From: jonb@Ingres.COM (Jon Berger)
Subject: Re: Concrete questions on music reading
Keywords: music, reading
Reply-To: jonb@ingres.com
Organization: Ingres, an ASK Company
Date: 12 Jan 93 18:30:43 GMT

In article <james.726859233@wrs.com>, james@wrs.com (James Moore) writes:
>jonb@Ingres.COM (Jon Berger) writes:
>
>>To this day, unless I concentrate fairly hard,
>>when I see, say, a note on the second-from-bottom line of the staff,
>>I tend to see "third finger on the D string", not "G".
>
>It's always been one of my unquestioned assumptions that this is way
>everyone learns to read music.  I went through learning to play violin
>in elementary school, and learned to read in exactly the same way.
>Then when I took up pipes I just changed the finger mapping -
>C doesn't mean second finger down on the A string any more, it means
>three fingers down on the top hand, and first and pinkie down on the 
>bottom hand.  I can instantly translate between the finger position and
>the note, but I really don't look at printed music and make a direct
>connection without moving fingers in my mind.
>
>My question is, why do you think this is a handicap?  After all, finger
>position or the equivilent for your instrument is what's actually going
>to make the correct notes.  It seems like knowing something is a C is
>less useful than knowing what you physically have to do to produce the
>note.

Well, I mentioned a couple of reasons in the original article.  Basically,
if all you're going to do is play that one instrument that you know
the mapping for, you're probably ok.  Actually, you're not all _that_
ok, really; the violin, like any other stringed instrument, has a great
variety of possible fingerings for most of its notes, so if I'm very tied
into seeing "third finger on the D string" for the G, I may overlook the
possibility of playing the same note in second or third position, which
might be really handy depending on the context.  However, in fairness,
subsequent violin teachers hammered those in just as thoroughly, so I
guess I really see the note as _all_ of its possible fingerings.

The point where this becomes seriously annoying is when you're
trying to learn to read in different clefs, or when you're trying to
sight-transpose, or when you're trying to sight-sing.  That last one
is a real bear.  What you say is true of almost all instruments: all
you need to do is to relearn the mapping.  But in the case of voice,
there's no mapping; there's no specific physical thing that I do to
produce a given note.  Well, I guess there is, at some level; let's say
there's nothing I'm aware of doing.  It's much better to know what the
notes actually are when you're sight-singing.

A friend of mine, a cello player, once really blew my mind by reading
through a piece that was written in the treble clef, playing it on
the cello (which is normally scored in bass clef), and transposing it
to a different key, all at the same time.  It was a hard piece, too.
You just can't do that sort of thing if you're tied into reading
fingerings.  Of course, you might not _want_ to do that sort of thing,
but if you do, you have to see the music as notes, not as fingerings.
In the programming biz, this is called abstraction: think of the notes
as base classes, and the finger positions as derived classes.  If you
have access to the base classes, it's a whole lot easier to write new
classes that inherit their characteristics.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
   -__ __ /_   Jon Berger              "If you push something hard enough,
  //_// //_/   jonb@ingres.com          it will fall over."
_/ ---------                              - Fudd's First Law of Opposition
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers