Fermata

fermlogo.gif I read music pret­ty well, but some­times I think my gui­tar instruc­tor thinks I’m an idiot, because I read music strange­ly.

He’ll say ‘Start from the E’ and it will take me 5 or 10 sec­onds to find the right note from which to start. When I read music I don’t read notes as their names, I read them as tones. I sup­pose the best anal­o­gy I can come up with is that when you read this, you don’t read each let­ter and think A‑D-A‑M adam I‑S is D‑U-M‑B dumb. You just read it as: Adam is dumb. I’ve always read music this way, but I used to be bet­ter at pick­ing up the notes on the staff, but since I had an 8 year break from read­ing music, that semi-abil­i­ty is slow to come back.

In the oth­er direc­tion, sort of, I can’t play things by ear unless I’ve read and mem­o­rized the ‘pas­sage’ first. I’ve got a good mem­o­ry for rote things.

5 thoughts on “Fermata”

  1. See, I’m all about their names. Though, grant­ed, I can read staff like a 3 year old. So you think about the pas­sage, as a whole, not the indiv. notes with­in it?

  2. I have a hard time con­vert­ing the audi­to­ry to the visu­al. I have always been able to pick things out by ear and hear whether some­thing is on key or not (what some refer to as ‘per­fect pitch’, altho most peo­ple think that means you can sing per­fect­ly on key). It’s my one gen­uine musi­cal tal­ent that I got from being on the end of gen­er­a­tions of musi­cians (my grand­par­ents met at West­min­ster Choir Col­lege). What this means tho is that I can sort of play any instru­ment I pick up, but can­not real­ly play any­thing because I absolute­ly can­not read music with­out think­ing “ok — e‑g ‑b — yah — that’s a b!”, so in all my lessons I nev­er could play any­thing longer than about a page because i had to be able to mem­o­rize it to play it.

  3. On gui­tar for exam­ple, once I’ve got the note ful­ly asso­ci­at­ed with its posi­tion on the neck, I ‘for­get’ what the note is called and instead relate it to the notes around it, almost like I have an intu­itive grasp of what some­thing should sound like.

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