[Harp-L] Reading Music

[Michael Rubin]

Personally I sat around watching my mom read music when I was a kid.  She
couldn't improvise.  At the end of my 15th year I bought a harp and spent a
month making sounds.  Then someone taught me to play a single note.  I
pulled out my mom's Simon and Garfunkel songbook and turned to Feeling
Groovy (The 59th Street Bridge Song).  I was able to pick it out by ear.
Luckily for me, the whole book was written in C.  I soon realized every
time I played 6 draw, the music dot was in the same place.  It took me a
lot longer to start calling that A.

I spent a year reading music for a few hours every day.  I knew nothing of
timing or sharps and flats so some of my songs didn't song right.

One day I accidentally bent a note.  I had heard of bending because of
Gindick's Musically Hopeless book but it didn't make any sense.  So then I
read music and every time there was a draw note I bent it.

A week later I suddenly grokked cross harp improvisation.  A month later I
was in a band and have been working ever since.  No kidding.

I believe my ability to understand improvisation was due to reading music.
Because if improvisation is creating melodies, you should study melodies.

I got a chromatic and figured out sharps and flats and got to where I could
read the melodies in my jazz improvisation classes in college and handle
sight singing in choir.  If I was playing by myself and did not know the
song my timing would be out the window.

I had a few songbooks over the years but that was about it until I was 28.
Someone called me to audition for the Houston production of a soon to be
Broadway play.  There was no way I was doing Broadway, that would be a New
York musician.  They just wanted to save money by going local.  Living in
Austin, Houston felt about as local to me as New York.

I did well impressing them at the audition.  But when they asked me to read
music I had no timing and missed the cues.

The interviewer asked me "Can you read music?"

"Yes", I said.

He then asked, "Can you read music?"

"YES!", I said.

I got the gig.  I quit my job, put all my stuff in storage, got rid of my
apartment, took two lessons on reading music from 2 different friends and
spent 2 weeks reading music 8 hours a day.  When I got to Houston I was the
worst reader of the group but I wasn't fired either.  They liked me so much
I got the Broadway chair.  It probably helped that Rob Papparozzi wasn't
available.  Thanks Rob!

On a side note, it was Broadway that got me into theory.  One day a singer
couldn't make it due to being sick.  The understudy couldn't sing in the
standard key so the conductor told us to transpose it to A.  I raised my
hand.

"What key are we in now?"

You could have heard a pin drop.

At that moment I vowed to understand theory and began asking every musician
what was important about theory.

Back to reading.  I understood that timing was my weakest link.  Somehow I
got hip to Louis Bellson's Modern Reading Text in 4/4 time.  This is a
drummer's book that is written music but all of it is on one note, so all
you are reading is the timing.  5 to 8 hours a day for a few years.

I started reading out of the Real Books.

Recently there has been a new development.  In February I was hired to play
with the Austin Opera in January of 2019.  As I have done a few theater
shows, I am well aware that in general you receive the music around a week
before the show begins, because they are under the impression that all
musicians read at the level of symphonic musicians.  Although I have
advised them it would be wise to send me the music asap, they have yet to
do it.

So I bought an advanced classical music book for flute because the range of
a 12 hole chromatic is similar to that of a flute.  I have spent around 30
minutes a day on it.  I know I am improving because I have a gig that I do
every couple of months that is basically 75% reading and it has gotten
easier.  I have also had a great time and would say it has been one of my
biggest joys this year.

I don't think reading (or theory) has hurt my improvisational abilities one
bit.  I think it has helped everything I do.

I don't think reading is necessary for becoming a great improvisor or
musician in general.  It's pretty low on my priority list if someone were
to ask me how to become a high level musician.

As a teacher I rarely suggest reading music until:

1. The student requests learning to read.

2. They've been coming for so long, might as well.

3. There is an element of music, say timing, that they just cannot improve
upon in other ways.  People learn differently.  There is information in
reading music, just like there in information in  reading a book.
Sometimes it clarifies what the student is supposed to DO.  I often say,

"You cannot do the work until you understand the concept.  But
understanding the concept is not doing the work."

(feel free to use that, just credit me.)

BUT what I have discovered is that there is a certain type of student who
took lessons reading music as a child.  Almost always, their relationship
with music is a skittish one.  Improvisation scares the heck out of them.
It is like a shelter dog who was beaten by their previous male owner and
now all men scare it.  This is not an exaggeration.

With lots of love and care this person can learn to be a great improvisor
and enjoy music.  But often, the pain is so great, we revert to learning to
read on the harmonica.  Which is fine.  Everybody should have a connection
to music, imo, and if that is theirs, it is my job to cultivate that.

Michael Rubin
michaelrubinharmonica.com









On Fri, Nov 2, 2018 at 12:58 AM philharpn--- via Harp-L <harp-l at xxxxx>
wrote:

> My experience is totally the opposite.
>
> Learning to read music while learning to play piano was the best thing I
> ever did.
>
> And I didn't have a clue what I was doing for a long time. But I kept at
> it. Eventually it made sense.
>
> I begged my parents for piano lessons as a kid and finally started in 4th
> grade after my parents found a second hand piano. I took semi-classical
> weekly lessons for five years. Nobody else played music in the house at the
> time. My teacher didn't teach older kids (high school age) and rock n roll
> was happening anyway and I didn't search out another teacher. I purchased
> sheet music from time to time in high school and worked my way through it.
>
> I never performed concertos or any thing more exciting than the annual
> spring recital. My last recital was a version of "Autumn Leaves" -- which
> was all over the radio at the time by Roger Williams. I have known how to
> read music since 1954 and it made it possible for me later to study guitar,
> harmonica, ukulele and trumpet without wasting my time through endless
> trial and error dead ends.
>
> Today, I take weekly lessons in trumpet, jazz guitar and slide guitar and
> teach group lessons in Harmonica 101 and Ukulele 101. All of it made easier
> because I can read the damn notes.
>
> The other side of this story is the number of people who have regrets that
> they didn't stick with piano lessons long enough to learn how to play. I
> can play by ear. But if I didn't have a fake book or sheet music it would
> take me 10 times as long to work my way through a song. Plus I would leave
> out half the notes.
>
> Because of piano, I studied classical guitar -- use all the fingers  --
> when I first took it up, which made it easier to play fingerstyle blues and
> folk. Besides, I kept dropping the pick in the sound hole.
>
>
> And nobody ever told me that practicing was supposed to be fun! Or for
> girls only. Most of the piano players I knew were guys!
>
> That old argument that people who sight read can't play without sheet
> music! If you can sight read you can go through the song a few dozen times
> and have it memorized-- which is faster than trying to figure it out by ear.
>
> My younger sister -- never quit-- she continued taking piano lessons
> through high school and when she couldn't get a piano to play  in college--
> she signed up for piano lessons. She was a grade school teacher (not a
> music teacher).
>
> I never heard of anybody who complained that they wasted time learning to
> read and play music. All I ever hear is the folks who can't read
> complaining that it is a waste of time.
>
> The Suzuki Method -- as I understand it -- has the really little kids
> leaning to play songs by ear and only later do they learn to read music.
> They may learn to sing the song first. I don't know.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hellerman, Steven L. <shellerman at xxxxx>
> To: harp-l <harp-l at xxxxx>
> Sent: Thu, Nov 1, 2018 4:53 pm
> Subject: [Harp-L] Reading Music
>
> I wrote extensively on this subject several years ago here on the harp-l,
> particularly regarding my own experience . In short: As a kid and teenager
> I was told by teachers that reading music was essential for playing any
> instrument. "Yeah, well people like the Beatles are geniuses", said the
> guitar instructor when I raised the subject, " but you need to read
> music".  In my 15 year-old mind, that meant "people like you, who don't
> have natural musical talent like, say, the Beatles, need to read music if
> they want to play." It was no fun so I -- assuming that I had no natural
> musical ability -- quit those tedious guitar lessons. I was 43 when I
> discovered that I could indeed play some music, first on the harmonica,
> then a little guitar. I play completely by ear, though I know enough theory
> to know what harp to use in what keys, and to figure out the chords to
> songs on the guitar.
>
>
> There are millions of people (mostly female) out there who as kids were
> taught piano with an emphasis on sight reading. The vast majority of them
> quit altogether when their Mom said they didn't have to do it anymore. It
> just wasn't any fun. And perhaps the majority of those folks (mostly
> female) who might still play would be completely lost without sheet music.
> Still not much fun, one would think.
>
>
> Anyway, hope you all get my point.
>
>
> SLH
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 08:11:24 -0400
> From:
> To: harp-l <harp-l at xxxxx>
> Subject: [Harp-L] Learning Music
> Message-ID: <4E8A4389-FB68-4719-9500-210663AA8D33 at xxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset=utf-8
>
> Hi,
>
> I thought the notion of a child learning music for the first time may be
> apropos to the discussion on modes, positions and music theory. As a child,
> my parents sent me to a piano teacher who used the Schwann (sp?) teaching
> system. In principle, it was intended to teach the student to both learn to
> read music and to play it on the piano at the same time. I did terribly
> with this method and my hypothesis is that it?s because it tries to teach
> one to read while it teaches one to play. If we look at how children
> acquire spoken language (my field is related to linguistics), we see that
> they learn to speak years before they learn to read.
>
> In my mind, teaching a child to read music before we teach them to ?speak?
> music is akin to teaching someone to repair a carburetor before we teach
> them to drive the car. It?s my belief that we should teach music to
> children by showing them the sounds and sales (the alphabet of music) and
> then add a little theory at a time. When they?re ready, teaching them to
> read music will make sense to them as the symbols on the page will already
> correspond to sounds. A child can do a lot just knowing scales and playing
> around and figuring out what sounds good to them. Formalizing the mechanics
> of music before the student has an aural vocabulary causes confusion and
> expects to train two separate parts of the brain at once.
>
> This is just my opinion but we?ve observed similar problems with teaching
> math to kids and we lose a lot of students due to backwards teaching
> methods.
>
> Happy Hacking,
> cdh
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:55:14 -0400
> From: The Iceman <icemanle at xxxxx>
> To: cdh at xxxxx, harp-l at xxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Harp-L] Learning Music
> Message-ID: <166ca9f1183-1ec5-8fbc at xxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> I concur with Chris....some of the most fun I've had has been teaching a
> few youngsters.....some may remember Sunny Girl, who I began teaching when
> she was 6....descriptive words/ theory/etc was not necessary with someone
> so young....it was like direct music from one mind into the other....for
> instance, she would play something, I'd say 'no, not exactly, it's..." and
> then I'd play it correctly. She'd look at me with a puzzled look at first,
> then that flash of understanding would cross her face and she'd say "Oh,
> you mean like..." and then play it back correctly...minimum words, maximum
> understanding non-verbal flow.
>
>
> Best to start'em young, but start'em with effective teaching style. Less
> words, more action!
>
>
> The trouble with adults is that they insist everything be explained to
> them using lotsa words! They lose that "open like a sponge" innocence of
> youth as they age.
>
>
>