem to believe that there is an optimal
way of teaching children music that will give them the
greatest amount of general skills and techniques that
they can then apply to whatever musical endeavor they
chose.  Based on my experience, this is wrong.  The
way someone is taught will influence how they will
eventually play and the kind of musician they will be.
Different students excel or fail depending on the
approach taken.  A good teacher will try to intuit
what approach will work best for a particular student
and be flexible enough to apply different approaches. 
Some students can, in time, learn to play well in
different styles and traditions, though I've never
found it that common to find someone who really
excelled at more than one gendre.

For myself, it took me years to unlearn much of the
excellent classical music education I had received in
order to start to have a feel for and sound decent as
a blues player.  In a sense, there is a "pay your
money, take your choice" aspect to musical education
(as there in, in fact, with all education).  I know
many people who are great classical musicians, who
can't improvise to save their lives.  I know other
people, who are great at improvisation, who can't play
an standard repertoire piece to save their lives.  I
also know other people who do both well.  As far as I
can tell, from an artistic point of view, there are no
hard-and-fast rules here.



- --- Robert Paparozzi <chromboy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>       Reading isn't imperative to be a great
> musician, I think I was making
> some great music, before I could read a note 25
> years ago. I did however get
> frustrated at rehearsals when I wanted to show the
> band new tunes and I had
> to resort to humming the groove or melody and
> stomping my feet to show the
> drummer the beat I wanted. I think when you decide
> to play with others
> professionally, you owe it to yourself as well as
> the rest of the music
> world to learn the "language" of music....here's a
> recent example:
> 
> Last week I got back from a tour of Japan, on the
> last two nights of our
> Tokyo engagement, our Special Guest ( Eddie Floyd),
> had to leave early for
> the States and it was decided to to bring in a
> Famous Japanese Rock Star
> (Kyoshiro Otawano) for the last two nights to play
> with our band (The
> Original Blues Brothers Band.)
> 
>  He brought in charts for 3 of his songs and we read
> them down at a
> rehearsal on the afternoon of the gig....and it all
> sounded great and the
> process of "reading" saved the gig!!!!  Attemping to
> try to pull this off by
> memory on such short notice would have been a
> disaster for sure.
> 
>          There was NO problem of lacking any SOUL,
> we had Steve Cropper &
> John Tropea on Guitars, Lou Marini on Tenor Sax,
> Alan Rubin on Trumpet and a
> full band of players that not only "Grooved" but got
> the job done on time!
> 
>      The point is, not everybody is at the same
> level of reading
> proficiency, but a common core and Knowledge base is
> imperative if we are to
> commuicate with other musicians, in this case the
> Rock star spoke hardly any
> English, but it didn't matter....his charts were in
> a language we all
> understood.,-)!!
> 
<snip>

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