Teaching an old dog to read music

As a teacher, I am constantly amazed by how things I assume to be obvious aren't obvious to other people.

My husband plays many instruments, all of them by ear. He also has excellent absolute ('perfect') pitch and can name any note he hears. But he can't read music, despite 8 years of playing trumpet in our school band. He always said that his mild dyslexia (mixing up b's, d's, p's, and q's) made the notes jump around on the page and made it impossible to read. Although he is a good natural musician, not reading music has really held him back learning new pieces or working with a group.

After watching him for many years, it struck me that (a) he had never learned to read music because it was just easier for him to hear it once and play it back from memory and (b) learning the trumpet first had made things worse. Unlike written notes for the piano or for singing, trumpet scores are always transposed to make it easier for the player. With trumpet scores, what you see is not what you get. Because the notes on the page of a trumpet score don't map onto the absolute pitch, my husband never saw the connection between the visual image and sound.

Last night, I was showing him the new software I had bought to help my younger son learn the violin. It's a simple, but nifty program that accompanies you while you play. At its most basic, the software shows the music you are supposed to play on the screen and plays the accompaniment. You can toggle your own part in or out. The cursor moves across the score as it plays.

At the end of the piece, my husband looked at me really strangely.

"I've never looked at music that way before."

"Like what?", I asked.

"One note at a time like that. Does everyone read music like that?"

Well, yes.

It turns out that he had always tried to read music measure by measure - like a word. Just as when you look at a word, you read the whole thing and essentially ignore the individual letters, he thought you were supposed to look at a measure as a unit and just recognize it. He never could, so he thought he couldn't read music. Although he could name a whole, half, and quarter note (not an eighth or sixteenth), he never knew what a rest or dotted notes were. The idea of reading or playing the symbols as a sequence to get a sense of what it sounds like had never occurred to him. He has been playing music for probably 40 years and no one had ever picked up on it. Of course that's how you read musical notes!

I find it really interesting how missing one small assumption can trip up an entire process. And yes, I know that as you become proficient you group patterns together into single units and that when you are sight reading fluently or playing music you know you just look at individual notes and see and hear patterns. But the idea of sequence is critical to starting the process. And he had missed it.

So this morning we started playing "Long Long Ago". From music.

© 2010 Nancy Darling. All Rights Reserved

---------------------------------------------------

Interesting books on psychology and music in no particular order

• This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin
• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
• A Soprano on her Head: Right Side Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances by Eloise Ristad. Among other things, this books talks about how a piano teacher found that her dyslexic students had a lot easier time reading music when it was turned on its side. That way, the right had part lined up with their right hand and the left hand (bass) part lined up with their left.