[Harp-L] Reading Music

[Slim Heilpern]

Hi Michael!

I found your personal journey of learning to read music to be really interesting, and even though it’s very different from mine, I can relate.

Just wanted to comment on this bit though:

> 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.

Just to be clear, I’m assuming you don’t mean that the reading lessons as a child were the _cause_ of having difficulty learning to improvise later — only that there are such cases where a person learned to read music but never tried to play by ear or improvise until much later, and then found that transition to be difficult (or impossible). I have seen the same.

However, I and others I know did take lessons which included reading at a very young age and also learned to use our ears at a young age (my piano lessons began at age 5, reading, but I also picked up the chromatic harmonica at the same time, not reading, and I soon found myself playing be ear on the piano as well). Despite the reading lessons, which went on for years, I’ve always been much stronger playing by ear and improvising — it has always come to me with relative ease compared to reading. My wife also learned to read music as a kid and she also plays very well by ear as well as improvising, but in her case she became a much stronger reader than I will ever be (she's routinely in situations where she has to sight read very difficult music on various instruments as I watch in amazement). 

We each have our strong points, for whatever reason, and the same path won’t necessarily produce the same results in different individuals.

- Slim.

www.SlimAndPenny.com