IMO, the ability to read music has lost relevance ever since brass and woodwind instruments disappeared from popular music. In other words, ever since the advent of the drums-bass-guitar format and “rock” music. Even before that, many outstanding musicians never learned to read music. Wes Montgomery was one, and he played (and I think composed) music with complicated bebop harmonies, and he knew the names of the chords and scales he played.
The thing that stuns me is when I run into someone who can sight read really well, but can’t play a memorized part or improvise to save their lives. I met a co-worker who had that skill set about a year ago. He could play just about anything on piano that was written down and placed in front of him, but if you told him to play a blues in A, he was lost. I’m always amazed that this is even possible.
The Beatles did not think that, and John Lennon didn’t say it. It was a gag by a British radio host. The Beatles knew Ringo was a killer drummer. After the band broke up, he played on their solo albums by request. He’s been heavily in demand as a session drummer for decades, and has a string of hits of his own.
The Beatles were excited when he agreed to join the band, because at the time he was one of the most popular musicians and the best drummer in Liverpool.
Anyway, quite a lot of Rock musicians of the 70’s and 80’s could read music, because many of them were products of the Jr and High School band programs, which taught kids to read music. That’s where I learned. And I can still read it after 40 years.
But even musicians who can read and write music often don’t use it in the studio. The studio process is often much too organic for that, and stopping to write music gets in the way of brainstorming.
Warren Zevon was classically trained (even studying a bit under Igor Stravinsky), and even composed a complete (unpublished) symphony. But even he didn’t write music in the studio. He and his bandmates would start with some ideas, maybe some lyrics and a general notion of what the song should be, or maybe a lead sheet with some lyrics, a few chords and a melody line. Then they’d just play along with each other. Someone might say, “Wait, How about this?” and play some Rhythm groove. Someone else then might just jump in and lay down some Rhythm guitar. If it was working, they’d keep going. If not, they’d stop and try something else.
That’s a pretty common scene in music studios.
Up until high school, that was pretty much me. Give me sheet music (up to a certain level) , I can play it. Improvise? That’s magic stuff! You can’t learn that—you need to be born with it. I couldn’t even begin to conceptualize how one just makes up music. Nobody ever taught me how to do it or explained to me that it’s within the grasp of any ordinary musician. Like anything else, some people are good at it from the get go, but most others practice and experiment to get good.
So now, it’s pretty much opposite for me. I do like lead sheets, but can’t play verbatim full sheet music without going pretty slowly. I’m always winging it. But it’s very easy for me to understand how one can’t play an A blues but could rip through a Liszt because it’s two quite different t skills.
Assuming it was actually said, it just means two things:
- Paul just played every instrument better than the rest.
- John sometimes said things just to be a dick.
It was not actually said. It wass a joke on a BBC 4 radio show in 1981. Can we kill this stupid ‘fact’ please?
One main point of writing down music is to communicate it to someone else; otherwise you have to play it for them, or send them a recording. @Musicat said that session musicians do expect sheet music to be available, unless I misunderstood.
Another musical skill is to accurately play back what is heard (or imagined).
Yeah, it’s an urban legend that keeps popping up and getting debunked over and over (here and elsewhere), and it really needs to die.
That was my ex-girlfriend. Classically training, could read better than most, but take away the music and she would struggle with Mary Had a Little Lamb. It’s because, for all time she spent learning those skills, she never spent time with ear training or improvisation, which are both essential skills to being a well-rounded musician, IMO. You have to be able to rely on your ears as well as the printed page. Otherwise, again in my opinion, it would be like needing a script before one could speak.
Yeah, that seems to be it. The persons I have met like this simply don’t seem to have an aspect of experimentation in their experience with instruments. If I’m in a room with a piano, I have to resist the urge to go over to it and noodle on it*. I can’t imagine having an instrument in my hands and not experimenting with it.
Of course, I had two different instructors tell me “Well, you’re obviously playing your instrument all the time, you have a new song you’ve learned every week. However, you’re not practicing the stuff I send you home with. You’re a fun kid to hang out with and all, but let’s stop wasting your parent’s money.”
Yeah, pretty much everyone I’ve met that is dependent on sheet music comes from a classical background.
I wouldn’t say it was like a script before you could speak, but one where the script is in a foreign language. In this case, they understand how to interpret the printed page into sound and kind of know what’s going on in the story, but they don’t really understand the language. It’s a relationship with music that is so far from my own.
*Heck, I had a hell of time banging away on the church’s piano after service let out, way back when I barely knew what a major scale was from my Fisher-Price xylophone.
I just meant that a script tells you what to say, much like sheet music tells you what to play. There is no guess work involved. Obviously, we are all capable of speaking without a script, but not all can play music without sheet music. It becomes a crutch.
As a performing musician, I’m often asked to sub for bands, and will be asked to play music (without a rehearsal) that I’ve never heard before. In those instances, I have to rely on my ears and my musical knowledge, because there is no road map, so to speak, other than perhaps “This song is in G”. I’m able to do it pretty well, and often, nobody can tell that I’ve never heard it before. But if I was trained classically, I would be completely lost.
Yeah, and there’s no real reason why classical music shouldn’t have aspects of ear-training and improvisation taught with it. Classical musicians were historically very good at that kind of stuff. These days, I mean, in music school, you will get classes like Aural Skills that really test your ability to pick up melodies and chord progressions. But it’s not something that seems to be taught early on, at least in my experience taking classical lessons and talking to others who have been exposed to all sorts of different classical teaching methods. I was primarily taught how to read music, with a reasonable bit of theory thrown into that. But I never got stuff like “name that interval” or “what kind of chord is this” until I got a little bit of jazz training. I wish I had been exposed to that way of thinking a lot earlier on.
But it is kind of fun when a classical musician who is technically miles ahead of you and can just play the shit out of Rachmaninoff ask you how in the hell you’re banging away a “Take 5” improvisation on the piano (which can be done with just basic show-off blues over the vamp part.)
If a composer has the status of John Williams. his name is probably prominent on the credits for the song, album, whatever.
For more obscure arrangers, if not indicated on what passes for an album cover nowadays, it could probably be obtained from the union contracts for the sessions (if you can get access to those). All musicians who participate, excluding royalty artists, would be listed there. But beware, some names may have been added just to spread around slush money, from session payments to repeating royalties.
It’s not uncommon for a producer, who plays nothing and has no musical skills on any instrument to be named on a session and paid just like the real musicians. Its just a way of getting more fingers in the pie.
I was the recipient of a few of these. I worked for a publisher who had excess funds to throw away and needed tax writeoffs. He often gave me shit jobs that made no sense, but paid anyway. Who am I to complain?
I recall going to the union hall – back when that was the only way to get a check – and finding checks waiting for me that I was not expecting. Some generous producer put me down for sessions that I merely attended or advised, not actually played on.
When I was very young (6 or 7), my family bought an organ. My next door neighbor had one of those cheap air-powered organs where you could push a button and it would play a chord. Mine didn’t have that feature, but I really wanted to learn those chords and didn’t yet have a teacher. I would run to the neighbor’s house, hit the button, and then try to keep those three notes in my head while I ran back home and tried to find them on the keyboard. It was just major and minor chords, no 11ths or flat 9s or anything, but I learned every chord that way. I would also find the melodies to every song on the radio because I couldn’t read sheet music at the time. By the time I got to college, identifying intervals and chords was easy. I already knew how they sounded, I just didn’t always know what the were called before then. But honing in my ear at such an early age helped immensely in learning how to improvise.
Your second paragraph reminded me of the time my girlfriend was having a lot of trouble with a Debussy piece she was learning. After hearing her practice it so much, I was able to play it as well, without the music. This peeved her to no end, and we didn’t last long after that. 
To DPRK and Sam Stone:
Please don’t confuse head arrangements with written music; they meet different needs. Any decent band can play with nothing more than the song name (if a known pop tune) or a crude chord chart, and most listeners/fans won’t know how/why the song sounded so good. It’s what musicians do.
But how could a string orchestra or a large brass section play an unknown, unrehearsed, song without some kind of relatively detailed written music? Not likely, so those kind of players are usually terrific sight-readers.
And even if they can do it alone, the producer/arranger may not want them to! He’s been hired to make the song sound a certain way, which may be far from random improvising. Film scores are a good example – nothing happens by chance.
But there are exceptions to everything. A really good horn section can improvise to a certain degree, even as an ensemble, since very good players can play according to common practices for the particular genre. It’s all part of experience and on-the-job training.
I am good friends with a local quartet cover band who have been playing together for 40 years. If one member starts playing a blues tune, they can all join in and sound terrific without any written music or specific direction. They’re musicians, goddammit!
Yeah, in my experience, blues is kind of the common “let’s get to know each other as musicians” tunes that I’ve encountered in a rock context. Everybody knows the three chords. We might have to figure out what turnaround we’re using and what we’re doing at the second bar (are we going to IV or staying on I?), but it’s sort of the universal first jam session song. I don’t think I’ve ever played a jam session without the blues progression somewhere in there.
You are right. I once met John Clayton at a college band rehearsal, and after the class was over, he said, “hey, let’s play some blues.” All I needed was a key and we played a dozen choruses improvised, no problem. Good times.
This can happen with other tunes, as long as the performers have a chord progression in mind. Blues is the best example, but you could do it with Tea for Two or When the Saints as well.
When I played in a concert band, the only time any improvisation was allowed is if it was writte; that way (i.e. 12 bars marked ‘solo’) or whatever. It’s the conductor that determines what the music should sound like pther than what’s written on the page.
But I was talking about rock bands in a studio. No one is generally sitting around marking up music notation and handing it out. It’s more like, “Hey, I came up with this riff last night. What do you think?” Then someone will start picking out a bass part, the drummer lays down a beat, and they listen and iterate until they’ve got something.
That’s not always the case. Some bands go theough a more formal process and start out with some kind of transcribed music, but I don’t thinkmit’s that common.
Sam Stone, I think you are still confusing recording of head-arrangement commercial bands with written music augmentation, like sweetening sessions.
You are correct in saying that most bands will work on a project with little or no charts at first. Such recordings can develop with no written music used.
But it is typical that the semi-finished product, basically a recording without sweetening, is then augmented with additional tracks as the producer desires. This may be strings, horns or something else. If it is a relatively large augmentation group like a string section, the arranger will have to write the parts on paper to get them played and recorded. They cannot be ad-libbed or there would be chaos.
Your “playing in a concert band” experience is nowhere near the professional work process. Most high school/college concert/marching band music is written expressly for that purpose and bears little relevance to commercial recording practices.
Hmmm, perhaps you could play all the right notes but did you have all of the dynamics, articulation, timbre and phrasing absolutely correct ? Because that’s the point of sheet music. It’s not about doing an excellent imitation of what you’ve heard, but it’s about bringing all of those details that are in the score to life faithfully, while adding your own personal touch. And let’s not even go into all the more or less poetic, subjective indications that are everywhere in, well, Debussy for example. You miss all of that if you don’t have the sheet music.