Reading music isn’t a binary state, though - there’s a whole spectrum of levels of ability, from ‘able to sight-read full score with different clefs and transpositions’ to ‘able to figure out the basic shape of the melody and rhythm in treble clef and fake it from there’.
In other words, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between ‘uses written score as a primary means of musical communication’ and ‘reads a bit, but picks it up better by ear’. I read well, but I don’t remotely have the skill set that Musicat has.
An analogy - I’m assuming most of us on the Dope read these messages rather than using voice recognition software. But how many of us would do well reading this thread out loud for the podcast? For the live telecast on MSNBC? I wouldn’t describe myself as being illiterate, but newscasters have a skill set that I’d need to develop.
squeegee - you have a good point about ‘huge sites devoted to tabbing every song in the universe’, but you overlook the fact that TAB can be rendered in ASCII - most folks have a word processing program on their computer that can handle the text and the formatting required, whereas very few people have Finale or Sibelius programs with which to make PDF’s of their basic transcriptions… Ximenean - Published TAB (as opposed to the TAB online) does have its rhythm notated, as did the Renaissance music for lute and its cousins. There were, in fact, two competing systems of TAB - Italian tablature had the highest string on the bottom of the ‘staff’, French had it on the top of the ‘staff’. Lautengesellschaft userguide article on TAB.
When he was directing the Broadway musical Two by Two, the newspapers said that Danny Kaye couldn’t read music, which lead to interesting musical direction.
Saith Wikipedia:
There are definitely more TAB transcriptions out there than anything else, but I’d still say there are about as many guitar solo transcriptions as any other instrument.
The transcriptions in stores are still way off sometimes -especially if it’s a whole arrangement (or a piano reduction).
Since the OP concerns professionals, in my mind the bar is set by the other musicians. If you can read well enough to get hired again, then you read well enough.
I doubt it, since he was blind before he started to learn how to play music.
Well, the OP referenced “famous” musicians, which encompasses professionals, but not all professionals are famous. In that light, I think my comments earlier about “most players” was probably too broad. Not necessarily wrong, mind you.
This is in part because of the history of notated music. Notated music in the European tradition emerged with the church, and came out of the desire to memorize tunes, of which a given monk or learned person may have known hundreds, if not thousands. Thus, if you look at a neumatic manuscript from the 9th century, it resembles little more than a few messy scribbles atop a line of poetic verse. These were not the complete performance instructions we understand notation as today; they were more akin to crib notes.
Notated music gained prominence because it greatly facilitated the use of polyphony, and because it was a marketable commodity - a composer in the 18th and 19th century could sell an organ fugue he wrote down as sheet music. The same could not be said for an equally virtuosic improvisation, which was gone as soon as it was performed.
Fast forward to 2010. This hasn’t been the case for decades. Much of this, I would opine, has to do with the nature of the music being performed. “Musically illiterate” is as misleading a title as, say “lactose intolerant.” Most of the world is lactose intolerant, and its in fact only a minority of the world that isn’t - primarily in parts of Central and Northern Europe, which ironically enough are the same people that are supposed to be musically literate.
Back to my point. For large polyphonic works such as Palestrina and Bach, notation makes sense. It becomes virtually **impossible **to conceptualize four or five voices moving in contrary motion without notation. If you’re doing a chord progression, you can give other musicians in your group hand gestures, or even say what you want to do out loud. Notation would just make it more complicated!
Actually, Duke, that’s the simpler of the two. The more complicated is a Squier Stratocaster.
I can’t hear it, at work, but I think that’s White Stripes he’s playing. The Mustang is the cheaper of the two ‘pro’ variants, and the only one currently priced. The Squier is a 22 fret full on guitar.
On a side note, this plastic guitar video game is not that bad, as it draws more and more kids away from the real instrument. In the 90’s and 00’s, the world was indeed full of kids strumming away on their Korean strat and taking themselves for geniuses.
Can you clarify your statement? I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, either. Do you mean pitch is represented by height on the staff, but length isn’t analogously notated by, say, width of a note on the staff? (Like, say, in piano roll notation?)
It’s odd–I don’t really find it illogical or nonsensical at all, but, then again, I have been raised in the system. Certainly, piano roll-type representation looks a hell of a lot more confusing to me. I really can’t think of an alternative notation system for scoring that would work better. What do you propose as more logical? I’m curious as to what competing systems there may be.
I’ve heard the Squier strat. There’s a demo of a guy playing the White Stripes’ “Hardest Button to Button”, where at one point they turn the game audio off and turn up his guitar amp - and it sounds exactly like the song.
The new Rock Band notation is a full, note-perfect transcription of the guitar part for each song. On ‘Pro Expert’, you’ll be playing everything the real guitarist plays, in exactly the same way. They even notate string bends and other dynamic information.
Their notation style is very innovative, actually. They show barre chords as ‘shapes’ that you can memorize. They’ll show the fret number of the barre or the first finger position, and then the shape is relative to that fret. At the bottom of the screen, the shape is also shown as you fret the guitar. So you get a real-time indicator of how you’re setting up your chord and whether it matches what the game wants you to do. When the shape falls down the note track and lands on yours, it will match up perfectly if you did it right, and you’ll score points.
Another cool thing they did was to show the chord name beside the shape, so you can actually learn the chords and ignore the shapes over time. So you’ll see “Fm7” in the margin beside the note track, then the shape of the chord.
For fingerpicking and multiple changes on a single string, each fret number is shown on each string, like standard tab.
But you are playing a real guitar, and you’re playing it in a real way. There are no shortcuts.
I guess this has puzzled me, especially as a musician who can read fluently in whatever clef you want to throw at me (though much more slowly with alto and tenor clefs): why do people think there’s a connection between proficient, creative musicianship with musical reading skills? In my opinion and experience, great musicianship is more about listening and translating the sounds in your head to your instrument. This does not require any reading skills whatsoever, and I’ve long rued my musical instruction which I wish had much more training in aural skills, picking out melodies and harmonies by ear, teaching me to play what I hear and feel rather than what’s on a page. Eventually, I made up for my deficiencies in these areas, but I really felt I was significantly set back by the lack of attention in this department.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think there is definitely much to be gained from knowing how to read and write music. But there is little connection that I’ve seen between musicians who can read music well and musical creativity.
At any rate, this thread can go on nearly forever. There’s a metric assload of famous musicians who have poor-to-no music reading skills. It’s not a necessary skill to be a great performer or songwriter/composer.
I agree with the first paragraph, but this is akin to saying “you don’t need to learn your scales and permutations cold to be a good musician”. This may be true, but learning them sure helps.
I feel that learning to read and write music helps us to order the music in our brain a different way. We are primarily visual animals (especially in comparison to other animals like dogs or snakes). Visual data is much easier to process for us (except for those of us with intensely accurate perfect pitch). And we can view a whole score at once, but not listen to it all at once.
I definitely agree that with you that young musicians should receive more aural training, but those out of school should teach themselves to read, if even a small amount. I frequently gig in bar bands with great musicians who can’t read. They have a terrible time dealing with complicated forms. They also have slight difficulty starting in the middle of complex songs when we’re rehearsing. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
I know that you aren’t saying that reading/writing is useless. I just think that it has some unintended benefits.
You cannot be a professional classical musician or opera singer without a formation. You have to be able to sight read and learn hour long musical pieces. Throughout history it is popular and traditional music which is filled with musician which do not know how to read music.
Saw Andrew Bird Saturday night (wonderful concert, BTW, and he has a new album coming out this winter) – he mentioned that though he trained as a classical violinist, he learned that repertoire by ear. Not clear whether he can’t read music at all or whether it’s just not his preference.
