Should sheet music be required for music school?
2024 ж. 14 Мам.
281 373 Рет қаралды
Continuing the Tantacrulian tradition of chess metaphors in music notation.
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0:00 Intro
1:22 Part 1 - Music notation is kinda hard, actually
6:05 Part 2 - Music notation as a “professional tool”
10:52 Part 3 - What is Music School even for?
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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.
In this case, many keyboards are percussion instruments
@@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).
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.
Really appreciated your video about notation.
@adamneely @tantacrul You guys should definitely collab. Two of the best communicators in the game. Cheers!
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.
I mean, it seems like you spend a whole lot of time working with notation now though, considering you're a designer for multiple notation software.
I always liked something my theory professor said, "you get the same reaction when you take away the music from someone who only reads as when you put a piece of music in front of someone who never reads". Good to be versed in both scenarios! You will absolutely be more useful having both skills. One thing that you didn't touch on was classical improvisation
Underrated comment.
Though they're really not equal, the ability to navigate well with your ears will come up far more often than the need to be able to read something well. I taught myself to read, and I'm glad I did, though I'm very slow. It's come in handy on occasion when I needed to record a simple part someone wrote out, or I wanted to write a specific part out for someone else. But having strong ears is far and away the skill that is critical in virtually every other situation. Not to mention, every non reading musician I've ever known with amazing ears, never had a problem getting work.
@@Teeverd That completely depends on the genre of music that you're performing though. Putting aside that any musician will need good "ears" to work/play as a group, many musicians (for example, a choral singer, in the church tradition) will need to read in order to learn the music. Many traditions rely on written music to communicate, while others rely on oral/aural traditions. I don't think it's possible to say definitively which is the more common set of traditions, or which will come up "more often".
@@harriesadam Those are fair points. But they still strike me as more the exception than the rule. As Adam himself said- (among the various musical skills)- *"reading is not even close to being the most important. Consistently across my musical career it's been my ear, my ability to improvise , my ability to adapt to different styles and my musical memory that have served me the best in every professional situation".* That's been my experience too, also for virtually every full time working musician I know working in mainstream musical settings. Another perspective is, if being a poor reader was truly a limitation on what you could do in music, then every blind musician would have a limit to their possibilities. Of the few I've known through the years, it was far from a limitation, since all those skills Adam mentioned were off the charts with them. I'm not against reading at all, it is absolutely a useful tool, I just have never seen the lack of that ability be an actual barrier to becoming a great musician in any popular genre.
@@Teeverd I think those points still apply in a genre-specific manner though. For instance, "ability to improvise" is something that is basically non-existent in the classical genre (aside from some baroque techniques). "Mainstream" musical settings are (predominantly) descended from African-American music-making traditions, such as Jazz, and so value improvisation and aural skills more than reading (though most jazz musicians could still read back in the day!) Regardless of the genre though, reading/writing is a valuable skill in communication with other musicians. If I want another musician to play something that I've thought of, I either have to play it for them, or write it down. The latter is a significantly lower latency means of communication. Lots of working musicians need that short turnaround, across multiple genres, so it's an important skill for musical *communication*. I think the elephant in the room is the way in which this discussion forgets that it's not just about individual playing (which, of course, doesn't need reading), but about playing as communities or as groups of musicians. Many genres *need* reading for that to work without an obscene amount of fuss, and while some genres don't, it does sometimes make working together easier.
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.
A better analogy for 6:10 - Reading books : reading notation : : Telling a story : Playing a song. You can tell a story/play a song, but the method of learning that story/song is the catch. Did you "sightread" the book out loud? Or did you hear someone else tell the story, then repeat it? The method of acquisition of the knowledge does not define the person's performing skill, but does affect the efficiency in getting to a performance.
Exactly. Just because you can’t read a book doesn’t mean you can’t listen to it. And just because you can’t read what’s on a page doesn’t necessarily mean you have no idea what the complicated words mean, sentence structure, parts of speech etc. On that note, would you keep an autistic person who doesn’t talk from going to school for poetry? They know English, and can write nice poems, they just can’t or won’t use there “literal voice”.
Efficiency, but accuracy too. A book can be read as many times as you want, but the words will always be the same. Meanwhile a story shared through spoken words only will eventually change, little by little, after each session and interpretation. The same happens with music.
I think this is exactly the correct analogy. If you're studying literature, it is a waste of time to analyse Shakespeare via spoken word. Yes, it is doable, but it is extremely inefficient, inacutate, and not reproducible. And this is precisely the reason why I think reading music is a requirement for music schools: you want to convey a musical idea to the class quickly and clearly.
It dies define persons skill. Try "retelling" dostoyevsky, it would sound like an uneducated bafoon babble, the try reading it like a pro actor, word for word. Much different experience.
"to read books you must know how to read books" would've been funny as hell as a segue to an Audible ad read
As someone who studied linguistics and early texts in Japanese, the purpose of notation, of all writing, is twofold: to give you to the ability to record something in a way that doesn’t change without relying on a very intensive system of memorization, and to allow you to learn something you have no direct experience of. For music, the first case is important and was even more important before the advent of recorded music. Now, it’s possible we would have had the same music; people can and do learn and memorize Bach by ear, and the chain of “I am Z taught by Y taught by X” goes back hundreds to years now. But it would be much harder to dabble in the whole corpus, so you’d probably have people knowing one school and people knowing another. Less important works would be forgotten (possibly even Bach, as he had a period of being out of favor). Also, new works would become harder to introduce. Only someone in the chain of teaching could really hope their works might be remembered and added, and the tradition would always be valued over new works (you can see this in religious texts). Simply because there is a finite amount even the best trained person can memorize, but an infinite amount that can be passed by writing. In the second case, if the only way to learn Bach or hear Bach was a Bach teacher, then it would be impossible for someone who had no experience to pick it up. I can play a random song out of the real book and make it work OK. I sure as hell don’t know all the thousands of songs in there. I can learn a Bossa tune I don’t know partly based on what I know of the style and the sheet music. So you are absolutely limited to what is in your experience. Before written language there were people in religious or government office who were in charge of memorizing important texts and passing them down perfectly, and they would train other people to do so, and so on. And this was a job a very few people would do. With writing that burden is lessened and many people can learn. People can also learn many things. This is extremely difficult without writing or recording.
These are some really thoughtful and well-written observations.
To add on, modern recording technology could be argued as a replacement outside of the fact that it requires some form of playback technology and often uses mediums that are harder to preserve than paper and its relatives.
My first linguist reaction was that learning notation is like learning IPA. It's useful for most of us, some of us get it down more smoothly than others, but pretending it's the end-all-be-all of linguistics is short sighted. And while I started my program knowing IPA, I think it would be ridiculous to require it for entry.
@@kahlilbt Can one of you linguists confirm that music is not a language because it has no syntax?
@@LesterBrunt I'm just a linguist and a amateur musician but musical syntax is a whole field of study.
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 :)
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'm a classical student studying cello and I find this topic fascinating. It's really interesting to hear your perspective as a jazz musician, since there seems to be such a divide between the classical and jazz worlds in education, despite there being so many similarities as you say. To me it would seem impossible to get involved in higher music education without being able to read sheet music, but it was really interesting to hear you describe how your professional life doesn't fully depend on that at all. I always cringe every time a visiting musician comes into the conservatoire where I study, and asks us to improvise or teaches us something by ear. And yet it feels like a skill I always wish I had been taught earlier. I actually used to love learning music on the piano by ear when I was younger, learning my favourite pop tunes to impress my friends. But in the classical world, on cello specifically, it's never been considered a useful skill, and so it's never been taught to me. Interesting stuff
I just commented the same thing basically, from a jazz trombonist perspective. I admire my orchestral friends for their phenomenal sight reading skills, but sometimes it’s hard to communicate with them in an improvisational environment. We need both sides of the coin taught to everyone!
It's interesting, too, how much we think about school as a place meant to prepare you for work. Do you need to read sheet music to work? It depends. There is also the other perspective, too, that school is not just about preparing you to work. It's also about enrichment, both for the student and the community, and the attainment of knowledge and skill for It's own sake. But then again, we all have to eat. Just wanted to throw in my two cents.
Learning how to read and write won't keep the musical geniuses from creating great music. But not being able to read and write will keep graduates from making a living.
I suppose in your world, blind people should just give up any musical ambitions.
Of course that’s an absurd notion but wouldn’t it be great if someone invented another sensory method of musical notation that sight impaired persons could use so everything didn’t have to be memorized? Foot braille for instrumentalists or a piano roll system that when strapped to an arm applied pressure to points that could be differentiated by feel? I’d be surprised if there wasn’t something already in use or development.
I think that my school does it right - you do a performance audition and a theory test (which I think is pretty standard) but your results in the theory test will never get you declined, it’ll just see if you need to take an introductory theory course. I think it’s a good medium because I think notation is fairly important in music school, but they offer the skills to help you learn if you don’t already know.
But that doesn't sound like a basic music school. It sounds like a more advanced one already, like where you would go before music university
When I auditioned for one college, I got a near perfect score on theory but my aural skills were so in the trash that I would have had to take a remedial course. I can read with the best of them, but I didn't bother too much with the aural training. Exact opposite of what I think you're talking about. So...
@@TheJoern when I said school I meant my University. Sorry
@@mikehayden7691 There are a lot of great KZhead channels for ear training I use for students. Intervals, chords, inversions, scales, modes, rhythms, etc. Score vids are great, too! Give it a try! Building your musical ear is THE most important thing in your musical training. It's to musicians what the 'the force' is to a jedi!
@@TheJoernThe school I went to does this as well, and I would not consider it a particularly intense or high caliber music school.
I feel like Dr. Socolofsky's intentions were misunderstood by some. The idea likely wasn't "Abandon all notation" but "Stop making knowing beforehand a requirement and teach afterwards"
Yes, but she is talking about music schools. Shouldn't music schools have some level of requirement for admission? She is saying that having it a requirement is some form of unethical standard, or being used to keep others out, unjustly. Gatekeeping is a term used for those practices. Having admission requirements is not gatekeeping and therefor not in the scope of her criticism, however the Dr seems like a person who may not have the mental prerequisite to be taken as an intelligent or ethical person. Therefor those that listen to her may be setting themselves up for failure later. I believe that in order to produce good students and make sure that the school is graduating them, they should be able to pick their admitted students using a standard that is relevant to their goals. If you think that this is discriminatory then you want schools to be required to choose students that may not be capable of following through the program and failing. Yes, reading the most common form of music notation should be a requirement to entry? Should reading and writing not be a requirement for a journalism school? Should Mathematics not be a requirement for a technological institute? Her intentions are not misunderstood at all, it is a continuation of the decay of standards for a society should value having higher standards. I say should, because from your comment and from the state of our society, standards have taken a seat and allowed narcissism to stand up and demand to be heard. Sit down.
holy yap 😂
@@TN-gr1xh Amen
@@TN-gr1xh Problem is you have to pay $200,000 for your fancy Berklee degree but you did all the hard work before hand teaching yourself how to read. Once again proving how much of a waste of money music school can be. All of it comes down to you and not your formal education.
@@ChetHanks-eh1md Do you believe the only, or at least the most important thing you learn in an advanced music institution is reading music? Its about learning advanced musical techniques, history, different instruments, COMPOSITION, and working with other skilled musicians. It would behoove you to have learned the most common form of musical notation so that you are not busy struggling to keep up with the others. How does an instructor communicate to an entire class theory and instruct them without things like handouts and visual aid in notation form. We need to boost standards for education right now, because it baffles me how stupid the people are now.
I've always found that it's a great tool to have. I've never lost a gig because I can sight read, but wouldn't have got some if I couldn't. But there's plenty that I've done that I don't need it for too, but the experience and skills gained from those have helped with what gigs that don't need reading. The skills can and do feed into each other.
jazz school graduate here! i believe knowing how to read music is required 99% of the time when playing originals or arrangements. it’s also required 100% of the time if you ever want to play with a big band!
people sure love throwing "Gatekeeping" around, they want everything to not require Effort at all, that if anything is require effort, it's wrong. like if they can't do that, the society must adjust to their skill level. Most of the time those guy that complaining about music sheet was the one that end up drop out or work at McDonalds for the rest of their life. it's a natural barrier of entry to weed out the goofing around one from the serious one i don't think reading sheet music is that hard, basically for Piano, Violin, Saxophone, and other classical instrument player, reading sheet music is the default, it's expected. but for Guitar, Drum, those guys are rough around the edges, because they grow up with "100 best Guitar of all time", and thinking that they can play something using tabs, and didn't need music sheet notation. they're the one that opposed to music sheet notation hard. because they're not properly Trained, therefore they're more avoidant and allergic to any music theory and even if they're admitted, they'll resist learning anything hard, because why learning something new, why learning scale, why learning rhythm, when you can already kinda shred some pop song from "100 best Guitar of all time" book
Could agree more
@@jensenraylight8011 YES!! Try that with college level sports. '...Let's see, you want to play on the baseball team, right....??..... pitcher.....ok......you what.?? Haven't learned how to throw a fastball??? Oh, just not yet.... We''ll be teaching you that???? Well, hmm...yeah, ahh, ok......we'll get back wichooo.....'
BTW, my best friend has several Grammies and can't read a note. He's also a natural -- I brought him to my music school and they gave him an ear test, his keenness of hearing (pitch, rhythm sensitivity) was the highest they'd ever tested. But he's had a real aversion, almost a phobia, about reading, but it didn't prevent him from achieving. But he's that rare exception.
@@zdogg8 Your friend definitely was a rare exception, and having a several Grammies are no joke either, it's worthy of respect but in this case, musical notation can be learned by yourself probably about 1-6 months while you're still at high school. it only took you one youtube video. why do you wait to actually get admitted at university before you learn that? the fact that people apply to a music university without at least trying to satisfy the requirement first is really baffling. because you're wasting everyone time, you're wasting your instructor time, your peers time. now everyone have to stoop so low to your awfully low standard. there are a lot of peope who suddenly vanished in the middle of the term, maybe because they can't memorize the note on the fretboard because Tabs didn't tell you the notes name, or can't memorize the musical notation notes. who knows, but not knowing that in the first hand hurts you as well.
As a singer who relies on church gigs, you're often called in with little to no rehearsal to cover for a section leader. You have to sight sing as well as sight read. If you don't know the music ahead of time, you absolutely need to be able to read what's on the page and take notes wherever the director wants changes. If you're not a classical singer, it may be a lot less important to be able to read music, but I can't imagine being able to do this job without being able to read it.
It’s funny because the main songs I’m asked to sight read /don’t have any notation/. I just have to know it from the piano chords.
No one goes to a university level professional music program to play church gigs.
@@gcvrsa I know tons of musicians some self taught and some professionals who are weekend warriors. Playing at local restaurants and bars. They got the knowledge and education. Sadly working as a musician you got to hustle. When the pandemic hit. I saw them struggle and still trying to keep up.
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!
"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.
Sheet music allows us to communicate what we want, easily, and to a large group of people. Without sheet music, or at least the ability to describe what is on the page, we cannot easily convey what we want to, and then as the player, we cannot easily translate the concept of the music to the actions of our body, much like Adam said.
Even something as simple as the Nashville system works wonders at communicating between musicians, I've jammed with a bass player who couldn't tell me what key he's in and it's not so fun
Also sheet music allows us to communicate across vast gulfs of time and space. We can be anywhere in the world with access to the internet and find out how Beethoven arranged woodwinds in a symphony or how David Gilmour played compound bends in a guitar solo. There are other ways to learn, transmit, and preserve this information, but they are not better ways. Most of them have great disadvantages compared with sheet music.
I agree but the original premise is whether to require it for admission. An admitted student who doesn’t read music could then be brought up to speed. Adam addresses the limitations of this but for a dedicated student who already has technical ability it wouldn’t be that hard. They’d have some catching up to do but I could see it happening in a semester.
@@jm.101exactly. The discussion isn't about whether they need the skill at all but rather do they need it to begin their higher education.
That’s the problem, the Marxists want you to stop. You’re not communicating their ideas. You’re too free. You’re too articulate. You’re not valuable enough to the party. They’ll fix that.
I love the piano motifs on Kinesthetic and Audiation to underline it.
I've been a musician my whole life. I can read, but never have been very good at it. I was diagnosed as dyslexic at a very young age, now that I'm getting older my eyesight is beginning to fail, so it's getting harder & harder to follow along on the page. Reading is an ever-present element in my writing & performing, but it's certainly not the biggest element I've had to focus on. Thank you for your wonderful videos Mr. N!
You forgot to differentiate between the two types of university music degrees: music performance and music education. I was an education major and it prepared me not just to teach but to play professionally. My education was very broad. I was a trombone major but had classes on every group of instruments. I even conducted Beethovens 5th. Before university I studied jazz improve at Eastman, but took improv classes with classical musicians. Many of them had a difficult time. The skills I learned made it easier to get gigs of every type, and made it easy to lead my own groups since I understood how to play all instruments. After completing my first cruise ship contract ad was asked to be a musical director on the next contract. Why? Not just my playing but understanding every style of music and being able to lead the other musicians. I even had to teach a music school drummer how to play a bossa! Performance majors do not get this training specially at Berkley! I think this is a big mistake. Just narrow concentration on jazz improv does not prepare students for the real world playing for money!
Great video as usual, bro. This isn't a criticism of you, this is a criticism of the broader cultural co-opting of jazz that has happened over the past 40+ years, but I just want to point out that, at 12:38, you mention how music school is "...a cultural project that aims to maintain the aesthetic practices, like reading sheet music, of a given musical style - mostly classical music and JAZZ music." The reason this statement bothers me isn't because you said it, it's because it's true now, whereas it was NOT true before jazz became institutionalized. It's crazy how we've just accepted that sheet music is "necessary" for jazz, and is, most of the time, treated with more priority than learning and memorizing even simple melodies by ear in MOST schools around the world. Playing music this way is at the BACKBONE of jazz and how it started, and reading music was ALWAYS a carry-over from classical education, NOT jazz. Reading sheet music had nothing to do with jazz in New Orleans, and it was the mixed Creole musicians who were forced into the black communities, because of the One Drop rule, that we have this inclusion of classical concepts in the music. However, there were still PLENTY of bands, most of them, who did not use sheet music in either the learning process or the performing process. A good example of this in more "relevant" practice is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Look at any of those videos and tell me if you see music stands. Sun Ra. We all know of the great early Count Basie tradition of coming up with riffs on the spot; sometimes ENTIRE TUNES were learned this way when cats would just make up parts for the sections to learn. We do NOT do this in music school. AT ALL. It seems like all of the more aural methods of learning, as well as the use of body movement and immersion into jazz music, is always looked at as "primitive" or "uneducated" by a select group of people and their culture, or those INFLUENCED by said culture. I don't like that "jazz" is included in this statement, but I can't be mad at you at all, and I'm not - because it's true. Right now, that IS an "aesthetic practice" of most jazz musicians in the world, and we only do it to cut down on time and money spent in rehearsals and at home so we can keep working everyone else's gigs to pay rent... 2 hours isn't enough time to practice a 2 set show with 5-6 tunes per set, adjustments and all - by EAR. And have you tried sending music in advance to a jazz musician? Come on. Send it 2 months in advance and they are looking at it the day before the rehearsal (or on the train ride TO the rehearsal if you live in a big city).
*The elephant in the room.* As an outsider and newbie, it feels like (other than New Orleans) jazz has been completely captured by academia. I went to a jam session hosted by a jazz professor in Atlanta. I'm no slouch, but I couldn't recognize any of the standards they were playing. It felt like 6 months in a conservatory was a prerequisite to hang. I love & respect what y'all are doing with your well-earned skills, but something just feels off about a spontaneous organic tradition being smothered under layers of dogmatic snobbery. Or maybe I'm just bitter that after seven years of elite music education, I still can't read. 😩
I’m currently enrolled in a jazz studies program, and we do have a professor from Ghana with a doctorate in ethnomusicology, who teaches by rote majority of the time. But even with him, he’s teaching so much stuff, and you are learning so much, spread across the incredibly large load of a music major, that if he didn’t also provide sheet music for at least some of his material you’d be flailing in deep waters. Not to mention he runs a big band, which while still playing in the traditional style he dictates to them as best they can, there still needs to be a compilation of the incredibly dense parts happening for the professor to reference from time to time, and there still needs to be a way to teach 7 different tunes with unintuitive forms, rhythms they’ve never heard or played, time signature changes, body movements, points where horn players are expected to pick up traditional auxiliary percussion instruments, on top of teaching these parts to 11-12 different instruments. I play hand drum and I still occasionally need to reference something
If you don't mind sharing, which program are you at/who is the professor? Interested to research more.
For young children (high brain plasticity), the very first skill taught should be playing by ear - even perfect pitch can be taught at that age. Sheet music and memorizing - that comes later.
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 a french horn player, reading is vital for my instrumental tradition, but that is very much not the case for all instruments. I think the most useful part of music notation is the mental skills it develops even outside music reading itself. It's like how being bilingual is helpful even if you're only regularly speaking a single language in public. This type of skill also extends to tabs and other types of encoding information. I think learning to read music is a valuable skill that can lead to the flexibility for learning by ear and understanding music theory (if used as a tool to assist wider musical understanding, rather than the be-all end-all for understanding music).
Interesting thing with French horn. I'm a guitar player that only reads in jazz but not in pop/rock situations. French horn in concert bands and orchestras requires reading but the transposition is another unnecessary impediment to playing the horn with confidence and security. The transposition came from the early days when the music was written for valveless horn and changing the length of the tubing to accommodate numerous keys was needed. Since the rotary valve was invented in 1843 and the horn tuned in f/Bb was actually standardized maybe before 1900, the need to read in all of the arcane keys is ridiculous! There has been roughly 100 years for the parts to be written in F by the publishers . I recently returned to playing the horn along with guitar and I suspect the music should be written in concert pitch as the numerous notes that masquerade as C have ruined my painfully developed relative pitch. A side issue all of this but related to Adam's topic
@@kenzuercher7497 there are arguments for both changing it and keeping tradition. I find the transposition helpful because it gives a sense of where I am in the key, and when much of the music has been retranscribed in F anyway, the transposition still makes it so that the staff lies in a good location for my range. If we were to write purely in concert pitch, the horn would either have to awkwardly straddle the treble and bass clefs even more than it does now, or use the obscure mezzo soprano clef (c clef on second line from the bottom) to keep continuity. The flexibility I've developed with playing in F, C, Bb, E, and others has solidified my relative pitch and made it easier to adjust and adapt, similar to getting comfortable with scales in all keys. The original reasons no longer apply, but keeping those transpositions still give information on tone and keycenter that would be obscured if it concert pitch. I also played in a wind band which just used horn in F with key signatures, and that is far easier than reading horn in G or Eb, but. I appreciate my time developing these skills.
Its really hard to communicate advanced techniques without sheet music. I started playing guitar by ear but wanted to learn fingerstyle. I didn't "get it" right away. When I learned it through sheet music, even though I can barely read music, it started to click.
This is an interesting comment to me, since learning fingerstyle was when I realised how little information is contained in sheet music and had to start relying on my ear more. I couldn't have learned the particular blues style of palm muting the bass notes from sheet music, that had to be taught and then compared with records.
@@DylanFreak263 i couldnt hear or feel the rhythm properly until I saw the eighth notes and sixteenth notes on the page. Just for learning, not saying I would sight read folk songs or anything lol
Very interesting to me as a blind music student. I obviously have no sight reading capabilities, but can interact with it through accessible notation software or braille music. Definitely has made things more difficult but I’m studying jazz drumset and music theory, so much of my work can be done by ear or through accessible software, luckily I am not a classical string player cuz they use sheet music for literally everything lol
I learned through classical reading of sheet music when I had most of my sight left. Now as a college student, I study music through self teaching and I have my sheet music enlarged or I use my braille display to read given music and my own compositions. Due to my autism and synthesia - which is seeing colors when hearing music - I color code chords and notes based on emotions I feel when playing a certain piece. I mainly still use my limited sight and braille to read sheet music. I’m learning to transcribe my older music in braille for self learning/teaching.
🎶 _Two blind Kai's? Two blind Kai's._ _Hear how they play? Hear how they play!_ ❤
@@crnkmnky creative…
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.
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).
Unironically, as a guitar player who just cannot wrap my head around the notes on the stave tab + notation is a Godsend to trying to figure things out
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.
@@peterb7923 check out JunkieXL (although he flew under Zimmers wings).
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.
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 notice that with sheet music i memorize songs much quicker so i think that it is very important in both reading gigs and artist gigs
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)
Really enjoyed your discussion. Maybe music school is most useful to people with modest talent that can be enhanced by the understanding of structure of the music they most enjoy. At my level, with very little talent, knowing how music is structured helps me work with piano and guitar.
I only have beginner skills, however, I am one of those happy souls that even a superficial reading and listening makes it possible to find reading and fingering notes enjoyable.
I graduated from the Musicians Institute in 1989 on electric bass and couldn't read a lick to save my life; I was accepted because of my audition, where I played (by memory) Beethoven Rondo a Capriccio Op 129, The panel of judges or teachers were stunned and I got accepted. Of course, it was my goal to learn how to read music and by graduation I was quite proficient but that wasn't the point. My acceptance was based on my passion and desire to learn music.
So you learned it by ear?
Very impressive. Did you play it on piano or bass? How did you learn it, without reading sheet music? By ear?
What kept you from learning beforehand?
@@MonkyTube18 Primarily, I had a bass teacher that taught me the song, he tabbed out the hard parts by hand, but the rest was by ear and watching
Played on electric bass, I had a bass teacher that taught me (because he knew I was trying to get in that school), he tabbed out parts of the song but the rest was by ear and watching @@EricGoetzMusic
I feel like musicians, and other artists for that matter, just don't really gain much from university/college formally. You can go there for satisfying your urge to learn the old ways, but if you want to make a living as a musician, you'll probably be better served to just learn independently what you need for the specific niche you want to work in. At least where I live, nobody cares if you went to music school. They care about whether or not you're a good musician. In a way that happens more and more with companies and more traditional office jobs and such, where the employers tend to care less about your formal education, and more about if you just have the necessary skills. With that in mind, I definitely think that music schools still have a reason to keep that tradition going. The same way people study old languages, learning to play music the old ways so to speak, is something that connects and fills certain peoples lives with purpose. You don't need music school to learn how to be a good musician, but you sure as hell can go there if you think it's gonna give you a purpose in life, doing what you enjoy.
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.
Being fluent in sight reading isn’t exactly necessary to be a good musician but understanding music theory will 100% make you a better musician
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.
Yes you should. It is a new way of looking at music that will teach you a lot.
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
Work up your solfège skills
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.
Wtf is unicollege? Is that a new type of university?
Appreciate this very much - well stated. On the issue of the purpose of music schools, I'd clarify it to refer to your average state school music program, and that the majority of these programs exist for teacher training; i.e., K-12 music educators. Not all, of course, but for most "traditional" music programs, they are vocational/trade schools in that sense for many of their students.
Yay!!!! Another Adam upload! I hope your tour went well man! It was a pleasure seeing yinz in Pittsburgh! Come back to PA soon please! 🙏🏻
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.
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).
During my first year of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam, Solfège and Harmony was taught as a two semester course and was probably the hardest passing grade for people from a non-classical background. For me it really felt like being taught music as a language. It did take me about a full semester before thinks 'clicked' in my head, though. And you do really get out of it what you put in. They did really set you up to succeed, but you'd have to develop proficiency in all aspects of it to pass it.
Solfege and harmony, I realize, were also the most impactful disciplines I was taught at university
I think this totally depends on which country you’re from. As a classically trained pianist, I learned both fixed-do solfège through Yamaha and movable-do solfège through Kodaly.
Adam, thank you so much for this wonderful video. I have been watching your content for a number of years now and I am a huge fan! You have really educated me on so many things in a way that is both entertaining and highly informative. Reading Western notation was a topic that came up at my university (University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign) in 2020 when we were beginning to address racism and other forms of oppression that are possibly embedded in our curriculum and School of Music in general (we identified MANY things in these areas!). The issue of requiring students to not only be able to read music to get in to the school of music, but also further requiring students to read music in order to graduate with a degree was a huge discussion that was left open ended. I am a horn player so have spent my entire life reading notation in the world of classical music. It’s hard for me to personally fathom having a career without being able to read or to be able to tell my students they could function as a professional musician without this skill (even though non classical routes for us all require reading, like Broadway, Film, Pop, etc.). Having said that, I’m only one person, and I operate only in my limited domain so would not want to force requirements important to my area on any other aspect of the SOM. Since 2018 I have been centering my teaching around student’s creativity, improvisation and composition being a huge part. This has yielded some amazing things for the students and for me, one of which is we all now have new skill sets! There are lots of other reasons aside from building specific skills that creativity can offer so I am a huge proponent now. I’m with you in that learning to read music can be a way to get more professional opportunities so I think if one is open to learning, then it can be worth it. Having said that, for many of the reasons you mention in the video, I no longer feel that it should be required to both enter and graduate from music school. I would even hold to this for my own horn students if they had other goals in music that did not have to do with notation. That hasn’t come up yet in the studio, and I think it would be a rare thing, at least at this point in time, but I now at least leave the possibility open. It should simply be offered as something to learn that can be very beneficial to students if they want to go into areas it is required. I might be in the minority with this, but I think this the way to go, effectively de-centering it in the curriculum. Thanks again for the amazing content and I look forward to forward to the next video!
I totally believe in the value of reading music and I wish I were better at it. I briefly played with the Northwestern University jazz band and I couldn't play any of the suggested guitar solos because my reading wasn't up to it.
Music school requirements are a bit of a joke. But of a side rent here: regardless of your discipline, many universities will still require you to have a primary instrument and to pass an audition on it, even if you aren't going for performance, and studio space is limited. Someone who's going for composition shouldn't have to compete in auditions for studio space against people who are going for performance degrees. Same goes for musicologists.
You have to be a good musician to be a good composer
@@doublespoonco What would you say J Dilla's "primary instrument" was? And if its "MPC", please show me which music school takes that as an acceptable primary instrument
I'm going to add that while these requirements will certainly weed out people who are deserving, I think that it's a pretty good barometer for how well someone will do.
@@james_subosits It's also worth noting that failing to get into music school doesn't mean you can't have a career in music.
@@ZodiacEntertainment2No but what then is the point of music school? They claim it is to prepare you for a career and yet most, if not nearly all, graduates from their superior educational programs don’t find a paying career in music, and plenty of people who do find a career didn’t go to these supposedly fantastic institutions.
Well said as always Adam. As a Berklee grad too and to throw in my 2 cents, the guitar side of Berklee was basically all taught in tab. The sheet music as at the top for rhythm but we all read tab.
I’m not a music school grad, but I play a few instruments…IMO, the guitar just doesn’t lend itself to sheet music very well unless you’re specifically interested in classical guitar. A beginner student could see a note on the page and not know which of the many strings or frets that note corresponds to without a bunch of other knowledge…meanwhile, there’s only one middle C on a piano or an alto sax and it’s easy to sight read.
Good to have you back Adam! Great video, thx!
Even Hendrix said he wanted to eventually read, where he then would expand his genius even further, I absolutely agree. Demand the highest education from your educational system.
The fact that the legend that is Hendrix said this admirable to the 100th degree.
thanks for making this! i agree with so much of what you've said here, especially your conclusions about what music school is "for". when i left college i looked back and realized that i was being trained to (and tbh, assessed on, though not within juries) live a particular lifestyle and have a particular set of values. when i was in school i could not understand that that was why i felt such a huge gap between how much i disappointed my professors vs. how well i demonstrated understanding the material.
😯
comments giving opinions 3 minutes after the video goes up
I think a big question is what a music school should be. It seems you may have a unique experience with Berklee, which tries to be more ecumenical than most schools. I do believe that that's an admirable goal, but not every school has to have that same outlook. It doesn't necessarily make sense for someone who wants to be a bluegrass or rai musician (to take two fairly random examples) to want to study at Juilliard. The knowledge and technique that they would be seeking would be much more accessible elsewhere. I honestly don't see anything wrong with that.
The subjects you dive into are fantastic. Thank you.
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 attended music school at The Edna Manley College in Jamaica. Not many people leave high school knowing how to read music in Jamaica. They (EMC) address this issue by allowing applicants without prior reading experience to enroll in a preliminary program called "Fundamentals of Music Literacy & Performance". It's a whole school year of study which aims to bring such students up to speed on reading, writing, musical analysis and audiation while also developing technique and overall proficiency on their principal instrument. Students are required to complete this program with no less than a B average before being admitted into a bachelor's program.
Yeah as a Music Theory tutor in a college that requires no audition or formal baseline of reading sheet music- I feel the "remedying systemic inequities" hard lol
As someone who loves both your channel and effective altruism, I'm really hyped that you were sponsored by GiveWell. I also agree with your bottom line about sheet music in this video. Keep up the great work!
Reading is a huge advantage. It also helps you with other aspects of music unrelated to reading because it gives you a visual rendition of musical ideas. If you can read and play what you are reading expressively and accurately, you will work.
You make excellent points. I played orchestral bass in college, they needed a bass player for the jazz band, which was just chord changes, which was not anything I had ever even seen. Luckily they found a person who only knew how to play changes, so we traded back and forth. So my reliance on western notation was essential for my orchestral work, but was an active hinderance for working on anything else.
Thank you Adam. I always learn something from you, and you give plenty food for thought. I was classically trained through sheet music. I'm so envious of jazz musicians' ability to pick up a tune/changes by ear: I have to labour at it.
Not having sheet music and being forced to memorise everything can also be a barrier. I can only speak for my own experiences but there was a very heavy emphasis on memorisation in my program (jazz) and I struggle a lot with this due to a learning disability. I was basically told too bad lol
Excellent video. You really hit the nail on the head when talking about the need for universities/music colleges to "hire faculty whose pedagogy doesn't rely on music notation reading"... i.e. the vast majority of working music professionals. Heck - the majority of musicians in the world. Some institutions are making that step, but it is a genuine political battle within those institutions.
It depends on how you look at it. I teach classical trombone at a university. Most of the music students play is written down, but most of the things I teach is not. The hard part is mastering the instrument and learning how to play the music, not reading it.
I think playing ear and improvising are way underrated in the classical music field. Being able to do these as well as sightreading should make you a well-rounded & versatile musician.
You don't really need to be well-rounded in the classical music field. It is a hyper competitive field that is extremely specialized. If anything, learning to play by ear and improvise would take away from time dedicated to the practice of classical music
100% agree! I wish that improvisation had been something I’d started learning as a young child, because I think it’s much harder to step away from the music and be comfortable in the unknown when you’ve spent so long only playing what you’re reading
@@Joseph_M1I’m interested if you’re a classical musician yourself? I don’t personally agree. If this improvisation was a standard skill taught from the very first lessons, it wouldn’t be something that would necessarily need to be massively time consuming in the critical years at University and beyond, and the pay off would be enormous. Improvisation is a great way of freeing up the creative and interpretive side of the brain, and I think can practicing that skill can be a useful enhancement to playing any music (including when reading). PLUS, I don’t think your point is historically supported. It was common practice for Baroque musicians to be excellent improvisers, and many classical musicians were capable of improvising elaborate cadenzas. Somewhere along the way we lost this skill, which I find such a shame. I also feel like despite the competitiveness of the industry, every musician should be able enjoy their music and have some passion projects. Spending 24 hours a day grinding technique doesn’t necessarily make you the best musician you can be, and certainly isn’t a recipe for a long and fulfilling career
@@Joseph_M1 You can absolutely have a whole career without sightreading and improvising, but the best classical musicians I know tend to be quite good at it.
@@issiebrown8460 Pretty much everything I learnt about improvising was playing in the contemporary group at church and in a folk band 🤔
what a great channel. always with in depth, interesting videos.
Thank you for your opinion, I had been eagerly waiting for new content from you.
I had a similar thing to Berklee at my school where we basically took a music theory test when we got to campus; if you didn’t pass you had to take Music Fundamentals where you’d learn all the basic stuff like that. Having taken theory in high school, I didn’t end up taking fundamentals but I always thought this was a great system to help those who needed to learn some basics like sheet music reading without forcing people like me to have to take a class full of stuff we already knew.
I graduated from Brooklyn College studying music composition as a metal guitarist who was only slightly able to read music from saxophone in elementary, there were definitely hurdles to climb, but the staff and course layout DEFINITELY caught me up to speed. I got 90 in all of my ear training classes because they were the ones that helped me understand what I was reading the most, so I worked hard at it (as someone WHO SUCKED at singing, but now could easily hold a note). Of course I had a head start, but not anywhere near compared to most of my other classmates. I had to take fundementals of music, then 3 theory classes, 4 ear training classes 6 keyboard classes (just started picking it up before that( and 6 composition classes. By the end of it, I was really able to hone my craft. I failed entry to the program 3 times, but they still let you take course and retry, I was so lucky they let me try a 4th time because I gave up for a while before that last attempt. Regardless, their program was definitely enough to catch me up to speed, and their flexibility was a massive help. The staff was really great at accommodating, especially the music department. I can't say enough how much this has helped me gain confidence in my pending career in music, and it wouldn't have seriously started it if it wasn't for completing the program.
outside of sampling when using piano roll I think logic X makes a great connect between piano roll and score. Some of my production students get stuck on midi notation and i often start them with the equivilent 1 4th, 8th, 16th tuplets etc... because making riffs n ideas that they hear in their minds but arent able to write on a piano roll i find understanding how to read always helps them !
A new Adam Neely video? It’s a Christmas miracle!! 🤩🤩🤩
I'm completing my master's in a jazz-oriented music school without fluency in sheet music. I joined through the audio engineering course, but bcause of my skills in composition by ear, I was given the opportunity to compose for an ensemble consisting of lecturers. This lack of fluency created an interesting problem, which was creatively solved through collaboration with another lecturer who creates music via visual and audio scores rather than traditional scores. Depending on your goal, sheet music may not be important at all. If you intend to go into art through music, sheet music can be literally useless. However if you plan on being in jazz or classical, it's imperitive.
Anyway I can speak to you about Audio Engineering school? Applied last month and have some questions regarding it.
@@paygas yeah sure!
@@xeropulse5745 any way I can reach you? (email or som)
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.
Agreed. But this also holds true for orchestral string instrument players, and they seem to love sheet music.
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.
Very interesting issue. I'm currently doing an experimental composition/sound art based PhD in Ireland and I've come through a University that promotes, accepts and welcomes musicians that aren't especially proficient in reading music. As part of my Masters degree I actually wrote a paper on the difficulties faced by universities trying to accommodate and deliver music theory to ensure that everyone reaches the same theory level in order to get the most out of their degree. It's pretty impossible to do that effectively since everyone's background experience, music qualifications/theory knowledge and abilities are completely different and trying to coalesce that into a degree program that caters to everyone is a real challenge. At our university everyone studies the same music theory modules in their first year and these cover pretty much everything that's required so that from second year onwards, the students have a great footing to explore more complex musical territory. So on one hand, I absolutely appreciate the value that having a theory background can give a musician. In terms of the 'gatekeeping' that's going on at some universities, however, I would say this - So many of the amazing creative forces that I've encountered both academically and professionally have gone down a pathway that does not require the implementation of standard notation. This crosses into both performance (particularly improvisational areas) and composition. In my work as a sound artist and experimental composer I regular encounter graphic, or unconventional scores and discussions around abstracting the authentic musical character and essence of a player's creative mindset are much more prevalent, and much more accessible through these channels. With this approach there's a serious amount of artistic freedom that allows players to express themselves creatively, allowing their true creative identity to shine through and sometimes these opportunities are not prevalent when dealing exclusively with the constraints of musical notation. I think it would be a big mistake for universities to turn their backs on people that identify with this approach as they have so much to offer creatively.
My first degree is from an urban university. The same “equity” stuff was part of that culture. I recall a vocal performance major who couldn’t read music even as a senior. Since she was the pet project of the department head, unconventional exceptions were made to accommodate her, including her own private accompanist and “rote learning tutors” who had to create audio recordings for her. This was pre- 2006 so KZhead wasn’t a thing then.
One of the things that helped me, a lot, with learning notation was by actually composing simple melodies with it. Something about using the concepts and not just reading them helped solidify things for me.
For graduation, not admission. Not even sure I want to entertain a long video about this, honestly.
Commenting as a guitarist who learnt through TAB for years before developing standard notation skills, and who now works in a similar area of pop gigs to what Adam describes - I still really credit my understanding of harmony and theory, musical forms etc. to the scaffolding that reading music notation provided. I don't think I would have been able to process/retain as much of my university's teaching were it not for this understanding. Even though I don't need it day to day in my current life, my grasp of the concepts I practice day to day were informed by this amazing system of information developed and refined over centuries.
I agree with this. I didn't learn standard notation until "later in life," many years into my musical studies. But after awhile something really interesting happened, making that sight-sound connection - it's as if intervals in harmony and the contour of melodies suddenly clicked for me in ways like never before. It truly deepened my understanding of music and improved my ear training being able to "see" sound on a page.
Something which I think is mentioned only briefly in this video and seems almost completely unmentioned in the Twitter threads: *western notation isn't the only notation*. People comparing it to reading and writing in English are ignoring that crucial detail. Western notation is not some "pure" or fundamental description of music; it has its own quirks and focuses, which color your understanding and push you towards certain styles (like classical and jazz as Adam mentions). If that's your goal then yeah, the notation is essential to be able to read the many texts of antiquity. If not, it might help you expand your horizons but it's not some critical hurdle.
True, but the I don't see how the same doesn't go for English? There are other alphabets, other writing systems, including things like Braille, not to mention other languages. It's still very useful to be able to read regular Latin script English. Not because it's the best language, or the most 'pure', but simply because it is so widespread and established. The music schools this conversation is about seem to almost exclusively teach classical and jazz. Of course, if you want to learn traditional Zimbabwean music (which is awesome), you probably require a different skill set.
@@bladdnun3016Because music has no fixed meaning it is not comparable to language.
I also think there's a difference between instruments like piano and wind, guitar to a certain extent, and drums/bass. From my experience studying bass, in an ensemble setting i can mostly get by by seeing a chord chart and drawing upon muscle memory and scales, ext, as opposed to worrying about reading note by note. There might be a couple written out parts/licks/whatever you want to call it but overall its much less intense then, for example, the piano player or horn player that needs to be able to sight read the melody for the first time in rehearsal. Similarly, Percussionists might need to know the groove and a form, and maybe be able to figure out a fill or some hits that are specifically written in, but otherwise can get by without the chart.
I'm currently going to music school part-time, so this topic definitely interests me. I don't think reading music should be requirement for entry into music school, however, it should be considered as part of your entry. Everything should matter. If a student comes to an audition, completely self-taught and shows great promise as a musician, why deny them entry into music school simply because they can't read music? Music schools should project what type of a musician someone could be, not what they currently are. To me it's like an Ivy League school comparing two students: one growing up in an inner-city going to a low performing school, with a troubled home-life, who manages good grades, and shows promise to be an exceptional student. The other a student from a wealthy family, going to a top prep school, and having private tutors. The second candidate might currently be the better student, but maybe the first projects to be the better student with advanced education.
Part-time music school? Is that a thing? Is it like a publicly funded adult education center/folk high school? Maybe it shouldn't be required to read and write in any profession e.g. as engineers? We can memorize the necessary phrases, etc. from the nuclear powerplant safety guide. Why exclude genius wannabee engineers, who have proven to be so talented with LEGO? 😀 (Pardon my sarcasm. I really don't want to bully you! To me this discussion seems so absurd!) People aspiring to get some sort of degree, eventually calling themselves 'master', should willingly learn to speak, read and write the language of their respective trades.
That's sort of the "everyone gets a trophy mentality". you get in just by seeming to play well. you can do that if you're only a singer/songwriter but if you ever want a gig, you will have to master music theory and reading music is part of that. A chord chart and a good ear can get you a church gig in the evangelical world but if you want to do music outside of that setting you have to learn to read music and yes you should know it pretty well to get into music school. why else would you bother going to music school if not to master your instrument? you can't wait till you get to music school to start, it makes you seem lazy.
Another great video full wisdom and experience. Especially thank you for mentioning Molly Tuttle!
I didn’t know a thing about music till I taught myself to read from KZhead videos three years ago! It’s not hard to learn and it’s very helpful in speed up growth!
Being able to read sheet music is a musical accelerant. Regarding music school - Thought experiment: if known musical practice was wiped from our memories, would the same musical practices eventually emerge in time? I suspect so based on human anatomy. Hence, it's an efficient way to prevent intergenerational reinvention of the musical wheel.
Notation started as a way of remembering musical material - it was all quite practical. Notation became more complex (and precise) through the ca. 1000 years it has existed. It's a really efficient way of getting your musical thoughts to someone else. Whether it's a lead sheet or a work for full orchestra, the notation conveys the musical intentions of one artist to another. It's the way we communicate. Sure, if someone whistles a tune many of us can pick it up and make something with it. But what happens when that person is not there? Now we have to hope we've faithfully reproduced the intentions of the composer. A LOT of music in the western world has been created using some form of notation (lead sheets, fully notated, etc.). If you're going to learn any of that music, you'll need to deal with notation. Yes, there is a point where many of us will put the written music aside, and depending on the style of music, take some artistic liberties. Obviously, with a jazz standard I'll take a lot of liberties (freely ornamenting the tune, reharmonizing, etc) that I might not do with, say, Mozart - but I would take liberties to make it my own interpretation. Final point: you're going to college to learn something. Whether it's how to play bass, get better at improvisation, do filmscoring, etc., you're going to have an easier time if everyone involved can discuss the topic at hand using some form of musical notation.
Give Well sounds amazing. Thanks Adam!
Great topic, Adam! I learned to read music as a kid, definitely had it reinforced in music school, and have quickly become a multi-instrumentalist (reading multiple clefs, styles, etc). Interestingly though, while starting to learn jazz standards, most people tell me to "learn by ear" instead of using Real Books, etc. I think reading is important, but equally important is the auditory understanding.
writing and reading music gives me an enormous advantage to easely remember the coordinated breaks, chorus, rythm and other stuffs. I usually write them in combination of chords sheets, as a kind of a memo until the song is perfectly known. It is certainly important in a one shot gig when time is short and i need to be as efficient as possible. Also, the chance of mistake is then much lower than my mate who doesn't read, and often lower understand what they are playing, because playing by ear doesn't always mean you KNOW what you're doing.
This may be one of your best videos to date, Adam
Although I’m a classical bassist, for the first semester or so my teacher had me learn pretty much all of my solo music by ear before I ever looked at the sheet music, and it kind of changed the way I think about notation: I think a lot of times (particularly in the classical world, less so in jazz or broadway) we tend to think of sheet music as being what the composer intended, but after learning so much by ear I started thinking of sheet music as being how the composer was able to best represent what they were hearing or performing (see: recordings of Rachmaninoff playing his own compositions). It also helps develop the skill of knowing how something is supposed to go before you start playing it, which I think is hard to do when you’re starting from the sheet music as a reference point.
Thanks for this! I feel like another element in reading music in order to get into music schools is that there are, depending on the University (and whether or not its a uni, a college, a school etc), a LOT of modules that are entirely historical, philosophical or analytical, and a lot of Unis whose main purpose is not to do any practical teaching of musicians but to teach students about Music. There is a lot to learn if you give up practice time, for historians, philosophers, administrators, managers etc - the last of whom Universities quite like to try and churn out.
"IN THE HARMONIC STYLE OF 18TH CENTURY EUROPEAN MUSICIANS." It had to be said.
Something I see often missing from these discussions is that another subset of music education isn’t for professional performance or for university education, but for education in the public school setting. I am a K-12 vocal teacher currently but I am mainly an instrumentalist, guitar and bass specifically. I find a lot of problems with how my colleagues, especially older ones, teach music strictly from notation and method books, especially when students aren’t going to go on to even be in band or choir at all. I think a wholistic approach to music education in the public school is always best, especially with elementary students, but music programs tend to only offer that one “out of the box thinker” speaker that comes in once a year that talks about how to teach kids in a way that doesn’t line up with high-level college musicianship. I love you, Adam, but I’m trying to find the mirror of you currently in the public music education sector to get those takes and haven’t found it yet. Great insights as always though, dude!
Teachers in general should try to teach kids in the ways that work best for them, especially in creative classes like music and art. The rise of common core math is an example of how one way of teaching leaves many kids behind. Schools are becoming more about efficiency and less about effectiveness. Imagine a dyslexic autistic kid with perfect pitch, but they ignore him the entire music class because he can't and won't read sheet music... or worse, they remove him from the class..
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!
just discovered this channel, this is some amazing stuff
11:20 Jianpu needs to be talked about more. It's an amazing system (Especially for singing / ear training). I started using (a variation of) it when drafting out composition because it's just easier to write and read.
Totally agree! I just learned about it from Adam. Seems like a very intuitive, easy to learn concept
Programming should be required to get into music school. Nothing has helped my music career more than having a job as a software engineer :)
Could you elaborate which music skill was improved through your programming skills?
@@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.
The ability to handle loops, and array or table functions is more musical than most people would think.
@@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.
@@andrewduncan529 I'm a software engineer with a math degree that plays guitar. I don't notice much overlap between the three in daily life.
I graduated from music school last December and I’ve thought about this a lot this past year. When I started learning guitar, I took formal lessons for about 2 and a half years and after that, I was learning mostly by ear. When I got to college, I hadn’t read music in about 5 years. That made me feel very unprepared and very self conscious since the other freshman that had been reading music since 6th grade. It took a long time but I was able to read music again after about a year of studying. I’m a Hendrix, Clapton, Beatles etc. guy. They never learned, and look at the amazing stuff they created. I looked up to that and was more focused on feel and groove then learning what was actually going on under those chords. I still love to play that music but I do firmly believe that learning to read is integral to understanding music as a whole. I would not be where I am today musically without learning what I did at school. Peace
I didn't get into music until highschool and everyone that was already in band had been doing it since early elementary. Since i didn't know how the teachers didn't want to waste time on me so i couldn't ever get up to match with my the rest of the kids. Definitely himdered my musical journey.
It is never late to learn. But it is very naive to pretend you can keep up with a poetry class if you don't know how to write and read.
@@maskingtables I don't think it's naive for a high schooler to want to learn music? How the hell was I supposed to know that I should've been learning it since elementary???? No one in my family plays instruments, am I naive for getting into something at the age when one starts finding their own interests?
From spending time working for a music school and going to another music school I would say to enter music school you have have to pass a basic reading test OR a ear training test. If someone has a good ear they are ahead of the readers already so let them in and let them get up to speed on reading and theory. If someone reads fine, but what can they play when there is no music, most fall on there face. They also tend to be the people who think music is about learning and following rules. As you said,.... "You can hear them read" or in class they feel everything is a rule and constantly ask..... "is it okay to play???". I cringe when I hear a music student say that, I'm thinking just play it and hear what it sound like. So if a student wants into music school and can't read or reads poorly (like me) then test their ears as an alternative.
The problem it's the demand. There is only a few places for new students, and a lot more aspirants. Why would the school accept the dude with Bad reading and "good ear", if There is 30 aspirants who actually bothered to develop reading and have good ear equally or better than the other dude?
What makes you think there are so few places for new students? For a long time now music school is more about who can afford to pay, if you can pay then then we'll find you a seat. Music schools need the money of those who can pay to fund all the scholarships they give out to the hot up musicians.
@@DojoOfCool Well, I don't Now about your country, but in mine education is free, and schools only accept those with better score at the admisión test. Particular education in My country (the one that actually costs money) it's usually extremely bad and the free one is a Lot better with higher opportunities, but Aldo extremely hight demand.
Royal Colleges in the UK are strictly notation, however, there are plenty of other music related courses that embrace the umbrella of 'music production or electronic music' whilst not requiring classical training or a traditional instrument. The divide balances alongside the class system - which is a shame. Great videos.
I did not read music when I decided to become a music major- I had been a shreddy took guitar player since I was 11 by only played by ear, tab, or chord chart. I was frustrated by being required to learn how to read and it made me feel like I was taking a step backwards at first. But after doing a few sight reading labs I started to hear the music on the sheet in my head and it opened up new worlds of music I had never considered before. I think reading is an incredibly useful skill for an aspiring musician. I could support flexibility in programs for students like me know sho had not previously read, but I do think it is an essential school for music school.
The example that Adam gives at 5:23 is very interesting to me as someone who has spent healthy time in steel pan ensembles and other environments where all music was taught via the director just saying the notes out loud to us. It's exactly what Adam mentions as an impractical situation.
Steel drum, gospel choir, they tend to be mostly homophony based, not true polyphony. So orchestra participation, about which he makes his case, is at another level of complexity, rendering that impractical. There is a great - and internationally well-regarded - jazz/big band teacher of kids in Barcelona Spain, Joan Chamorro, (St. Andreu Jazz Band) who does teach - at least a fair amount, by rote, and so I'm all for that. Anyway, I don't see what Adam's suggesting to be a direct contradiction to your - very valid - observation.