Bob van der Poel wrote: > I've got to chime in on this point! Completely agree. To me, at least, > not knowing how to read music is just like being a novelist and not > being able to read English (fill in your language). > > The sad thing is that folks have a conception of music reading be "very > hard". It really isn't ... In my case, music reading was hard because my eyes have different focal planes. The harder I tried to focus, the more it looked like the notes were dancing on the page. When I learned my piano recital piece at 12 years old, an Impromptu by Schubert, I was lucky. My mother had a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing the same piece, so I used the recording to learn the piece by ear, except that I learned and played it a half-step higher than it was written (it was written in B-flat). I learned that many years later when a friend played the same piece in what I thought was the wrong key. I think that there was at least one benefit in not learning to read music, and that is that my concept of music was not overly set or influenced by the conventions of sheet music. I learned more about sound, especially harmony. I learned that a key signature for example is mostly just a notational convenience, ever since the equal temperament system of tuning gave us a complete 12-tone chromatic scale. Most of the music since Bach's time depends upon this "keyless" tuning and its introduction of much more complex and rich harmonic possibilities. I'm sorry to be babbling. :-) Best wishes, Steve _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
