Learning to Read Music with Comprehension

 

Reading music and understanding music are two quite different things. I’ve known players who read, I’ve known players who understand, and I’ve known players who do both.

Reading music without understanding is like learning to read a book without understanding what you’re reading. For a person such as this, how many books would they be inspired to read?

Understanding music is the most important thing, but without reading, access to new ideas, concepts, pieces, etc., is a lengthier and more difficult process. So why not learn to read music with comprehension?

I believe that the central problem lies in the way reading is usually taught. It can be boiled down to this, “When you see this note it is telling you how to play it on your instrument, i.e., what pitch and how long to hold it.” This is what I call rote reading. Rote reading means that you don’t know what the music is saying or how the music works. It’s like learning to read letters without understand the words, let alone understanding what those words are actually saying. It seems absurd that a person would read a book and not know the story, but that’s exactly what happens with rote reading. Again, I ask the question, for a person such as this, how many books would they be inspired to read?

But what if a person first learns a musical concept, let’s say natural whole steps and half steps, and then is taught how those steps are represented in musical notation, and then how they are created on their instrument? The same process can then apply to intervals, scales, chords, phrases, etc. In every case, the introduction of the musical idea precedes the musical notation. Learning to read music in this way, with comprehension, paves the way to creative and intelligent interpretation and expression as opposed to merely imitating the interpretations and expressions of others.

Andre Segovia once said, What the world does not need is another guitar player. What the world does need are musicians and artists who happen to play the guitar.” Rote reading and rote playing can never transcend the domain of the guitar player, but reading and playing with comprehension is in the domain of the musician and it is the domain of the musician that creates the foundation for the further development and expression of the artist.

“A real artist works at a level beyond both the guitar player and the musician yet embodies the highest attainments of both. Absorbed in the artistic sphere he creates works that are enduring and that assists humanity in its ongoing struggle to free itself from the bondage of ignorance and destructive self-interest. Through his works the artist, absorbed in the artistic sphere, distills the lessons of material life and its aspirations, and shapes them into an expression of life’s universal quest for meaning, fulfillment, and love.” – From Silence to Sound, by Michael Kovitz, Available from the author at fromsilencetosound142@gmail.com

                                                                                                                                  © copyright Michael Kovitz 3/2/21

 

Productive Practice and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1.)

 

The desire for happiness is woven into the very fabric of our nature and left unimpeded, we will effortlessly rise to happiness like bubbles to the surface from the depths. Music can be both an incredible source of happiness as well as the means to attain it, but who can be happy practicing and playing the same old things again and again in the same old way without showing any progress? Unproductive practice impedes process—traps the bubbles and keep them from rising.

 

One’s practice should resemble a spiral—an upward spiral—not a turning around and around in the same circle. But how to transform the circle into a spiral and create a happy, healthy, and sustainable musical life? To raise the level of one’s music, the level of one’s practice must be raised. To raise the level of one’s practice, the level of one’s thinking must be raised. And to raise the level of one’s thinking, the level of the questions one asks oneself about one’s work must also be raised. These questions are more important than answers. Questions have energy. Answers kill questions. The right questions lead to a productive practice. But what constitutes a right question?

 

The question must be the right question at the right time. What kind of curtains will we hang in the living room window is a legitimate question but should not be given priority over those questions regarding the foundation of the house that is yet to be built. On the other hand, questioning the efficacy of the foundation is not an appropriate question to ask after the house has been framed. Everything must happen in its right order and its right time.

 

For example, a student wants to learn a new piece. Maybe she has heard it before, maybe she has not. She begins to read through the piece, taking care to not go too fast, to play the correct notes in the right rhythms, and to use the best fingerings for both the right and the left hands. After a few reads of the piece, she isolates and begins to work on some of the more difficult sections of the piece.

 

That’s good, but there are some fundamental questions she may have failed to ask that could facilitate her work. For example, are we looking at a piece diatonic common practice music, and, if so, what is the key?  Not all music is diatonic. Renaissance music derives from a modal system while much of the music of the 20th century may be atonal, modal, diatonic but not necessarily diatonic common practice, i.e., not written within the bounds of the compositional practices which began in the High Baroque period and evolved through the Classical Romantic Periods. If the music is diatonic common practice, then some follow-up questions might be, am I familiar with the scale that is the resource of this music? What are the chords and chord progressions I might anticipate finding in this piece? What about phrase lengths and cadences common to this kind of music?

 

Why are these questions important? Because if we are not understanding what it is that we are reading, then our reading is rote reading—essentially note by note—but if we are understanding what we are reading, then we are reading with comprehension and this comprehension facilitates both the reading and all the further work on the piece. When we do a thoughtful read, we are not only reading the notes, but we are also beginning to understand what the notes are saying. It is like the difference between reading just letters and words as opposed to learning the story that is being told.

 

Questions must be specific. For a practice to be productive we need to know not only what to do, but why we are doing it. Take the student who decides, or is asked, to play a piece that he has been working on. He begins to play the piece, but the problem is that there is no context to the playing. Without context, without knowing why I am doing something, without knowing what I am trying to accomplish, there is no purpose behind my action and without purpose there cannot be force. A dress rehearsal, for example, should be approached differently than, say, working on rhythm or tempo in a piece. In the case of the former, one would not stop in the middle of the piece to work on a mistake, while in the case of the latter, it would not be productive to just play through the piece without stopping to work on specific areas of the piece. In other words, the why of one’s work orients and shapes the work itself.

 

Another example of asking the right question at the right time is the student who just cannot seem to get a certain passage correct. She plays it over and over, sometimes slower, and sometimes in tempo, yet it just does not get any better. Working hard is not automatically working smart. Practice, in the sense of repetition, does not make perfect, it makes permanent. What she needs to do is to stop playing and ask herself if there might be a better way to execute the passage. Are there other ways to finger the piece? Both the right and the left-hand fingering should be considered. I often tell my students; good fingerings can render a difficult passage playable and musical, but awkward fingerings can render a relatively simple passage virtually unplayable. When your practice begins to feel like one of those bad dreams in which you are running as fast as you can but are going nowhere, you are being told that your practice is not productive. An unproductive practice is an unhappy practice, which is to say that the bubbles of happiness have gotten trapped in old and dysfunctional habits of thought and patterns of work. The good news is that by asking the right questions we can initiate a process that replaces these dysfunctional habits and patterns with productive ones.

 

(To be continued.)