Great Sight-readers Vs. Great Memorizers - May be one and the same!

[opus10no2]

PATTERNS. Music is full of them. The more we play, the more we listen, the more we accumulate a kind of 'repertoire' of patterns that we become familiar with.

The greatest analogy could be words - vocabulary - when we read words or memorize a sequence of words...we aren't cognitively processing EVERY LETTER.

Some people are better at one or the other - some don't have the best long term memory and some are great at processing things on the fly - but the concept that you have to be either a great reader or a great memorizer are actually founded on the exact same thing - a gift for recognizing, remembering, and generally processing these recurring patterns.

Learning Music becomes faster because you're learning less and less 'new' material as you become more advanced - you're simply using familiar patterns refashioned in new orders, new ways.

I know all of this is pretty obvious to a lot of you, but breaking it down in this simple way puts things in perspective, sometimes we get lost among the trees and it give us peace of mind to zoom out and look at the forest like this.

[keypeg]

I understand what you are saying, but this same thing became a trap for me.  There are some elements to reading music which are important, and I'm also thinking that maybe a different word should be used, because reading music is not exactly the same as reading words.  It is more like reading a graph, maybe.  I'll try to explain.
I had my first actual lessons when I was close to 50.  Nothing was taught in school, except for solfege by a grade 2 teacher.  It seems I always had an ear for musical patterns, and classical music played in the house.  When I was given a little organ with a book for adult learners at age 8, I found where C is on the piano and in the notes, I know that "Do" was above the last sharp, and then I sang my way up and down the notes.  The next thing was my grandmother's book of sonatinas, starting with Clementi.
What developed for me was a strong recognition of musical patterns, especially the cliche traditional ones in Clementi's sonatinas, which are the backbone of a lot of earlier music.  I was not really reading each note.  A diagonal line is what a scale looks like, and you're also hearing it as the scale you sang.  You get clues: cadences usually slow down, the shift to the Dominant key is pepped with accidentals on the same note, preceded by white notes for the slow-down.  Clementi's Alberti bass is so predictable that you'll know what it will do, before seeing it.  A phrase starting a given way, will probably continue and conclude in a predictable way, followed by its answering phrase.  Etc.
This became my way of "reading" music ..... for 45 years!  I did not know how people normally read, and I didn't know how reading really worked.  I had picked up some important advanced elements of reading that experienced musicians use, but not other elements.

For playing an instrument with fingering such as piano, violin, guitar etc. (but not trumpet etc.), a specific note on the page has a specific location on the instrument.  (Ok, for violin & guitar it can have several locations on other strings, but I'm keeping it simple).  A musician who reads will at some level see the note on the page, and have the physical reflex of placing a finger on the corresponding piano key.  I did not know this existed.  For me it had been: See a series of notes, hear a melody in my head, play what I hear in my head, with the sounds shining out from the piano surface - adjust where it sounds wrong.

What I had learned to do pattern-wise worked for music that was diatonic and had predictable patterns.  It broke down if there was a note off in some strange place, and that did not follow such a pattern.  It broke down if the music switched around in different keys, or no key, or was no longer diatonic, did not have some predictable sequence, was in an unfamiliar genre, etc.  I would play in the wrong key and not know.  For instruments with a more limited range, like recorder, I would "run out of notes", switch into different keys by trial and error, until one had "enough notes".  This was unsatisfactory, and fuzzy.

Pure reading, where you learn to associate the note on the page with the key on the piano, is an important skill. I pursued it, and have it now.  intervalic reading helps.  Knowing your chords and scales helps.  Even in reading words, we get a full grasp of the alphabet.  If someone writes ""The cat is on the house.", you know it does not say "The cat is in the house.", so you know the right place to look for the cat, and fetch a ladder, because you distinguish "i" from "o".

[opus10no2]

Oh I absolutely agree and it is very true that the GREATEST Music more often than not defies convention and varies patterns more, they're not all 'textbook'.

Lesser Music spins patterns, stock cliches.

But nevertheless it holds true that while we must have open eyes to all the details, a mind for patterns like you say helps immensely.

[bernadette60614]

What is a good approach to learning how to recognize patterns?

[opus10no2]

When you look at a score - are you looking at individual notes, or are you looking at patterns?

Consider it like reading WORDS - when you're reading these words are you breaking down every single letter, or glazing over each word with a quick scan and recognising the familiar.

Well Music really is the same, it just comes through experience - and each style has it's own vocabulary - like a different language of words - that have to become familiarised.

If you've learned 10 Mozart sonatas - learning the eleventh becomes so much easier than the first or second. You begin to notice common patterns, cadences, chords, runs.

There really is no systematic approach to learning these patterns other than to simply develop an eye for common groupings - such as chromatic lines, scalar lines, arpeggios, and chords which are made of a certain group of notes.

When I see a sequence of chromatic notes for example...do I look at every note?! No I look at the first and last and have a quick glance to make sure there are no irregularities.

The greatest analogy again is like the one with words - you develop a skill level wherein you can swallow whole words and small phrases as opposed to picking out single letters every time.

[keypeg]

Which again can bring us into the trap of whether the cat is in or on the house.  While the verb "read" is used for both activities, there are some important differences between reading words and reading music.  There are skills inherent to music notation which are important to master.  That includes being able to recognize a single note so as to play that note on your instrument, even outside of context.