No no, I said that when I was under the impression that Fish was saying that Billy Joel couldn’t write something in Elton John’s style, and I was trying to draw a parallel.
As I said before, certain people reach a point in their creativity when their awareness encompasses everything and enables them to be what we call “geniuses”… actually Steve Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile gives Picasso a wonderful monologue detailing this train of thought… “the time between the idea and the pen, and the gap is getting smaller”, to paraphrase.
But no, I think all the people we’ve discussed in this thread, Billy, Elton, Picasso, et. al are (or were) to the point where they could do anything they wanted. I thank God they all found their own voices, however.
DooWahDiddy, I see. Sorry about that. Clearly I should have read the post you were responding to before I posted my comments. My apologies.
However, in a way I’m glad the misunderstanding occurred. Your response to me was very well written and has made me aware of a few things I hadn’t thought of before, and it’s brought my attention to Martin’s play, which sounds very interesting.
I learn grade 8+ classical guitar pieces and fiendishly difficult solos from tapes. (It never fails to astonish classically trained musicians!) Yes, it takes longer to learn a pieceso that it’s playable but I would suggest it actually reduces the time it takes to play it well.
The correlation between reading music and writing musically complex pieces?
Billy vs. Elton?
I’ll tackle them both:
Asserting that there is a correlation here is pretty silly. Let’s face it: music notation is an imperfect way to capture the nuance and complexity of a piece. However, it can be critical for communication. That is the whole point of notation - to communicate.
What people seem to be saying is “if you learn to read music, it can introduce you to more complex compositions and show you different chord combinations, arrangements and relationships between notes.” This is true - if you are the type of person who takes to reading music and uses that skill to explore composition, it can definitely do that. But reading music is NOT the only way to learn those complexities - just the most traditional, accepted way to do it.
Recent research has challenged the learning process in general. Some people learn by reading. Some people learn by seeing. Some people learning only by doing it over and over - words or pictures go right through them. Regardless of what is considered “acceptable” in a class setting, all ways of learning are okay - depending on the combination of student, teacher (who may be the student themselves if self-taught) and process - anything can be learned if all three are in alignment.
Picking some “holier than thou” approach to learn is parochial and denies the fundamental complexity of music in general and the learning process itself. There are some folks who can read music and couldn’t write anything more complex than Chopsticks. There are some folks who can’t read who can construct awesomely complex, nuanced pieces. Can we knock it off now?
Elton vs. Billy - honestly, who cares? Both write music rooted in the pop tradition. Elton may tend to use more classically-influenced aspects in his work, Joel may be a little bit more meat and potatoes. But they have both written popular work, some critically acclaimed and both respect each other’s skills. Trying to use either to bolster the issue discussed in #1 above is pointless…
my $.02. Learned to read music as a kid; stopped playing the instrument. Have played guitar for over 25 years without reading, but have friends who are very accomplished musicians and readers…