These quotes from this thread struck me as being right on target, some for "ear" and some for "eye":
Gerry - school and mainstream music pedagogy emphasizes visual reading skills, even though the art form we are trying to master is aural, not visual.
Frank - Most of these Irish tunes were played hundreds of years ago, and were passed down the generations by ear...during those generations, the songs get changed by the artists who play them.
Emma - Notation alone will never be able to communicate completely a tune's personality.
Tony - would argue strongly that one could never learn to play in the traditional style without hearing what it sounds like. But, that is not to say that learning a new tune has to come from how you hear someone else play it.
Claudine - Music is an international language, if you know it, you'll be able to play with people anywhere in the world. So - as you all learned to speak and read english - why not learn music?
Tom - there are people in Japan who can read and write English fluently, but have only the vaguest idea of how to speak it. Of course, there are also those who understand and speak the language, but cannot read or write. Both of these extremes are missing out on much of the beauty of the language... ...how would you like to learn, say, Mandarin Chinese by simply listening to recordings of people speaking it, without getting to ask them what they're saying, or see how they're producing the sounds?
Rich - One standard pedagogical technique for jazz is to transcribe solos: the idea is to take a recorded solo you like, and write it out as accurately as possible, and then analyze it or learn it yourself or both. It's hard, and while there's certainly a school that thinks that soloing is more holistic than "what notes did he play over this turnaround", it's certainly useful to take apart what the pros do note for note.
Ron - L.E. McCullough states in his tutorial that contrary to popular myth most professional caliber players do indeed read music and the myth of them all playing by ear alone is nothing more that a myth of trad music. Does anyone honestly think Paddy Maloney could score a film without being able to read music?
Lee - To play any type of music well, you have to play what is felt, not just what is written, not just what is heard. For me, music is a medium that allows us to communicate even when words fail, with a richness that goes beyond... ...when I hear I new tune, my mind immediately flows with emotive response. It also associates the tune with a hundred tunes that sound or feel the same. Seeing the tune in standard notation gives it a back bone, keeps me from morphing the music into a different tune... ...If I want to join folks in a session playing a new tune, [] if I have a backbone (standard notation) for a tune, I can readily recognize how the group is altering the tune to reflect what the group wants to express.
Patrick - I can get a modern arrangement of a medieval tune and learn to play something that very few people have heard in several hundred years. If you want "freedom" in music, reading the notes is like being able to read a map that leads you to a beautiful place.
Sue - if you want to play it in a very specific style, you have to listen and imitate the style, style cannot be notated, just as an accent in language is not notated... Notation is a tool that can be helpful, but in traditional music it only provides the skeleton of the true music, the rest has to be added by the performer. The experience of the performer determines how the piece will sound. Even within the same country, the accent(in language) or musical style can vary, that what makes music a living, wonderful tradition!
Cinead - if one was to write a song before the advent of the tape recorder, he or she had no other way to insure the note and sequence structure of the song would be maintained or remembered. Sheet notation cornered the market, especially from a commercial point of view. Songs that were reproduced on sheet music travelled farther and faster than songs that travelled by ear. I do believe that if tape recorders and video recorders had always been around, this would have dramatically affected the way music would be documented and passed down...
...I believe sheet music is best to communicate and maintain a degree of uniformity among audiences as a song spreads in popularity. Not everybody has that great of an ear to reproduce melodies, chords and rhythms accurately. Sheet music keeps everybody from straying too far from home.
Robert
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