I studied composition in a conservatoire in the UK so my experience is very niche. That said, although I did learn notation in order to compose and submit scores, I don't ever recall a composition lesson where I discussed notation with my professor. We just discussed intention (what are we trying to achieve) and structure. A lot of my music was composed with DAWs or pieced together using other digital techniques, so I do wonder how much I could have learned if I had no notation experience at all. I suspect quite a lot. Obviously to get most of my music played, it would ultimately need to be notated but, again, my case is relatively niche.
I’m a current composition student at a UK conservatoire, and my experience has been very different - in my lessons, we talk about notation *constantly.* We frequently discuss the best way to notate/explain an idea - conventional Western notation, “extended” notation (boxes, arrows, other forms of semi-aleatoric notation), graphics, text, audio, oral explanation, collaborative devising… In first year, we also had classes devoted to notation - both conventional, and other kinds.
@@kitmccarthy2132 Interesting. I also did a lot of aleatoric stuff after having it suggested to me, although my professor just let me research the notation methods and didn't pay too much notice to the solution. At the time, I kind of resented the lack of attention to the specifics of notation actually. They just clearly didn't seem to think it was a very important part of my development. When I suggested any kind of non conventional notated methods, it would almost always be accepted without comment. Edit: I was self taught, so skipped the bachelors and went straight to masters. Perhaps I would have had a lot more specific classes related to notation if I'd done the initial 4 years.
This evening my mother showed me the melody of a song in her book written in the appendix. I was able to sight-sing it on the spot because I knew how to read music. This skill basically never comes in handy like that normally in life, but it was nice that I was able to bring a song to life for her just by looking at the page :)
Music is a language. You can speak it without knowing how to write or how to read, but having this skill gives you tremendous advantage in a vast majority of scenarios
Okay class - we're going to play Beethoven's 5th Symphony in C minor - GO! (no sheet music). Can you imagine the amount of time it would take to spoon feed that to the band if they didn't know how to read sheet music! *Boggles*
Is music really a language? If it is, then what does it mean? None of the music textbooks I've ever read tell you what it is that all the scales and chords actually mean or what message are they intended to convey. Whereas with a language I can look up the meaning of the words in a dictionary.
@@Davejkn obviously this is only an analogy. However, in baroque period the system of musical symbols was highly developed: signs of a cross are in almost every "Crucifixus", passus duriusculus meant sorrow and so on and so forth
@@Davejkn Framing it that way gets into semantics. The word language has a broad range of meanings - and that’s a broad subject. Music is definitely a mode of communication and when we talk about it as a language that’s all we’re saying. There are all sorts of people who think about how we respond to music; cognitive scientists, musicologists, psychiatrists, physicists, etc. But nobody, to my knowledge, is trying to create a dictionary of musical meanings comparable to Webster’s. Some music carries specific associations that allow us to construct characters and narratives - movie themes, for example. Music can’t specifically mean “great white shark” without the movie defining it. For anyone who has seen Jaws, it’s a musical cliché with a permanently fixed meaning. It’s as close as we can get to an example of two notes that became a word. Music which has no narrative associations can take us on a narrative journey by evoking a series of emotional and psychological states that we can turn into a story. Sometimes a composer tells us what narrative to buy into. We might guess that Debussy’s ‘La Mer’ is about the motion of the ocean without his verbal promptings, but the suggestions amplify the associations. In short, meaning in music doesn’t boil down to ‘words.’ And, as long as we’re here, the dictionary meaning of words is more fluid and less precise than is implied when you say we can just look up their meanings. One thing these two languages have in common is that context is everything. It’s very interesting to consider how we construct meaning out of music - and out of words. But they’re very different frames of reference, different modes of thought and experience.
Which has nothing to do with whether it should be required for admission. Otherwise known as the first step in higher education, part of which can include, to no detriment to the student or instructor, reading sheet music.
I played trumpet and horn in college. In orchestra, i played horn but it often required i transpose the part to allow for differences in keys. This would have been very hard if i did not read music WELL. On the other hand, i played trumpet in jazz band. And i played for a year next to a very talented girl who was blind. I grew less and less "dependent" on the written page the longer i played because as part of playing a new song, the director would go thru the song for the girl with all present. Here is the funny thing: my first thought was that it was impolite to play the parts for our blind trumpet player, (i was worried it embarrassed her) but i caused me to be able to play better WITHOUT music. And it most definitely helped me understand chord structure, and that made me better at composition, arranging, and transcription. My point is you must be able to do both, read AND play by ear. Not all music is committed to the page. Not all music should be.
I am not a fan of jazz, but I am a fan of you. Your analyses of your given subjects are thorough and complete. I don't even yell at the screen when you are on. Keep it up, bass boi.
As someone who graduated somewhat recently in Music College(composition), "sight reading" wasn't hit as much as other majors. What I noticed is, our teachers wanted us to know how to read music to compose via Finale/Sibelius...but we often used a midi keyboard in speedy entry tool, so if you weren't as quick on your feet for sight reading, you could still make your way around. Scoring for films is 99% on a DAW nowadays anyway, so sheet music is less important(unless you have a big budget for session musicians. For us guitarists, having both the sheet music as well as tablature gives us a way better overall understanding of the music, especially rhythmically. If you can at least understand sheet music to a decent degree, tbh you'll be fine in music school(depending on major).
Why is film scoring 99% on DAW? I understand how it would be for electronic music, but if you were writing music to be performed by an orchestra then you'd need it in standard notation.
Film scoring might be composed using a DAW now, but the music still has to get put into the DAW by the composer, a human being. Most soundtracks have lots of complex arrangements and orchestrations played by an orchestra or large group of musicians. It's still an orchestra, whether it's session players or sampled instruments. So how does all this complexity get into the composer? With every single well-known composer/arranger you can name, they “paid their dues” playing in big bands, symphony orchestras, analyzing other people's arrangements, learning a wide variety of musical styles, the ranges of different instuments, etc. And ALL of this involves reading written music. It’s not like a hip-hop producer putting beats into ProTools. Maybe someone can name an exception, but I guarantee it’s gonna be one in a thousand. And BTW, guitar TAB is never used in professional music composing or recording. That’s not just “my opinion” - see what folks like John Scofield have to say about it.
When it comes down to it, you just need to get better at understanding positions on the guitar. Tab is a cope. No one said getting good means the easy way out. Guitar is hard.
I'm a classical musician studying violin performance at the moment and this was a great video. However, your experience of needing your memory over sight-reading is very contextual. For me and the gigs that I've gotten (in order to survive), have been almost 100% dependent on my ability to sight read quickly and efficiently. Now obviously my perspective is biased as well since I'm from a classical background. Just something I'd like to add. All I'd say is there's more nuance to explore in your "Music as a professional tool" segment. Love your videos!
Really appreciate the nuanced breakdown of this. You captured a lot of the complexities and different perspectives that were missing from the initial twitter meltdown. Also.. great use of a Drag Race clip! 😂👏
I would have had to spend hours and hours to count lines and count keys to figure out a melody from sheet music alone (and I probably would not actually succeed because it's rather hard to get a feel for the rhythm when it's several minutes between each note); but I can learn a melody by listening and watching it being played once. When I went to piano classes my teacher would give me the sheet music for a song to play (not sure if she ever realised I could not read it in any useful way..) and play through it once. I would try to play it by ear and from seeing her hands; and then I would later just practice from memory. The only thing I ever used the sheet music for was, reading the title to jog my memory of the melody; and sometimes if I could not remember the key (I don't have absolute perfect pitch) I would use a pencil point to count the lines from the f-line to the first note and then count keys from the f-key to the correct first key; and then I would just put away the sheet and play. I think I have some kind of dyslexia, that makes recognising exact position of things with just my eyes very hard, it does affect my reading of text too, but not so much that I can't read. I just read words in the wrong order, sometimes I read a few words from the wrong line, sometimes I skip a line, or skip back to the same line when I'm trying to read the next line, etc. Especially in small fonts with short line spacing. It means the first pass of reading is rather nonsensical; but I read the words themselves rather fast so I'm apparently able to re-read every line 2 or 3 times to figure out all the errors; and still end up with an average reading speed that is considered normal. But with sheet music; absolutely _all_ the information is encoded in position on or between a bunch of lines and their order; theres no extra information within each dot (they're just dots, with flags) to tell me that what I just read was nonsensical so I cannot "figure out" the melody from a bunch of floating dots. But I have had sheet music with simple chord names (like "C minor", "Asus7" etc) written with letters above each line of unreadable dots on lines, and those I can read and figure out a chord progression from*, because those are symbols with a self contained meaning beyond their position on the page . And I usually remember the melody perfectly from hearing it once anyway. (*or at least I could back when I went to piano school; these days I would have to google those chord names to figure out what they are; since I've played only by ear for my own enjoyment the last 20 years)
Adam, this video could not have come at a better time for me. I just got into uni(college) for jazz performance at the Elder Conservatorium. I have very limited experience with sheet music, but i have perfect pitch and have always solely relied on my ear, but when i auditioned they told me it was something i would have to work on.
Perfect pitch Will be useless when You are asked to play music You've never Heard. Like the premiew of a contemporary composition, or simply a piece of repertory that you've never Heard. Nobody in the ensamble or class has the time for You to listen and memorize the repertoire, Even with perfect pitch
Yeah..... definitely need to read. No way to get band/combo/recording gigs without being able to read, and specifically sight read just about anything.
Audiation Response is definitely a skill that takes a LONG time to develop, but it’s great when you get it to the point you can sight read AND transpose at the same time. That can be the difference between you and the other guy vying for a gig, or an even bigger and more permanent performance position. One of the best things you can ever master as a musician.
It's so funny to me as someone who cannot read sheet music, only learn things by ear and have good relative pitch perception (not absolute); that transposing is supposed to be difficult. For me, playing in a different key is exactly the same as playing in the "original" key, because I just hear a note and then decide that is the first note of the melody, and then I just hear the melody starting at that note in my head with no effort. For me the melody doesn't have a specific key; in my mind it's just a series of relative notes that can be applied to any starting value. (Of course on instruments like the piano that have stupid keys that is not consistently placed exactly one semitone apart, but favours C-major or A-minor (I think it is?) with those gaps in the black keys; some keys are mechanically harder to move your fingers to.)
@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug funny thing is, I originally learned trumpet by ear. But I wasn’t allowed to play in anything band at my high school unless I could read sheet music. So, I had to work into transitioning to reading my sheet music. I can do improv solos really well, but I didn’t learn to transpose completely before I learned to be glued to sheet music. Made transposition way harder than it should be. And my teacher says to think of it the exact same way as you do. Hear the key. Thing is, hearing a completely different key from what’s written is so much more challenging when you’re doing things like orchestra music for Trumpet. I’m slowly getting better, but transposition has always been my lowest grades, every single time. I get told to not fall into the trap of ONLY focusing on transposition, but that’s hard to do, cause eventually you get tired of being behind on transposition, even if you work on it every day. The sheet music is what makes transposition so difficult. If you can hear it, you can play it. The sheet music will make you hear something different than what you’re supposed to.
"Music schools aim at maintaining the musical practices of a given musical style". Very true and it's weird that it's not obvious for every one since it's literally in the name : conservatory comes from the word conserver which means to protect/maintain in good shape.
Why would you go to music school if you're to lazy to learn something apparently so easy, that gives us the ability to easily share and arrange music from today or hundreds of years ago?
Solid video, Adam. As someone who attended one the only three university programs that offered an instrumental music major in electric bass back in the 1970s, music school was for me a way to learn about a musical tradition (jazz), but also...a trade school. I attended for 2.5 years and then went on to put myself through another degree by playing weddings. Lots of them. I lucked into playing in a band whose leader was a music copyist, so we had lead sheets with basic arrangments for virtually everything we played -- big heavy books full of 400+ tunes, everything from traditional Italian and Irish songs to disco, to Broadway to jazz, and even original music. The band released two albums, one on vinyl and one CD. As a result, I'm pretty good at reading lead sheets, and now with a bit more practice I have gone on to play shows and big band stuff. Right now, though, I'm working on memorizing a ton of jazz standards, because if you want to play jazz, you'd better know them! Since most professional musicians earn their living partly by teaching, the insitutions that support them are much needed, both to preserve and pass on musical traditions and to make music education more accessible to the public.
Thank you so much for mentioning old time music alongside bluegrass! It's a massively under appreciated genre of music but is really culturally and historically important.
Adam, I knew you'd come down on the side of the question that you did, and thank goodness for that. My experience has been that people increasingly want to do things the easy way. They want to do hard things, but they don't want to put in the work. I had a music student once years ago who on his second lesson asked "How long will it be before I can play half decent?" I knew immediately that he was not really interested in music or in playing or in working hard but in being successful, so I told him how long I'd been playing myself and still didn't consider myself to be half decent. I never saw him again. My father, who was a prominent violist and conductor, taught me how music is written when I was about five, how to follow music from full orchestral scores when I was about ten (he had a huge library of them), and the mechanics of conducting about the same time. I composed and conducted through high school. Yes, my orientation was classical music, but I just can't imagine learning any kind of music in which notation is a tool of professionals and skipping that skill. Reading music is a part of music theory, and music theory is the language of music. If you want to learn Russian (for instance), dontcha think you might want to learn how it's written down and memorize a few handy grammatical and vocabulary lessions? I could go on. Pardon the rant.
For my own experience...I've been playing professionally for years and what has served me exponentially more than being able to read notation has been being able to read chord charts or create my own parts by ear after hearing music. Now my shoddy reading does keep me from playing certain gigs, as you allude to: I certainly won't be playing with the philharmonic by ear. But it hasn't stopped me from having a busy professional life playing a variety of gigs. Not all theatre students do Shakespeare, that doesn't mean they are lesser actors. I think music schools should look into the variety of music gigs out there and help students prepare for the kind of gigs they want to play. I've known some great readers who can't play by ear at all...that won't help them on a wedding gig.
Steve Lukather lamented that he was late getting to reading music. He said he would have a better pension now because the people who play on film scores did the best in terms of pay scale and pension. You have to be an excellent reader to get work playing on film scores for the most part.
I appreciate this perspective. I grew up learning sheet music in school but then relying entirely on ear and chord chart improv for piano in church (a lot of Christian rock). Both served me well to make me a well rounded musician who can now read pretty well, compose, and also just jam out for fun or with little formal prep. Yet, school music in particular never saw my chord charts and improv as “real music” because it wasn’t classical or jazz as Adam points out in the video.
@@corybarnes2341for sure... hence my point of it depends what kind of musician you want to be. If I were somebody that wanted to play on film scores I would definitely need to be able to read music. That is an entirely different kind of musician than one that would play in function bands or as a side musician for a solo artist where you're expected to create your own part or as a singer/songwriter etc etc. It isn't better or worse, just a different realm. Study for the jobs you want! (But obviously in a perfect world we'd all have time to become experts at all of it!)
It seems that you’re trying to make a point that is very different from what Adam Neely was addressing - reading ability in MUSIC SCHOOLS, not in regard to casuals, coffee house gigs, bar bands, etc. You don’t say if you went to music school, and if you did, what your goals were. I’m sure reading is important in “conservatories”, but for schools such as Berklee and MI, it’s not required for admission. And the huge majority of students in those two schools are guitarists, bassists or drummers who have next to no reading ability even after graduating. But they also have extremely little hearing ability. Neither of these conditions should mean that it’s pointless to teach reading or ear training. Which brings up something else in your comment - “I've known some great readers who can't play by ear at all… “ Obviously I don’t know the people you did, but I suspect that they weren’t GREAT readers. To read really well, you HAVE to HEAR what’s on the page BEFORE you play it. And that means not just the pitches and rhythms, but also dynamics, tempo and the nature of the idiom you’re in (e.g. eighth notes played with swing feel - if you can read a swing chart well, you can HEAR swing - if you can’t hear it, you’re not a good reader) No one has EVER argued that reading ability is necessary to being a skilled musician, or a successful musician. For most of the music one hears on the radio or internet, it’s not needed. And the entirety of “folk music” from all of the world is not notated - that’s what makes it “folk.” But in my own experience, whenever someone says“I play by ear” or “I read TAB” - it means that they don’t have enough experience for the gig, and that their ears ain’t that great either. I have NEVER heard a horn player say “I play by ear.”(Even tho they do use their ears all the time) Everything I just said about reading is equally true about music theory - you often don’t need it. But if you don’t need to read and you don’t need to know theory, then there’s no reason to attend a music school.
@@MooMooCow95 Yes I agree it shouldn't stop someone with an obvious musical gift from getting into school. They can learn reading in the first year and given the chance to use it a bit will be proficient by the time they graduate. There is a whole lot of bad advice not to bother learning to read, from people who didn't learn to read. It still matters in real world applications. If you want a theatre gig you will have to be able to read. Playing on film scores will require you to be able to read. These are among the best gigs available for musicians who aren't celebrity entertainers. These gigs are often even better paying than playing in the backup band for entertainers (pop, rock stars).
Sheet music is how we document and communicate songs and arrangements specifically for jazz and classical. I do think it is one of the functions of music school to pass down the foundations that have been used for 1000? Years. It is far less necessary for pop gigs or cover bands but even there, a lead sheet with key, tempo, arrangement, and changes really accelerates the learning curve and makes the most of rehearsal time. I was a classically trained vocalist and jazz trained guitarist so reading has always been part of my experience. There are usually better sight readers on stage though and for guitar, I may fish around a bit to find chord shapes that work well together for a particular piece. Some guitarists like EVH and Glen Campbell just had incredible ears and could hear a piece once and play it brilliantly in sessions or onstage. This is not one of my gifts so I appreciate a chart or lead sheet.
I'm an amateur guitarist and can read sheet music a little, though not well enough to sight read a song I've never played before. I learned to read music in high school band (playing sax), and it's very rare that I use it for guitar. I do think it's valuable though, and it has helped me with learning other instruments. I've been learning drums recently, and have found it very helpful for that. I've done a small amount of piano as well, and it was definitely helpful there. I think a big reason so many guitarists don't use sheet music is that for a lot of guitar music it is very important which position you play a note in. There's multiple places to play the same note, and using the "wrong" one affects intonation, tone, and difficulty of playing. Sometimes it's obvious where a note "should" be played, but other times it's not clear at all. This is valuable information that is conveyed by tab but not by sheet music. So many guitar players will skip sheet music entirely and only learn tab.
If the position of a note is important the fingering is usually notated, and 99% of the time the fingerings follow a scale shape. Not knowing which position to play in is only really a problem if you don't practice scales.
@@vincentb5431 that's extremely dependant on genre. Edit: As an example, go watch Tim Henson of Polyphia play GOAT. He is all over the neck. Getting the correct positions out of some sheet music with no position information would be basically impossible. By the time you add all the fret numbers and notations for extended techniques, the staff is basically irrelevant and you might as well have used tab instead.
@@Lennard222 Position dependant Intonation is not an issue for fretless instruments. The guitar also has a lot of strings, and thus more options for where to play something. It also depends on the genre and particular piece - some things are pretty obvious where they should be played, while with others it's not so clear.
@@dack42 It's very easy to notate. Circled number state which string to use. Non-circled number state which finger to use, which doesn't exist in tab. There is also notation for most extended techniques. I don't think you (or I, for that matter) can name one which doesn't have any notation.
The thing is, reading sheet music is taught in the beginning of Music Theory 101. When I was a music student at Arizona State University, I remembered all of the music students (including the performance ones) were required to take several years of Music Theory (basic theory, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, etc.) If it's just the requirement to read music, then the Music Theory classes can do that. (ASU's classes, at the time, also required sight reading/singing and dictation being taught as part of the class.) The big barrier at the time was the audition requirement. And that will require both a prepared piece and sight reading. I don't have an answer to that, or even if that's a form of gatekeeping.
I graduated with a bachelor of music (contemporary) and bachelor of business degree, even though I'm a classical trained musician who went playing classical violin as a kid, but end-up majoring contemporary music as a piano/keyboard major. Music school especially in higher education is not all about music theory, yes music theory is part of your course and you're required to learn it. The last 4 years doing my degree with a bmus and bbus degree. Going to my ensemble classes, music theory classes, music history classes was the best part of my experience studying the bachelor of music (contemporary) program. I have met alot of diverse like minded people who has the same passion as me in music. People who I still talk today and now some of them doing a master of education, master of music, master of speech pathology degrees. I have one friend who I met on campus who she completed her master of music degree and is now studying her doctor of medicine degree to become a medical doctor. Studying music isn't stupid or useless as people say! I have many university friends who is now trying to become a medical doctor, a lawyer, and a music therapist. Studying music in university opens a-lot of doors for you. Me who graduated my double major bmus and bbus in 2022. And I just finish my bbus (hons) course 2023, I am thinking to persuade my Phd in business next year! It just proves that going to music school isn't bad at all! If people say otherwise just ignorant them and follow your passion! It really does open alot doors for you!
The disconnect you're talking about, is extremely similar to the disconnect for people who have an engineering background and mathematics. Mathematics is taught on a similar way. Yes, it's a handy tool to have, but just the amount of time and (mostly manual) work you have to put into does not reflect most engineering jobs. Especially nowadays when there are tons of tools available (often for free). There are even companies and jobs available where they kinda forbid to do math by hand, because the changes of human error are to big. Sheet music is very similar. It's a very useful tool to have. But like most other tools, they start to become the goal for some people, which is unfortunate.
Please tell me in the construction of which building, bridge, facility you were involved. May me or my loved ones never set foot in one one of them.......
@@pichan8841 that's all modelled these days. In fact that's a good example where people don't do many differential equations or integrals by hand anymore. Not only does that take way to much time, the risk of human error is far to big. I wasn't talking not using any math, I am specifically talking about some very tedious manual actions.
That's like being admitted to a French literature degree and not being able to read French. You need to be this high to go on this ride. And btw... there is intense competition for places. The idea that you admit those who can't read music over anyone that can...... or that you'd waste an entire term bringing all those who can't up to the same level ( since that is what you'd have to do)... is ludicrous and impractical. I have a music degree. Every one of my fellow students had been reading music since before they were 10 years old. The o level and a level pre requisite for any degree course would also assume that the candidate HAD to be able to read music. I don't think I've heard a more stupid idea this year..... Congrats!
my dad could never continue with his music education because he was dyslexic and couldn't read the music, despite being great at playing by ear and improvising on the piano
Somehow this was better, imagine having to hear music that was played by someone who can’t read music, it would be a tragedy, a disaster, it would put so many lives at risk.
Three weeks ago I was called by a professional choir to replace an ill singer for a Mozart's C minor mass performance. I had never sang that work before, and the concert was only 4 days after I was called. I only managed to do this successfully because I can sight-read music.
For that type of job, absolutely! But it wouldn't be the same kind of prep if you were asked to be a fast replacement in a commercial band...that what a lot of this discussion is about. People still refer to 'reading music' as the notated dots on the page, very classical tradition. But in a rock band where those 'dots' aren't a thing, but chords, lead sheets, and tabs are the name of the game? I guarantee you, sight reading isn't going to help you, your ears are what's going to the thing to use...I say this from my current lived experience.
I'd say knowing the basics should be strongly recommended. They don't need to be able to sight-read, but they should know enough to be able to "communicate music." It's the communication I care about. It's not a big ask for people to know the notes on a staff, how sharps/flats/key sigs work, and rhythm. That will enable everyone to communicate what they mean about the music pretty efficiently with less confusion. It's actually a hassle to work with musicians who can't explain anything or have anything explained to them. The musicians that always say stuff like: "Where's C? When did we play C?" "What's a pick up?" "What do you mean 'on the and of 4?'" "What's a measure?" "What's a phrase?" "Hey, can you change what your playing to something more... Idk like darker? Like not dark, but like more mysterious. Give it more oomph. Give it some power." If you go to a music school, you probably shouldn't be talking like that.
Except you're still referring to hard notation here. Tabs/chords, and lead sheets is just different type of notation. I work with two guitarists who don't communicate like this at all. Different genres require different mediums of communication. It's not that there's a lack of one, but get a classical musician and rock musician in the same room and you'll find they have no idea how to communicate with eachother. Not because they can't...but because each style has a different vernacular that requires different communication techniques. And asking for more power, oomph, etc. is perfectly fine. It's merely describing what we want the sound to be like.
Fantastic video. I'm a musician with a career over two decades (have toured throughout North America and Europe), I don't know how to read but I know chord changes (II V I etc etc) and have a basic understanding through playing guitar and piano. My hot take is that transcendent music is 80-90% made by ear and oral tradition and self-taught folks. There is plenty of beautiful, moving music played by orchestras and people directly reading music, but I find that often when I'm moved to tears by music it is by artists playing off the cuff with other musicians who are tuned into what's happening in the moment, not looking down at sheet music. That said, I do wish I could read notation for the ease of communicating arrangements more easily with people who think about music as notation.
@@pichan8841 hard for me to weigh in with an opinion on music school when I didn't go. Have lots of friends who did and they can straddle both worlds (notation and by ear), but teaching would look very different if it was always by ear. Like Adam said: depends on what you think music education is for?
@@aidanknight I was about to say: "I think, it's for getting a job in the music industry." But let's be honest: Everybody hates 'the music industry'! Music business can be very much anti-creative. But music education is much more - and much worse, also. Although I have been very much defending western standard notation in the comments today, all the criticism has some truth in it, at least! Our educational system(s) is (are) rotten to the core. Yes, there is 'gatekeeping', there is colonialism, there is ignorance, there is prioritizing conformity, obedience and alignment with commercial ideals, cravings and goals over individuality, creativity, originality and intelligence. And part of it IS already embedded in notation and the philosophy behind it. Nevertheless, I still love it and the great variety of music it has helped to come into existence! I have been teaching music theory now and again to select students for over two decades. I'm certain: You can learn how to read and write music, too! (You can write language, that's how I know!😉) First make sure, you're ears are trained: Improvise on your instrument (single notes only) and sing what you're about to play. You don't have to be a Pavarotti or Robert Plant. Just try and sing the note you're about to play. Start simple. Pentatonics. Then diatonic scale-based melodies. Intervals. Then triads. Then 7thchords (two neighbouring 4-part chords make the whole scale: e.g. C E G B (Cmaj7) and D F A C (Dmin7) or e. g. F A C E (Fmaj7) and G B D F (G7). Each chord pair makes the full scale. ) Then learn to read rhythms (subdivisions, the rhythmic pyramid, rhythm patterns). RU-vid has a plethora of tutorials. I use e.g. Inyo Soro ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TIMQya8u6Qc.html or Gridmic www.youtube.com/@gridmic-readmusic/featured and musicwithnopain ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uyMMScapPzc.html with students. Then learn to identify the notes of the C major scale on the music staff. All of music theory and notation is based on the C Major scale. You don't have to learn all the scales at once. But once you've learned C-Maj, everything else will come easy to you. Sing, sing, sing the notes. It doesn't have to sound good. But it has to be sufficiently loud to make the mind-to-muscle connection. Contrary to any 'external' musical instrument, with singing you cannot betray yourself! You have to feel/know the note before 'playing'. Take your time. Don't rush yourself. Try to develop a daily routine, though. This will fire up the synapses on a regular basis and do the required re-wiring of your brain. Get a free scoring app like MuseScore, e. g. to test your skill and maybe create your own exercises. Maybe you have different ideas about how to learn reading (and writing). Let me know. (I guess I'll be available via this thread). I'm curious to learn about learning and teaching methods! 🧠👂👁👌!
@@pichan8841 the other question is "what would you use notation for?". for me, i have almost no need in my day-to-day activities as a musician for notation, so it has very limited use. if i were teaching music, maybe i would need a way to write it down, but i'm making recorded music predominantly and it is not a requirement for my personal needs so... i haven't learned. like i said, i know chords, chord changes, and some theory but notation isn't relevant to my ability to play and record.
@@aidanknight Actually, I'm not sure whether I really NEED musical notation. It's one of my main tools in everyday music production - and beyond. I carry with me my litle notebook at all times. I could use an app, sure. These devices and their software are still awkward and less capable than the simple paper/pencil combo. When a melody, a bass line, rhythm comes to mind, I could just hum into my smartphone's mic to record the idea. And sometimes I do. Writing down a musical idea makes it physically visible. Volatile thoughts become crystalline. As a kid I struggled with reading /writing music. I hated it. But without any means of recording it was the only tool available to me, back then, to reliably preserve an idea. This postion of need, I guess, was what led to the development of musical notation in the first place, thousands of years ago. As a touring musician in contemporary popular music you may not feel the necessity to learn any notation beyond chords. But the fact alone your're watching Adam's videos and 'indulge' in discussions among strangers about socio-musicological topics shows you're far more than a guy whose thinking is limited to his immediate needs. As humans and musicians - whether 'pro', 'semi-pro', hobby or whatever else there may be - we have our individual preferences that guide our choices when we're about to invest precious time and money in what were going to learn next. Do I really need to understand tritone substitution? I'm not going to play Bebop, am I? What about odd meters? Who wants to listen to 7/8s anyways? And why should I take drumming classes? I'm a singer! That's OK. We only have limited resources. We must choose. These choices are our private choices and for the most part only affect our private lives. I see a difference when it comes to official jobtitles and degrees. And this is far more than just about medical doctors being able to do heart surgery or giving reliable diagnoses for diabetes. An architect being able to calculate structural stabilty, etc. The overall attitude I get from many comments is: Institutions like music school exist to make better musicians. To supply training and info to enable ourselves to make a living as professional musicians. I agree. But to me there's far more to it than that. If I want to call myself 'Master of Music', I'd better be one. These institutions once were established to carry forth the incredibly complex musical knowledge and wisdom humanity had gained over the course of thousands of years. Formal music education was intended to build upon these achievements. Music notation has literally and physically shaped the minds and brain-wirings of the greatest composers and musicians of all time. It's not a matter of personal preference or taste. You may like their music, their style or even the epoch or not. Without DAWs, plug-ins, MIDI, Samplers, Spectral Analyzers etc., often enduring great hardships and personal distress, they created great monuments of outstanding complexity and emotional depths that are still deeply engraved in our cultural memory after hundreds of years. When people like Fibonacci dicarded roman numbers and took up the arabic decimal system including the 'zero' symbol '0', mathematics and all the sciences quite literally exploded. It blew people's minds, because now being able to write all kinds of numbers - even imaginary ones - let them grasp or even create new realities. The '0'-symbol alone was probably a decisive factor in the rise of 'renaissance' humanist culture and the downfall of absolute church power. We may feel that music is much more about spirituality, our personal emotions, expressions of our innermost feelings or that music is more about social interaction, bonding, a shared feeling of communality etc. than about technicalities like counterpoint and functional harmony. But discarding music notation as one of the basic requirements in music education to me seems like going back to roman numerals. People in the comments say, with technologies like the DAW at hand, there is hardly any need for music notation anymore. I disagree. DAWs with their LEGO-style approach to copy-&-paste- based production/songwriting and related technologies like 'Auto-Tune' surely have changed music production on a global industrial scale. Although I may not like every aspect of that development, obviously, I wouldn't forgo any of it. Nevertheless, neither would I want to forget about my first analog recordings, back when you still had to be capable of recording a song in a single take! The 'Masters of Music' are supposed to be the best of the best. It's a title that 'entitles' to teach and educate the next 'Masters of Music' at university, preparing students to become ALL different kinds of musicians: conductors, composers, performers, researchers etc. in all different areas of musical genres and styles across all music history and future musical developments. If our societies were lacking in talent, lacking in young people capable of mastering the challenges of the great variety of musical professions and music education, I might agree and say: "OK, let's lower our expectations and give them notation classes AFTER admission." That's clearly not the situation here. If you're still reading, your attention span clearly exceeds Generation Alpha levels! Maybe I'm just old, old-fashioned, nostalgic and conservative. Unable to atune myself to an ever faster changing culture. Missing out on the wonderful opportunities of a world at the brink of breakthrough changes brought upon us by all-pervasive communication and AI. Maybe. Btw. The main reason why people don't learn standard notation is bad teachers, I think. I have been teaching music theory to select students now and again from my college days. I dare say, teacher and student not always are a perfect match! Yet, I'm sure you can find someone who fits your personal interests. I can try and answer many questions pertaining to a great variety of music learning subjects, if you like. Merry Christmas and good luck with your music!
@@distorson The part where I can eat :) I was joking. I quit music school when I realized that I really really didn't want to be part of the "business" part of the music business.
@@pauljs75 I think math, programming, and music share a lot and if you are good at any one of them you can probably learn another one. I'm not sure that learning another one will make you any better at the original skill, but they do share a lot.
Re 9:20 this is why we have software like onsong. Chord charts in a format that you press a button to transpose. I usually learn the fundamentals of the baseline in a key but follow the chart in the key of the day
Berklee grad, class of '84. Masters in Jazz Studies from Indiana. Taught college part-time for about 30 years. I never understood why someone who can't read and doesn't want to read would go to school. If you want to play, play. You don't need school to do that. If you want to make beats, make beats. If you want to use technology to make music, go for it. That's all great. One can make a life in music without a degree. I sometimes wonder if it's a way of asking for permission? You don't need anyone's permission to make a life in music. Just do it!
All university courses have minimum standards for entry, and reading sheet music to a basic proficiency level is one sign that a student is serious about their study.
This video cleared up for me, to a considerable extent, the mystery of how professional musicians came to be divided into rival pro-notation and anti-notation camps. Thanks.
Yes, of course it should! If you're trying to get into university to study music, you'll be playing music besides what you composed yourself, and probably playing along with other performers, and possibly composing music for others to perform. And for any of those tasks you will need to read or write notation. Granted, you don't need to, if you're just messing about on your instrument on your own for your own amusement. But if that's all you want to do, why study music at university?
I'd like to throw my hat in the ring here. I'm a classical clarinet player but also a competitive bagpipe player. Every bagpipe tune I've learned has been by ear, my teacher played it, i tried to play it back and it just got easier as i went a long. Sheet music exists for these pipe tunes but it's unused often, so yes sheet music is important to my work but it's not necessary all the time.
Been part of the third camp for a while now, I was in band and jazz band through high school where i learned to read but was raised listening to alot of jazz both traditional and newer, then ive travelled and busked where most dont read music, did the audiation tools get used in more formal settings and the learned route of music notation and theory get used while busking, yes and yes. The best example is from the latter we wanted to play omerta by lamb of god whilst busking and had to explain to my boi that csharp was very important to the riff and he had notated it as just c in the notes he would take while we looked up aongs and rehearsed in the evening😂 it was great for both of us i think i learned more from him than he from me but it was awesome.
The entire question is "what is music school for." Clearly its not as simple as "to make its students better musicians." If want to be a better guitarist you go get some guitar lessons. "Music school" is about producing certain categories of professionals with certain sets of skills. There's no reason that's written in stone, but its just silly to castigate music schools for having admission requirements that match their mission.
As a language, music has to be learned in 4 aspects: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. As chemists worldwide use the same periodic table, musicians worldwide commonly use the western musical notation. Reading notes, writing notes, listening by ear and singing/playing the instrument are the 4 aspects of music language. To be able to communicate as precise as we could, with less misunderstanding, and with the benefit of "immortalizing" musical ideas, music sheets are very important (reading and writing aspects), though in reality, most music that's being played are by ears (listening and speaking aspects). Academically, students are really required to read lots of books especially in the undergraduate and graduate levels, I believe that's the same for music schools. Students have to read lots of music sheets to be able to understand and specialize in a particular field. But we also know that in the real world, not all of the books that we read in school are being applied, same is true to music schools. Schools, like music schools, will teach theory, but after graduating, real life and work will require more practical approach, like listening and playing by ear.
I am a music student - a middle-aged one at that - and although it is highly unlikely I’ll ever be anything close to a professional musician, I am slowly learning how to read music as I progress along my path. I’m finding that it helps in my overall understanding of and relationship with music. It might take a few years to get there but I genuinely want to learn to sight read.
I did a popular music degree that had a sheet music test at audition (this was just over ten years ago) - if I didn't know how to read it I think I would've been offered entry at a lower level, basically a year of remedial classes. The bigger obstacle that I saw a lot of my peers face - typically the most musically talented people - was the academic work. I would say most of the genuinely talented musicians were pushed away from the system because of essay writing instead of music making. Of the people who graduated I honestly couldn't tell you how many are now professional musicians even though my school also presented itself as a place that was training you for the workplace. Funnily enough those who are working musicians are mostly educators. My only job relation to music is through tutoring and the occasional pit gig. The problem I found with career progression beyond that is everyone I spoke to was looking for experience beyond what I had done in an academic setting but at a point where I'm past being able to do that work for *exposure*. All that to say, academia, like everything else under capitalism, is a pyramid scheme.
I feel like the "if they're just gonna play by ear, how are they gonna learn X song for competition" tweet also makes a very strange assumption that students who are good enough to get into music school but can't read music will just be shepherded through their time at school without ever being taught it. Like no, you could and should still teach them while they're there and prepare them for whatever world you think exists past school.
If you want to be a well rounded poet or a thinker, even if you’re creating sentences and stories only to be spoken and not to be written in books or articles, to better learn the rules of grammar you still will be better served if you’re able to read words. The same with music, concepts are vague without proper notation, most minds are not able to catalog all the music language available in western music. A blind person is able to learn music without being able to read, and you can be a great musician without reading. But come on, if you’re willing to really study music, why would you deny the skill of reading? I’m learning to read 25 years after I’ve first learned to play, and in my first year of music reading my horizons just opened so much! I’m not going to music college, but I can buy books, analyze great music, I don’t need to suffer to memorize everything I play, and can use notation as consultation device. If you can play well, if you have good ear you can learn reading music, will be good for your music and for your brain, don’t be lazy and don’t give excuses, if you wanna go to music college, make sure you learn how to read music.
I started classical piano over 30 years ago. Reading music wasn't exactly my forte as I started with the suzuki system. While i too can read music, my ability to hear something and figure it out has served me incredibly well. I practically only use sheet music when something needs to be communicated to another classical musician. Any musician that isn't classically trained? We just sing at each other. As with all communication, if both the sender and receiver of the message understand the same message, the method of communication is largely irrelevant.
I was teaching reading for bass players for a few years at university level. I got them reading rhythm and notes. They could clap the rhythms and say the note names in real time but they didn’t know where the notes were on the bass so I quit my job and now work as a bin-man at a kebab shop in Turkey.
I remember in high school, one if my band directors directed a new Orleans style brass band and made us learn all the music by ear. It was really my first chance getting ear training experience and really helped me have an ever better ear for Improvising.
It’s like being a race driver and not knowing how the transmission works. One has to keep in mind there are different levels of reading music. It is one thing to be able to get a single line melody from a sheet, and another to conduct a symphony.
I feel like the main problem here is that "Musician" is a vague ass term, like, any cathegory that includes Electronic music producers, singer songwriters, professional orchestra instrumentalists, metal gutarrists and modernist composers at once is gonna be pretty hard to generalize. Like, studying "music" seems a bit imprecise. What music and what are you doing with it?
I’m a private music teacher with a regional orchestra gig and a grassicana band. My best argument against the whole mindset is, “what if you come up with all of these licks, teach them to friends, collaborate with said friends, and have a solid decade run of playing shows and having success but then your guitar player has a kid and wants to leave to pursue a different career? You’re the best player around and now don’t have steady work-you’re going to want to take that reading gig.”
Seems like Anika wrote that to draw attention to herself and her rather mid modern music. To someone who's never stepped outside of classical music I'm sure her music seems important, but most of us have and if haven't heard her, you are not missing much, and at this point incorporation of "low" art is almost expected one would think. I think there's something as well to her seeing things from a vocalist perspective, and not understanding the different skillset of an instrumentalist despite being a composer. But if universities had just a short course and devalued writing music, the result would simply be a whole lot of students who would only be capable of playing easy music- and those who could would make the performing ensembles, leaving those who can't to, what?
So I came from a guitar background where I was originally not taught to read music, but only read tablature for the first several years of playing (largely metal music). But my understanding of music generally, my ability to think about and appreciate a broader variety of music, my ability to write music and my ability to perform with my instrument really did not come into their own until I learned to write (first kind of teaching myself using musescore later in highschool out of interest/a desire to write down my own music, then in classes and classical guitar lessons in college). It gave me a way to think about what I was playing and writing more thoroughly. I now had a whole vocabulary for things like dynamics and various rythmic ideas that I would not have had without learning to read music. It made a lot better at things like learning to play new music by ear (e.g., if there's a part I am struggling to get right or understand) I will think about how I would try to write it even if I never do write it down). I still don't have great audiation and my sight reading in general is quite poor for as long as I've been playing, but to me being able to go through the mechanics of quickly processing and playing written music is not really the biggest benefit of having learned to read music to the level I have. It 1) enables me to better communicate musical ideas with others and 2) enables me to think about the music that I write and perform in more explicit and careful way that I otherwise would not. I strongly do believe that for many (or, at least for me) learning to read some developed form of music notation helps improve most other musical skills by just giving young musicians a new sort of cognitive shorthand vocabulary to think through musical ideas, even if they might not always use musical sight reading as working musicians. So I do still think it is important for students to learn at least some notation.
Regarding the last question, "What is music school even for?": I feel like a whole episode could be devoted to that question. It was really interesting, and I was left hoping for a greater exploration into all the things you touched on in that section. I guess what I was really looking for was a compromise that could address the different needs of vastly different musicians, as well as maintain the importance and preservation of certain practices. How should one responsibly steer the culture around music education, Adam? How?! Is it too much to ask that you solve all our problems so we can have a satisfying end to our short video essay?! ;)
i can read sheet music, but i read at like a 2nd grade level LOL so music school is teaching me how to read at a professional level and that's great and it's WORKING also i'm going to school for music production and recording and all that stuff, not like classical or jazz. however, i do play in jazz combo and am required to play in other ones at some point, and it's fun to learn and will definitely help me in the future! i even write my own scores and have to read sheet music for my required piano classes, so it all is kinda necessary if ur serious about music
While I am by no means a professional musician, I performed for 6 years in school in both concert band and marching band and never fully grasped reading sheet music while performing - it was almost like a sheet music dyslexia because even after trying time and time again, while I could tell you roughly what that note should be, I could never while playing tell you what exact note I was looking at based on the sheet. If I'm sitting down with no pressure to play, I can read the music fine given enough time; but while performing, the individual notes on the page would become gibberish. Time signature, pauses, the melody itself, those I could read in the moment fine, but not the notes themselves even after 6 years of practice and grind. Instead I memorized the piece and based on what the scale generally looked like, its flow, I could use my muscle memory and melodic memory to "play it by ear", much to the chagrin of music teachers everywhere I'm sure. Even today I can break out my trumpet and play you the trumpet portion of the theme to Pirates of the Caribbean, but if you asked me to play it based on the sheet I couldn't tell you what the notes are while I'm playing.
I didn't learn to read music until I was 33 and I'm very happy I did. I am not fluent, can't sight read, but I can sure decipher and recognize things and I get better at it. It's about practice and your videos, David Bennett's, and 8-bit Music Theory's help tremendously.
I do cover gigs almost exclusively for a living. I used to be able to sight read okay when I played Sax and percussion in high school and.... It just doesn't come up these days. I'm getting back into it because I want to learn more jazz, but jazz isn't keeping my lights on, 90's rock is.
In high school one of the members of the drumline couldn't read music. He was a great player but he had to learn his quad parts by waiting for the other player to learn theirs and then watch them play it.
When I was in school, I'd listen to the song, listen more closely for my part and then I would read along with the sheet music while listening. Sight reading was a struggle for me at first but after doing it for a while (repetition legitimizes) I got better at it and didn't rely on the recordings as much
Teaching college chemistry to students who have not completed and become adept at basic algebra has caused profound losses in understanding of the physical-chemical aspects of this world. Many students are taking those math classes at the same time as they are taking general chemistry. It does not end well more than half of the time.
Not long ago I watched a great impro of one of my favorite songs. I asked the author (Marcel Lichter, who btw is a phenomenal pianist) where I can buy the sheet music and he replied there's no sheet music because he doesn't have the skills to do it himself.
To me, music is like any other language. You could learn to be a fantastic speaker and a master of language without learning to read, but that doesn't mean we should remove reading as a requirement for entry into higher education
I'll practice to remember my parts played in several different positions on guitar. I follow along with written song charts (if vocals are the key) but always keep an ear out for how I may "fit" in with the current performance. I stopped "reading" sheets shortly after I began teaching myself to play guitar. Due to expense, availability, and reliability I could "bring" more by "reading" less. I still find myself visualizing the keyboard or sheet music occasionally and try not to let it distract me from "hearing".
Reading is fundamental to the teaching of classical OR contemporary music theory and practice because it allows the instructor to essentially freeze the frame of sound. From the traditionalist standpoint, I can take a classical score and analyze the notes on a given beat in a given measure. I can then look at how melodic lines are woven against the harmonic textures (the old non-harmonic tones concept included) to showcase to the students WHY a particular passage has been found to be engaging to a listener. In contemporary practice, I can also take a lead sheet (jazz or pop) and analyze the chord movement against a melody. And yes, I can show a class what the changes are, how the melody/melodies move against it, how the rhythms of the different instruments in a rhythm section play with and against each other, and WHY audiences might dig the tune! When students are able to read, their understanding of the what and the why is much deeper. And while I am not saying that non-reading students don't develop a deep understanding of how music theory and practice function, I am saying their development is slower. And in a 16-week semester, where the students attend class for only 2-4 hours per week, that limited contact time between teacher and student can only be successful when a student reads.
The only other option is to bring back one-on-one mentorship, where the student essentially spends most of the day with a single teacher. 5 days a week! And we all know how higher education LOVES to pay full-time faculty to teach only ONE student per semester! (I can see it now - a university music department with 250 music majors and 250 full-time faculty who are mentoring those 250 students 8 hours a day, 5 days a week - imparting ALL the secrets of music to the students, who, btw, came in as "blank slates!")
The animation studio here in France I'm helping to finance is only hiring composers whom can prove they actually created the music themselves and didn't use an AI "assistant" ....writing notation on paper will help. Not sure if we will be setting the trend in human verification for scoring, but for those companies looking for real human talent, the process of Prix de Rome might be making a come back here in the near future.
I learned to play trombone in a brass band. All the music was written in treble clef, transposed to Bb. In my late teens, I started to transition to orchestras and jazz ensembles, I struggled hard just because the music was all written in bass clef and not transposed. It took so much of the joy out of my musical experience and basically stopped my musical development in its tracks. Yeah I could have pushed through if I had been more dedicated, but it's sad to me that I could have easily been a much more well rounded player, and may well have continued playing into adulthood.
Reading standard notation doesn't have to be entrance criteria. But it should absolutely be part of the curriculum and someone should fully fluent in sight reading before graduating.
I played Trumpet and French Horn in school band - so of course I had to learn to read music. Years later as an adult I've learned to play guitar. I've learned and played hundreds of songs and never not once have I used sheet music or tablature. I had a teacher who taught me to learn everything by ear. I've learned a whole bunch of different chords, chord progressions, modes, etc. and so I feel like what was the point to sheet music in band? In many ways I feel it stunted my musical growth. I'd become dependent on the black marks on the page rather than following the music. OTOH, when I play trumpet these days I know how to add my own style. The notes are just a recipe - and like any recipe, if you're experienced you can make it truly exceptional!
I have developed my musical skills through a couple different artistic traditions, none of which require the knowledge of reading sheet music: The first is the artistic tradition that my dad started when he bought a guitar when he was 16 after listening to Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan. This involves having no idea how sheet music works, and learning by ear to such an extreme degree that you learn *lyrics* by ear. That's how I learned guitar. Tabs existed too, but I didn't use them much because I find learning by tabs to be much harder to memorize than learning by ear. The second is the bluegrass-folk tradition of banjo playing which I've gotten into over the past year. I don't even write don't chords most of the time and instead just figure out melodies by knowing a lot of patterns. Half the work of learning a song is just subconscious intuition. The third is electronic music production in ableton. This in fact involves the most reading of music, however it isn't sheet music.
My school had a Fundamentals of Music course that you had to take(or pass through) before you could take Music Theory. It had the benefit of showing people what they were in for.
I find Dr. Socolofsky's argument self-contradictory. It can't be an "obscene form of gate keeping" if it can be easily achieved. I'm not saying reading capabilities *should* be a mandatory prerequisite, but that argument is not valid one against it.
At the end of the day, schools don’t want you to show up at a gig, say you went to Berklee, and then you can’t read the music because the person in charge would definitely include that the guy went to Berklee and can’t even read sheet music. That said, learning how to play and learning music by ear or by chord/number is far more useful unless you’re playing classical or playing for a play or something.
Most importantly it allows us to explain/ and transfer information that is abstract in a relatively concrete way. It’s as simple as that. Getting into university should be difficult - gatekeeping is often used as a bad word but what people don’t understand is if teachers accept everyone they are actually doing a disservice to the student because they will undoubtedly struggle in the real world and already over saturate and oversaturated market. This harms the students and makes the survival or success in business or likelihood to get a job quite low. If anything they should be more exclusive, if you can’t even overcome the discipline of reading music studying music at college is not for you. That’s not such a bad thing and you can still study privately (take private lessons) and doesn’t mean you can’t be a happy thriving studying musician on your own. School is expensive and time consuming and I met many musicians who were not cut out for music school and either dropped out or immediately after graduating pursued other avenues. The high standards (gatekeeping) should be used to guide students into fields that are appropriate for them.
At least in my native Finland, music schools practically require you to already know what they will teach you in order to get accepted because the amount of students they accept each year is miniscule. And the entrance exams aren't specialized enough: I tried to get into a music technology course for a few years approximately a decade ago, and the entrance exam was identical to the musician course entrance exam. That meant that classically trained cellists, trombonists, etc. took those slots and then transferred to the musician course the following year. I "knew" how to read notation, as in knew how it works and could figure out sheet music if I stared at it for long enough, but was I any competition for a violinist who had been drilled to do that ever since they were 3 and could sight-read the stuff we were shown in their sleep? Of course not. Somebody I know who was a goddamn wizard at mixing, recording, and producing didn't even have a chance because he only knew piano roll and didn't play an instrument.
I think the reading analogy people are looking for would be a theater student not knowing how to read English. You can speak and perform in English without knowing how to read it, but knowing how to read sure saves time.
i strongly believe that any music student must know basic music notation and theory. I will not deny that there are good musicians that cant read sheet music, but depending on where said musician wants to play or do in music usually know the basics will assist them a long way.
Music notation and theory are very different. I think just learning to ready is like learning how to pronounce a language you don’t understand, while learning theory is learning to understand the language, the grammar, have the ability to make your own meaning. I agree it’s a handy tool learning to read, but far less important than learning the language.
@@jgoodwin6901you would never hire an English teacher who can't read and write. It demonstrates, at bare minimum, an effort towards and knowledge of the subject. I can't imagine wanting to be a musician and not wanting or bothering to learn to read sheet music. It's ridiculously important for any real music gig. Composing, recording, band/combo gigs, teaching, etc etc. You need to be able to read, and especially need to be able to sight read extremely well.
@@charliecampbell6851 I agree with your first two sentences. Not with the rest. I think maybe some people really value reading sheet music because that’s what they have been taught to value. But take the score away and a lot of musicians wouldn’t know what to do with their instrument. Once people develop their relative pitch and can improvise well I feel like this is when people really unlock music. You start to play from the score within your own head. You just don’t need sheet music for MOST situations, just like Adam demonstrated. Singers don’t use sheet music in most situations because they don’t need it. Musicians with aural and improvisation skills also don’t need it for most situations. I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from learning to read. It’s useful sometimes. I am just trying to emphasise how much more important other musicianship skills are and how understated they are in music education.
@@jgoodwin6901 They're not different at all! They're almost the same thing, actually! Western standard notation can't be sepearated from western music theory. Both have evolved from one another over the course of many centuries. The C Major scale is the basis for the complete system of notation aswell as for the highly complex system of functional harmony! Either way it doesn't make sense to learn one without the other. You'll either be a useless, theorizing egghead/dork/nerd always just talking about the 'laws' of music or a zombie/robot/remotely controlled music reproduction machine taking orders from a sheet of paper.
This is awesome- thanks! I share a free, step-by-step music literacy course on my RU-vid channel in the hopes of making the skill of reading music accessible to all.
One thing that I remember learning about in the history of the swing era was big bands doing Head Arrangements (what Count Basie was notorious for at the time) versus playing written charts (Like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Etc. In the community college jazz band I was part of we did plenty of written charts but it's too bad we couldn't have also learned how to create Head Arrangements filling out the parts with a Big Band as well.
i appreciate how this video didn't quite answer it either. but as a DAWer of 5 years so far, i think honestly at least to create music is not at all necessary. helpful, yes, but i never learned it to a muscular degree. i sure respect it though
Before I watch the video, I’m gonna give my view. I will eventually watch the video but I want to see what my view in retrospect. I believe it depends. I believe in many situations it’s a yes, but I can’t say it should be required for people going into music production, music business, or world music (maybe a base level understanding.) probably a few more examples out there too. I think sheet music is essential in understanding the Western European classical tradition, and it is a good system of communicating music, but with technology, there are more ways around it.
just from watching the first few seconds i think you dont. Especially when talking about rock and metal, the genre i come from, most if not all musicians cant read sheet music and denying musicians entry based on that can have a substantial affect on them. from my personal experience with college (in the UK) i didnt have to read at all and instead we had classes to teach it for absolute beginners. I think you should be able to get into music school without knowing it but should get taught it as you go through
I played trombone, as an amateur who always tried to play better for about 50 years, stopping only because of a lip problem. Music notation was absolutely necessary for me as I played in symphony orchestras, swing bands, a brass quartet, brass bands etc. That said, I wished that I could play by ear and read changes at playing speed. I think that anyone who calls himself or herself a professional musician should be able to read. It's part of the game and opens things up for the player. Someone who is familiar only with playing, for instance, blues on a guitar may have a lot of fun and a good career but that person will be very limited.
Music is the study of how humans interact with relationships in sound. When hearing the term, "Classically trained musicians", try to hear, "Classically trained chefs". A classically trained chef learns about flavour combinations. This knowledge can go on to be used to cook traditional dishes, or not. Making burgers takes classical knowledge i.e. an understanding of flavour combinations. Learning to read music assists understanding of functional harmony - amongst other things. Music students must learn standard notation in the same way as physicists must learn the standard notation of mathematics. Without it, how can the Field of understanding about relationships in sound be progressed?
At least in my experience, Sight reading in Jazz is absolutely critical and something everybody needs to learn. In Conservatory, it is a skill that isn’t taught, but you are forced to learn it through experience sight reading either big band, ensembles or other students charts. It’s not gatekeepy to ask ppl to learn one of the most critical skills in the music lmfao. However, I don’t think it’s critical for a student to have that together coming into school, as nobody does ever. You can have a professor drill you in it or teach yourself over time and there’s nothing wrong with that (as I’m trying to do).
It depends on the type of program and desired outcomes. If your goal is to work as a classical musician, if you did somehow manage to gain acceptance to a music program in this genre without knowing how to read sheet music (not a dig; that would be a hugely talented person), you would enter with a huge disadvantage. Written music is a language with its own unique orthography. Much as we didn't learn to read our native spoken languages in a day, we can't learn to read music in a day either. That's because fluent reading requires automaticity, which can take years to develop. As musicians, in addition to this orthographic mapping, we also have to develop kinesthetic mapping along side it. This is why a violinist can't just pick up a flute and play it, even though the music is the same. Developing fluency and automaticity in both of these areas is intricate and cognitively demanding work. It's the difference between being able to read a simple melody at a slow pace, where you have time to think about note names and fingerings, and reading chords or extended 16th note runs where you don't have time to do this and must instead be able to do things like recognize chord shapes and rhythmic patterns, read intervallically, and have instant and automatic association of this to where your fingers need to go on your instrument. That being said, I don't necessarily think that reading standard notation has to be a requirement for everyone, depending on the goals of the program and the student. I do, as someone with degrees in music, reading instruction, and special education- and a ton of experience teaching struggling readers in both fields- disagree with the doctor's claim that reading music can simply be taught from scratch in a short enough period of time that musicians focusing in areas where the skill is imperative (classical, jazz, any large ensemble work) would have a fair chance at "catching up" to their peers. It's not impossible, but they would be entering at an extreme disadvantage. I suspect that this professional- long removed from her early musician days- does not remember what it was like to learn to read music herself, or recognize what an involved process it was in the first place. Most of us who learn when we're quite young... I don't think we fully appreciate this unless we start to learn about how these skills are acquired, so we take it for granted, myself included for most of my life When you've known how to do it for as you can remember, it really does seem as simple as "this is A, this is B, they all go in order then start over again after G. Got it?" I don't think that requiring at least a working knowledge of how to read sheet music- for fields where it is imperative- is necessarily gatekeeping, but I think that flexibility in this is key. Everyone arrives at a different place in their practice and with different abilities. I've played with musicians with vision impairments that had to access music in a different way than written on a page. Obviously it's possible. But is it ideal? Only as ideal as an adaptation can be, which is up the the person using it.
It's a flawed metaphor to compare it to illiterate people studying English literature. Instead it's like someone who can't read English (but could maybe read other languages) studying language in general, which I think would be totally reasonable. The hidden assumption is that "music program" really means "European music and its offshoots program"
I'm reading between the lines a bit here, but you say that when you joined the high school jazz band, you could read music, but you didn't know where F# was on your bass. To be blunt, if all music was to you at the time was fret numbers, you were not a good musician, but you became a good musician when you learned the notes on the guitar neck, in order to read music in practice. If you had never learned the notes on the neck, you would never have been able to do things you do at gigs now that *don't* involve reading music - for example watching the pianist's left hand, or listening to someone calling out chord names. A band leader will happily call out chord names to teach someone a song on the fly, but no band leader wants to be shouting things out like "third fret e string". I had to do this once as a band leader and it was a massive pain, plus I could only do it at all because I'm a guitarist, if I was a pianist it would be impossible. So, if the pressure to read music forced you to learn the notes on your instrument, it massively benefited you as a musician, even if you'd never had to read music again after leaving that band.
im a drummer and mainly play metal and stuff, music that doesnt even really lend well to being notated. Its been ~2 years since ive looked at drum charts/scores regularly and when i look back at them i do struggle. However, i know the notes of the fretboard and the black and white keys, and learning by ear is not a huge issue for me. i feel that that is more important than learning to notate or read music. not saying at all that you shouldnt learn to read music i mean i did. it certainly does help in certain situations as he described.
Yes, technically it's a vocabulary that a lot of people speak and understand. Basically the only issue is conforming to composition changes throughout regions and time. but even as someone that doesnt speak the language of music fluently, I think the communication is fine (unless we can come up with any easier concepts and way to learn the language, which we have many examples of but you still can't cheat time and effor, no matter how many short cuts people assume to come up with. Regardless, yes, I think any foundation of communicating a language of defined vibrations is well suited, albeit endlessly tedious, is still worth being required, until any improvements are made. yes music is created mostly with feel, there still needs to be a way to communicate those feelings. This is more-so a response to the internet, rather than Adam. But I personally think that the argument usually lies within the composition, and those are influenced and change throughout time.
Havent finished the vid yet but when i was 17/18 i played bass in school orchestra for the sound of music. The music couldnt be given to me as tab so i tried learning bass clef The first few WEEKS yes weeks of playing i didnt understand what flats and sharps were💀 after too many practises of being out of key i started learning the songs by ear. All of a sudden what i was reading started making sense! The sharps and flats made perfect sense too altho i tended to use vey inefficient fingerings. I got thru some practise sessions in the right key and by the time we performed i knew the music and understood the sheet music well enough to play well. Even recieved some compliments on my playing from audience members😂 Since then i never used bass clef again and would have to start from scratch, i defo think it would make me a better musician to do so
I went to Musicians Institute for Drums/percussion - While they don’t require it for admissions I had to learn how to read charts. Not just rhythm but notes. Drummers needed to learn basic keyboard/piano. It made me a better and more well rounded musician.
I was accepted on partial scholarship too. While I wasn’t a sight reader when I applied I knew how to read from concert/marching band in high school. Which I honestly hated lol
I've heard about other institutions having this requirement for learning basic piano skills. Which I'm not necessarily opposed to. But, it is interesting. 'Cause like. Wouldn't it be more equal if piano majors had to learn basic drums too? I feel like there'd be something to gain for them musically as well, just a thought, though. :)
the requirement for basic piano fundementals is even wierder than the requirement for reading sheet music. The only purpose for piano fundementals for a non piano player is that piano serves as a very easy method for TEACHING Music Theory. I find it wierd that people outside of Music Education degrees are required to learn piano. The problem is also there is alot of musicians in the world who are better than people who can read music or play piano. So reading isnt exactly required. Sight reading is also something thats a niche depending on work field. Before i went to music school i didnt know how to read music, all the gigs in bands i played were from memory. So at first reading music was very jarring but to know i could just have this sheet music up during the final concert also felt unproffessional to me. I Eventually learned how to read music but never did it become part of the final product. Every single concert i memorized my work and i was one of the few people to actually memorize the repertoire.
@@dolparadise3040 I mean keyboard skills are also very transferable to music production and composition. It's the most intuitive instrument to learn theory and harmony on (DAWs use piano rolls for a reason).
