'Reading notes' v. 'Reading music'

[musicrebel4u]

Here I should make a very clear distinction between "read notes" and "read music"--those are two completely different concepts and it is very clear to me that Soft Mozart is uncapable introducing what "read music" means, so you don't need to convince me about all the flaws, and of course, in this respect I will never be convinced that "quantity turns into quality" – Marik

Very interesting point to start new discussion!
As you know, when babies start talking, they are coping intonations of their parents. After they face outside world and learn how to read, their speech becoming independent.

Many music educators think that students are 'Tabula rasa' – white piece of paper and goal of the teacher to write on this papers, what student has to feel and how student has to express himself in music language.

But all people with ears listen to music even before their birth! The main problem for them is to manage 10 fingers of 2 hands (coordination) and to stop getting lost between 10+ lines and 10+ spaces of Grand Staff.

Yes, as teachers we could and should help them with understanding music professionally, but… when students are not busy with their coordination and reading obstacles!

Again, examples:
Here is a banjo player who learned Musette of Bach. Is his playing thoughtless? Is he playing 'notes' only? Obviously not! He just struggles with coordination:

Here is self-learner, who learned to read music and plays anything – I mean – ANYTHING that he sees in front of him. Is he lacking understanding of what he is playing?

I think, this kind of attitude is very unhealthy for music education, because instead of giving our students real freedom by teaching HOW TO READ, we limit them to the pieces that WE give them and enforcing our vision, what they suppose to feel and how. 

[Essyne]

Very thought-provoking.






Hmmmm . . . now I just need an opinion on the matter  .

[m]

Very interesting point to start new discussion!
 

Knowing how you usually handle discussions, I will pass on that one... just for time sake.

Here is self-learner, who learned to read music and plays anything – I mean – ANYTHING that he sees in front of him. Is he lacking understanding of what he is playing?

Yes, I paid attention to that Gentleman. But then again, Richter also was a self-learner, as was Arthur Rubinstein.

Best, M

[tds]

Here is a banjo player who learned Musette of Bach. Is his playing thoughtless? Is he playing 'notes' only? Obviously not! He just struggles with coordination:

this could only be best answered by our forum's banjoist .

[icanpiano]

You are so very right.

You have put on  the problem at the front and i hope music teachers would start open thier eyes to the world around them.

[m19834]

"Here I should make a very clear distinction between "read notes" and "read music"--those are two completely different concepts (...)"-- Marik

I think that reading notes is done intellectually in a way that is very similar to distinguishing between any kind of letter or number or whatnot, and it doesn't require any musical comprehension whatsoever.  However, I think that reading music is done with what I like to lately call the "musical mind" (which is basically that/everything within us which comprehends/speaks in the language of music), and developing the musical mind I think can't be done just by reading notes.  A musical mind thinks in terms of the musical text as it relates strictly to music and developing that, I think, is a combination of dance/motion, singing, listening, communication with another person in musical terms, etc..

Just a thought for now.

[keypeg]

Has anyone figured out which is the chicken, which the egg, or do the co-exist?  Maybe there's a chicken in an egg.  Or maybe there's a chicken containing an egg.  Or maybe it's a chickegg or a an eggen.  That's it - my music studies consist of chickeggening.  Both.

[m19834]

Has anyone figured out which is the chicken, which the egg, or do the co-exist?  Maybe there's a chicken in an egg.  Or maybe there's a chicken containing an egg.  Or maybe it's a chickegg or a an eggen.  That's it - my music studies consist of chickeggening.  Both.

ha ha ... not sure what you mean exactly, keypeg, but music actually came first for sure.  And, I am not trying to argue that anyway, I am actually just interested in the discussion and have been thinking about it ever since Marik brought it up in the other thread that M4U pulled the quote from (but did NOT reference).  You think that distinguishing the difference between note reading and music reading is the same as arguing about the old chicken and the egg ?

I would actually be interested in your thoughts about the differences between note reading and music reading.

[keypeg]

My history is not usual so I can't tell anything about the "normality" of my experiences.  I began with old fashioned solfege and I explored sound when I was young.  I would try to create melodies, and this was always music.  The concept of one note, another note, another note, and eventually hearing it as music is unknown to me - I cannot imagine what that is like.  I also explored sound for the sake of sound and sensation.  I remember my little Hohner "organ", the first invented keyboard, with the sweet vibrato because of the way the air pumped into the reeds - sixths are especially lovely on it.  I would get immersed simply exploring intervals and chords, listening to them vibrating.  Or feeling the vibration of a mouth organ and the physical feeling of harmony as vibration - an aesthetic pleasure lived and experienced like a good meal.

There is no segregation.  One thing flows into the other.  There are no separate parts.  But I also did not learn to read conventionally.  I learned last year and I'm in my fifties.

[m19834]

It is impossible to see and hear in lines and spaces and little black dots anything besides those very things, if not engaging a creative and musical imagination.

[keypeg]

What do we do when we see these squiggles and words and ideas form?  Is it not similar?

[m19834]

Do these lines and squiggles pur ?   kitty cat

[gyzzzmo]

I think that to be able to 'read the music' (and translating that into your playing) you have to be able to play and 'read the notes'. Because my experience is that to understand the 'music you read' and properly translating that into your playing, you often have to play it first and technally controlling it to see the bigger picture.

[m19834]

I think that music can be "read" on somebody's face or in their eyes, or on some landscape that is viewed from atop a mountain, it is not dependent on reading notes.

Also, anything can be "sounded out" but that doesn't mean that "music" is being read.  Similarly, an average 8 year old can properly sound out the word ecstasy, but to grasp its meaning is something entirely different.  I think that music is the meaning behind the notes, but unfortunately, to be able to fully respresent that in symbols is actually impossible.  If it were possible, there would be no reason to actually play it as it would all be there on the page in black and white (and, no, just for the record, I don't think that a spider running across a computer screen, picking up wrong notes, is any more indicative of music).

[keypeg]

Karli, the kitty cat hissed and then it curled up and looked cute.  I think it was the sharp "k" sound.

The problem with the spider is that I have a strong imagination.  The poor thing looked hungry and it was so much fun to drop wrong notes and feed it and see it scampering for apples.  He's a very cute spider.

I don't think the software was ever meant to teach music, but to get at the raw skill of note reading.

[m19834]

I don't think the software was ever meant to teach music, but to get at the raw skill of note reading.

Which, I think (if I remember correctly), was actually a part of the point in the original discussion, though I will have to go back and read it again to find out for sure. 

I probably took the concept in my own direction, hee hee. 

[m19834]

Karli, the kitty cat hissed and then it curled up and looked cute.  I think it was the sharp "k" sound.

I have to say, all this does is show that you have a good imagination and that you have some experience with cats.  It does not actually make the lines and squiggles pur or hiss or anything else.  Somebody who has never seen or been around a cat would not have anything to build an image with just because of those letters.  Just like the word "hiss" would mean next to nothing to them if they have never heard a cat actually hiss.

[keypeg]

The problem is that you prefaced it with asking if the lines and squiggles would purr.  For some reason, the fact that you spelled it as "pur" made the purring sound go away.  But to tell the truth, it took me a bit of time conjur up a picture.  When I first saw kitty cat there were simply sounds in my head.  Generally speaking I do not think in visual imagery, I think in sound.  When I hear music and it has meaning, or I create meaning, it is through sound.  I've always wondered at the preponderance of the visual I've seen in the piano boards.

[m19834]

No matter what you say or imagine, lines and squiggles themselves will not "purr," it is only your perception of those symbols that allows them to do that.  And, the lines and squiggles will never actually BE a cat.  I think you do get the point.  The fact still remains that if you did not know what a cat actually is (and if you did not engage your imagination), those words would mean next to nothing to you.

There is such a thing as people reading words and not comprehending what they are reading.  How could that happen if the symbols perfectly encapsulated the meaning of the words ?

In any case, you have not proven this statement of mine wrong : "It is impossible to see and hear in lines and spaces and little black dots anything besides those very things, if not engaging a creative and musical imagination."

You are simply stating that your imagination is tied to the symbols, which is great, I guess.  But, it's simply not like that for everyone and the symbols will always be only symbols which imperfectly represent something that is much more.

[keypeg]

I have become more and more interested in a chicken and egg kind of question in the last few months.  I have not been on piano forums for very long.  It has struck me that the approach of many people seems to be very visual.  There was even one person suggesting somewhere along the line of seeing a note on a page, pressing down a key, hearing that note (sort of), etc., doing this every day.  Then eventually after having "practiced" for a while (week, two weeks?) you would anticipate what it would sound like.  I got dizzy trying to imagine this - I couldn't.  The sound has always come first.  When there was written music, it became sound, and then I tried for the sound.

Well, that got me going.  In part, that got me going.

So I was thinking - what comes first - the visual or the audial?  What gets explored first?  Because I was not taught, conventionally or otherwise, I began with sound and music.  We were given m.d. solfege and patterns via the old chart and a pointer.  I associated the sound patterns to ups and downs along a scale.  THEN I was exposed to written music.  I saw that written music in the context of the sound.  I did not necessarily see CBAGF etc. because I did not know note names.  I saw ... no, I heard ... scales going up and down, arpeggios, chords .... when I saw the written notes.  I saw the general pattern.

I'm thinking that I perceived music very much like the people did in the time before written music was invented.  And after that music was invented they still retained a lot f that.  They were more like jazz musicians - when you have the figured bass, a spinnet that doesn't sustain, and you have to improvise along the bare notes while retaining a sense of the the rules of music.  Do we (not me personally) by and large still have that capacity?

Music is an thing in and of itself, and the written symbols are symbols of sequences of sound, and sensible musicals statement.  In that order.  But is it learned in reverse order.  Is anything lost in that.  Was my deprivation of instruction a happy accident?

Back to CATS:  I did consecutive interpretation in a very tense emotional and formal setting.  The question came about cats.  "Do you have a cat or a dog?"  "Un chat" "A cat" "Madam interpreter, did you say cat or dog?"  I looked at my notes and thought I saw the word cat, and thought I put a checkmark beside that word.  But I was looking at a comical drawing of a cat head and gave it whiskers.  It is only when the client sitting beside me burst out in helpless laughter that I examined my "notes" and saw the picture of a grinning cat.  We had to recess for 5 minutes.  What had happened?

When I am interpreting I am presented with ideas and images of events that the speaker is remembering and setting forth in the symbolism of language. I must capture that message and render it in another language as though I had become the other person transmitting that person's thoughts.  In what language am I operating?  The cat drawing would suggest that I am not operating in any language: the thoughts, ideas, and pictures are elements existing by themselves and are then translated into sequenced symbols.

What, other than that, is music?  There is something even beyond the notes we play.

I've strayed and can't tie the thought together.  I'll have to leave it "as is".

[m19834]

Hi, keypeg,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts so openly.  The thing is, I have to say that I have never meant to tie the idea of the symbols to the visual aspect alone.  Actually, I believe the visual aspect of the symbols and the system of writing them are more representative of the actual visual aspects of playing the notes, and the tactile sensation (where our hands and fingers are supposed to be on the keys, which direction our hands go on the piano, etc.), than they are of the aural.  What I have realized lately though, is that these little lines and spaces and dots, well, at the very least, they come nowhere even remotely close to representing what is my experience in sound.  Though, I must admit, there is sometimes very little separation in audio and visual, in my world (and probably truly in anybody's).

For example, a single note played in a particular way, especially at times that I have been alone and just experimenting at the instrument, that sound can seem to fill the entire room.  It can seem to echo across the valley that I live in and it can seem to chase the ridges at the top of the mountains.  Literally speaking, the sound waves are actually travelling farther than we can hear.  One sound may open up an entire *universe* for me, with oceans and colors and galaxies.  It finally dawned on me that this was my experience with sound, and that I have had a problem for many years now, not knowing how to link my experience with sound to this little black dot on the page.  Sound came first for me, too.  My experience with music and my experience with sound is its very own, living thing, and I have a very difficult time trying to channel all that that is through these little symbols on the page.  And, why should I ?

Music is, I think, at least better represented (for me anyway) as a language and experience in sound and silences.  It is very difficult for me to link little dots to that.  I am much more inclined to link it with the entire universe as I percieve it, and how can that be represented by dots of any kind ?  I just don't know how.  The closest I can come is through drawing and painting.

[m19834]

hee hee ... apparently I am gushing a bit  .

In an attempt to tie together what I am trying to express with what I think this thread is kind of about, I would have to say that (and this may sound odd), despite what my experience with sound is, as I have described it above, I actually think that I will still prefer the good ole' black and white system than a color-coded one.  But let me clarify, I am speaking in terms of sound, not in terms of the visual aspects of learning to link the staff and notes to getting around the piano.  I can see within the current system a simple kind of binary code where the sound is either on or off.  There is either sound or silence (though silence is something very interesting to me), and on a basic level, I think the systems that we currently have are just fine if not perfect for that.  They tell us everywhere we need to be, and they tell us when there is sound and when there is not.

In terms of music itself though, there is just no substitution for sound itself, and everything sound represents to each one of us (and wow, my ear is just *craving* the sound of the piano).  But, I also believe that sound is only a representation of what music actually is, it just happens to be even more fully expressive of music than what the visual and the linguistic aspects of life (at least of these alone) can express (otherwise sound in the case of music would have no need for existence).

I have to add that I think a vivid imagination can actually be quite a distraction when it comes to all of this ... hee hee, if not even a barracade.

[m19834]

Nevermind.  I give up.  I have no idea what anything in the world is and I think I will just go lay on my back on the floor in defeat.

bye bye

[morningstar]

I see innuendos Karli...LOL
Wait I kind of glossed over most of this...what is M4U talking about exactly?

[m19834]

I see innuendos Karli...LOL

just in case you read my first message, I am adding this more polite one now.

I don't care anymore 

*over it*

[morningstar]

just in case you read my first message, I am adding this more polite one now.

I don't care anymore 

*over it*

i'm just being silly, calm down lol
Is M4U actually gone?

[m19834]

i'm just being silly, calm down lol

Amp up, morgenstern.

Is M4U actually gone?

I also don't care too much about this, either, and am feeling pretty over that, too.