First of all, I disagree with the assertion that Western notation lacks duration. This was true during the earliest days of music notation, but we’ve had a universal means to notate duration for centuries now.
Further, not all classical musicians are trained to read and write music. Today that is mostly true (probably 99% or more professionals do, if I had to guess), but historically, many musicians did not. In particular, many Renaissance musicians learned everything by rote.
This is also ignoring some folks who are unable to read music notation, in particular the blind. There have been numerous famous blind classical musicians. For instance, blind organist Helmut Walcha recorded every one of Bach’s organ works.
To address the OP, even today countless musicians don’t read Western music notation (most of whom, I should add, do not play classical music :)). I could follow suite with everyone else and name the many, many jazz/blues/popular musicians who do not read music. However, let me just say that in my professional experience MANY of the bands you’re likely to hear playing at your local bar cannot read or write music (fluently). And sure enough some of these same folks will make it to the top of the charts.
What is being slightly obscured here is that there is more than one type of notation. I presume the OP is talking about modern western musical notation, but there are many other types of notation. For instance, if someone can read TAB, can they read music? It’s a universal type of notation for stringed instruments. I would bet (again, this is nonscientific) that a majority of the folks who “can’t read music” can read TAB notation. In my personal experience nearly every guitar player can read TAB.
For more examples of alternative musical notation, see Wikipedia’s list.
I remember Bob Dylan being inducted in the Songwriters Hall of Fame saying how it was a thrill because he couldn’t read a note of music. Afterwards he requested that he be photographed with fellow inductee Dinah Shore, kissing he on her right cheek.
As others have said, it’s quite common for professionals in the world of popular music to be unable to read music at all, or to read tabs but not standard musical notation. I suspect many popular singers cannot read any form of music at all and learn things totally by ear.
Pete Townshend of The Who has said that his father (himself a professional musician) had advised him early on that if he wanted to be a musician he’d better learn how to read music, but that he never took this advice. Townshend was the primary songwriter for The Who, and shared new songs with his bandmates via demo recordings. The other members of The Who would then work out their parts based on the demo. I believe bassist John Entwistle, who had some traditional training through playing horns in a youth orchestra as a kid, was the only member of the band who could read music. He did write out at least some of his compositions.
I can’t cite a specific example, but I’ve heard stories about rock bands deciding to play a song in concert that they haven’t done in a long time and having to quickly buy a copy of their own album before the show so they can hear how it goes. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the band members couldn’t read music, but it does indicate they don’t travel with any sort of sheet music for their own songs.
Tab(lature) doesn’t count because it doesn’t include the time component of music (leaving aside the fact that about 95% of guitar tablature on the internet is inaccurate). A musical notation system needs to cover both pitch and time.
I sympathise with ianzin’s view that the traditional system is not ideal, having ranted about it myself in the past, but I have come round to thinking that there is no good way of representing something on paper that has both spacial and temporal aspects, so we might as well stick with the established system. There are alternative musical notation systems out there, but none of them are dramatically easier to learn, because reading music from notation is just fundamentally difficult.
“Reading music” can mean different things to different people. Many people consider sight-reading - the ability to instantly convert the little ‘golf clubs’ to melody and rhythmn - the definition of reading music. Others might consider a good knowledge of theory to be ‘reading music’ - say the ability to name the notes of a V 13th chord in the key of Eb. I can do the latter, but I can’t do the former. I know some very accomplished musicians in this same category.
Sight-reading is IMO a difficult skill to pick up (certainly for an adult) and has to offer a payoff that doesn’t exist outside of classical music, big bands, session recording and a few other applications. Sight-reading also seems to be something you have to set out to do, whereas you can learn theory gradually over the years, from trying to sound out things (as I pretty much did).
Paul McCartney may not be able to sight-read, but before he starts playing on the first recording of ‘Yesterday’ (on the ‘Anthology’), you can hear him tell George Martin that he’s playing in the key of G, but since his guitar is tuned down two frets, he’s “playing in F, and the chords are G, F#m, B7, Em”…, etc., (paraphrased from memory). To write a song like ‘Yesterday’, you need more than “three chords and the truth”.
I suspect that when rock musicians say they can’t read music, most of them mean they can’t currently read it well enough to sight-read songs. I say that because most kids with an interest in music these days either take band in school, or manage some private lessons along the way. And guitar magazines are filled with music theory and sheet music, as well as tablature.
And I sympathize with Elton John - when I took piano lessons I could read music and transfer it to the keyboard within the limits of what I had learned. Recently I sat down to play some of the songs I had learned - and was utterly lost. I can read the music, but I can’t read it and find the notes on the keyboard fast enough to play along.
I think this is especially true of piano because of the need to read left and right hand parts at the same time. That makes it much more difficult than musical notation for say, a saxophone. I learned to sight-read music for my sax when I was in school, and when I picked up a sax 15 years later, I was surprised at how quickly I got back up to speed.
We’re probably ready for a new form of music notation - one that is animated and provides tempo and other cues for the performance. For example, Rock Band 3 is transitioning to real instruments - it will have a real MIDI keyboard and a real Fender Squier Stratocaster instead of a plastic 5-button guitar. To support that, they’ve invented a form of tablature that notates the real guitar part in full detail, but which is animated and flies down the note track like the older versions of Rock Band. A player in that game will be able to plug his instrument into an amp, shut off the audio to the game, and use the game as a form of sheet music to learn songs.
Couple that kind of technology with an iPad, and you’ve got a device for displaying a completely new form of music notation for use anywhere. I think we’re going to see more of that in the future.
Sight-reading skills are how many professional musicians keep getting hired. If you can’t sight-read, you greatly limit the number of paying jobs you can take. It’s true that most jazz and rock gigs don’t call for reading, but they also don’t pay nearly as well as the studio and pit gigs. Also, a lot of club dates (wedding gigs) involve reading.
We may be ready for a new form of notation, but we really don’t need it for most music. Despite what you say, there is standard notation for tempo (bpm) as well as performance cues (say, an + for an alternate fingering on sax or ped. to tell the performer to engage the sustain pedal on a piano).
The biggest problem with Guitar Hero-style notation (even the new kind) is that it is very difficult to analyze and understand the larger aspects of a piece of music. It’s tough, for instance, to figure out the form of a piece when you can only view one small section at a time. Further, it relies on the musician having good depth perception to determine duration of note.
On top of that, it needs some more refining to allow for a completely thorough notation (like “capo” for instance). I also find it much easier to read chords as G7#11 or V7#11 in C than as a bunch of dots (and that’s true for standard notation as well).
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This.
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There’s a big difference between picking out Aces High out of the Iron Maiden sheet music your dad got you at Guitar Center vs. being able to cold-read - and *swing *- some complex pro arrangement.
McCartney can’t read for shit. Except compared to you.
Adrian Belew is another respected musician who can’t read music. That astonished Frank Zappa, who first discovered him in a top 40 cover band at a Holiday Inn.
Normally, Zappa wrote extensive sheet music with extremely complicated notes that he expected his musicians to sight read. Belew had to learn by doing, picking up songs during rehearsals. Most of the time, given enough rehearsal time, he could learn anything.
And on those rare occasions that there WASN’T enough practice time for Belew to learn his piece? That’s when Zappa would decide, “Okay, since you can’t play your guitar during THIS piece tonight, we’ll have you do something weird or embarrassing on stage while the rest of the band plays that song.”
During those numbers, Belew would have to do something like sashay around in women’s clothing.
I mentioned this in the trivia dominoes thread - Tori Amos can’t read music. Her first album was titled Y Kant Tori Read in reference to this. (It’s also a reference to “Why Can’t Johnny Read?” which was a frequent tagline of literacy campaigns.)
I agree there’s an important distinction between knowing standard notation and sight-reading, but in my experience I think a large plurality of players really honestly have no idea how to read anything but tab and chords. Seriously. Otherwise, don’t you think there’d be a bunch of folks writing transcriptions of rock songs and putting them up online, vs. the existing huge sites devoted to tabbing every song in the universe?
Really? Filled? In my experience they’re filled with ads, gear guides 'n reviews intended not to offend advertisers, a few interviews, and then maybe we’d get to a staff article/column here and there on some theory-like aspect du jour, with a dab of standard notation here and there. Okay, I haven’t picked up a guitar mag in a few years, but seriously? Filled?
My occupation, when I worked in Hollywood, was made possible by the many musicians that couldn’t write music, but had to have their songs written down for (1) copyright purposes and/or (2) so others could learn it quickly. I received recordings of qualities from a cheap cassette recorder to finished, pressed discs, and had to transcribe them to a readable lead sheet page. It was a lot of musicians, some of them quite successful and famous.
I have to admit to selection bias. -I- buy guitar magazines which are filled with sheet music and theory. I don’t generally buy the gearhead mags. So maybe you’re right.
I guess I thought that most professional musicians would have expressed an interest in music young enough to wind up in a program some where, at least for a little while. And others would be self-taught using the zillions of public resources out there for teaching you to read music. Every music store has tons of them.
But maybe I’m guilty of bias. That’s the way I learned, and continue to learn. But maybe there are lots and lots who just pick up a guitar and noodle around until they can get into a garage band somewhere, then they just get better with all the nightly practice. That’s pretty much how the Beatles did it.
I think my response came off more jeeringly than intended, and sorry if I did. It’s just that in my experience the trade press, certainly for guitar-oriented stuff, has been fairly shoddy, but perhaps I’m doing my own selection bias. What mags do you like?
But still others would learn from each other or tab sites. Or it’s a mix - I learned to play piano and read sheet music fairly young; in my teens, I took up guitar and just learned that by ear because at that time seemingly all the available sheet music for rock guitar sucked. Really terrible stuff, transcribed for easy piano with some chords above the staff for guitar, and a lot of that was wrong. I’m told things are much better these days, which perhaps says there really are a lot more players who can read notation, so maybe you have a point.