Why do we teach music backwards?

Why do we teach music backwards?
Why are we taught to read music before we know how to play it?
There is an explanation for this and I’ll get to that in a moment but first things first.

First of all, music is a language and like every language we must learn to speak it at least functionally before we learn to read and write it. Learning to speak a language creates a context to know what you’re reading. Music works the same way. We all begin learning the language of music when we learn to sing our first songs. The seeds of music theory are sown yet we don’t seem to nurture those seeds.

The typical scenario goes like this; a child loves music and loves to sing so they ask their parents for music lessons. The parent seeks out a music teacher and almost every music teacher will try to teach that child to read the music first by showing them dots on a matrix that relate to finger positions on an instrument. (Most teachers teach that way because that’s how they were taught.) The student is learning to decipher a melodic pattern but they’re not being told that they’re learning a pattern. All music, I repeat ALL music is a series of patterns. Learning to recognize the patterns is what music theory is all about! Furthermore most early teaching repertoire is comprised of melodies written by old dead European guys. I haven’t met many students who want to learn that old stuff so they become disenchanted with the melodies and frustrated with trying to read the notation. The worst part is they feel like music is too hard and are left with a sense of failure. People want to learn the songs that touch them emotionally.

So why do we teach music backwards? Well, it comes from the advancement of European imperialism. Back in the days of kings and queens and emperors and the like, ultra wealthy folks liked to have their own in-house or should I say in-castle band. And because they had gobs of money, the bigger the band the cooler you were, so they had orchestras. (The first person to create a large group like this was a guy named Monteverde in the early 1600’s.) So the emperor would hire a popular musician like Mozart to write a piece of music to impress his friends and then hire an orchestra to play that music. You’ve heard the term court composer and chamber orchestra I’m sure. Anyway the composer needed a way to get all of these folks to play specific parts to make the musical piece come to life. To do this the composer had to develop a notation system for the players to follow and play the piece. There were many less specific attempts at notating music dating back 4,000 years but this new notation system developed by Monteverde and those after him became the standard.

That notation system thrived and is the basis of what we use today to read and write music. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s what we’ve got.

It’s important to point out here that humans have been making music for at least 40,000 years. That’s forty thousand! Many cutting edge scientists in that field believe we’ve done it for 100,000 years or more. There are flutes dating back 45,000 years made of animal leg bones and some of them play the major scale! (That’s a whole other history lesson). From that time until the system used by the European composers , music was handed down exactly the way every child learns to speak their native language today. By watching and listening and mimicking what they see and hear. That’s how we learn a language and that’s how we should learn music. If and when we learn to read notation we know what we’re reading.

It’s pretty common to think you have to read notation to play music but that’s just not true. The majority of musicians these days do not read music and many are at the top of their fields musically. That’s not to say being able to read music isn’t helpful to be a better musician because it is. It’s just not necessary. Understanding what music is made from is more important than being able to read it. I’ve had many students in my teaching career who could read extremely well but they couldn’t sit down and just play. They needed the music there to read. They couldn’t sit in and jam with other people or play some Jazz, as the whole point of Jazz is to improvise on a melodic theme. (That means to make it up on the spot.)

Reading music is not music theory. Music theory is understanding how music works. In a nutshell, music is made of 3 elements. A melody, a chord progression a/k/a the harmony, and a rhythmic beat and they are ALL based on patterns. The foundation on which ALL of these elements are built is the Major Scale. You know it as the Do - Re - Mi - scale. This scale is the alphabet we use to create the language of music.

I’ve created The Right Brain Music Method to teach anyone and everyone how to play music and understand the theory regardless of your ability to read notation.

BIO
James McVay is an American composer, producer, songwriter, author, and educator. He has over 200 TV and movie scores to his credit. He has produced dozens of albums for various artists and 3 of his own songs. As a multi-instrumentalist he has played on hundreds of studio recording sessions. As an author and educator he has written 10 books on how to play music. His most acclaimed books are in the Right Brain Music Method series which seeks to change the way we learn music.

Music Theory in a Nutshell

Music theory is the study of how music works. 

Music is a language and like any language you must first learn to speak it at least functionally before learning to read and write it. 

When you first learned to talk you weren’t shown letters and taught how to read those letters, you learned to say words and how to use them to get what you wanted.

First of all, music is simple…it’s vast but it’s simple. When we were young we learned to sing together. We didn’t think about it we just did it. It seemed to come naturally.

So let’s start with the simple part.

The foundation of music is the “Do Re Mi” scale.  Practically everyone knows that scale and our music is built from it. We start with 7 notes,  Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti.

The melody comes from that scale and the melody is the most important element of music. It’s the first music we learn as small children.

Notes are chosen from that scale and put into patterns. Patterns that repeat, creating more patterns. Think Frere Jacques.

Those melodic patterns are supported by a thing called a chord progression. Chords are groups of 3 or more notes played together and they come from the same scale as our melody.

So music is basically a melody supported by a chord progression.

Simple as that!

Now the vast part. 

There are 2 basic anomalies that turn our simple 7 note foundation into a vast frontier of possibilities.

First, 6 of our 7 scale notes can be moved up or down in pitch and 2 of those can move in either direction.

I want you to think of a piano keyboard.  The piano is a C based instrument with the white keys giving us our 7 note “Do Re Mi” scale and the 5 black keys representing those “up or down” extra notes we can choose. So now we have 12 notes to deal with but it’s important to remember that our foundation is the 7 notes of the “Do Re Mi” scale.

The second anomaly is that our “Do Re Mi" scale can start on any one of those 12 notes and that is what’s meant by the key of our music. We’ve got the key of C but we also have the key of A, or Bb, or F#, or any of those 12 notes. 

Another aspect that can make music seem complicated has to do with chords. As I said, a chord is a group of 3 or more notes played together and it’s the “or more” part that can give us an almost endless  palette of possibilities.  

The simple structure remains the same however, a melody that is supported by a chord progression. 

What's YOUR story?

What’s your story?

What was the moment or incident that turned you away from singing or playing in public?

I’ve heard countless renditions of the same two stories. 

Story 1 When you were a kid somebody told you you couldn’t sing, had a bad voice, or you got a critical look from someone so you got embarrassed and never sang in front of others again. They were wrong and it robbed you of the joy of singing.

Most of you still sing when you know no-one can hear you.

Story 2  You loved music as a young child and wanted to learn to play it so you got a teacher who sat with you and forced you to read notes. (usually melodies by old dead European guys) That analytical process was frustrating and you really just wanted to play a song you loved. You felt it was too hard so you turned away feeling inadequate and/or disappointed.

The truth is you were being taught the wrong way. We don’t all learn things the same way.

I grew up singing with my sisters and father especially at Holiday times. I remember my dad at the piano playing the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel and saying “don’t sing the same parts”. So to please my father, my sisters and I would struggle to find the harmonies and we all learned how to harmonize that way. Through the years our family gatherings were filled with making music…except for my mother.

Many years later when my dad passed we gathered at my folks’ house and had some friends over and we played music together and it dawned on me that moment that my mother never sang with us.  I asked her later that evening why she never joined in and this is what she said to me.  “When I was a little girl I was in church and I was singing a hymn that I really loved and someone from the next pew over gave me a dirty look so I never sang again”.

My mother was 82 years old when she told me this.

So, what’s your story?

If you can talk you can sing!

We humans talk with an up and down sort of contour in our voices. That contour, called prosody, can telegraph your emotional intention to the person with whom you’re speaking. Just think of the way you talk when you’re speaking to your pet or to an infant.  The pitch gets higher and your speaking gets very “sing song” sounding.  Singing is just a more controlled version of that.

Why are so many people afraid to sing in front of other people?

It’s amazing to me how many people I meet who will shy away from singing in front of strangers. I can’t help asking why. Every time I get them to open up about it they reveal some version of “I’m afraid I’ll sound bad”.                                                                                                                      

The truth is, if you can talk you can sing. Some people sing better than others, and that’s to be expected.  I’ve known professional singers who think they sound bad. It’s just human nature to have self conscious thoughts, but that shouldn’t deprive you of the joy of singing!

SO…                                                                                                                                                      

If you want to get better at singing, here’s an easy exercise you can do. Find an instrument, (one that you don’t have to blow into) play a note, and try to match the pitch of your voice to it. It might take a little practice but you CAN do it. Listen to the tone you’re making. Does it sound higher than the pitch on the instrument?   Lower? When you sing along with the songs you like, LISTEN to your pitch and try to make it match with the music. The more you do it the easier it will be. You can do this! I promise!

Case In Point 3/6/18

A young student came in to audition to perform in the Arts Showcase at the school where I teach. She wanted to play the drums. 

She sat down at the drum set and pulled out a book and set it on the floor tom.

She then proceeded to whack the snare 3 times and then pause for one beat then 3 more whacks etc. I asked her how long she had been taking drum lessons. She said 3 months.

That was all she had learned in 3 months. I asked her if she could play any songs and with a bewildered look she said no.

So I asked her what her favorite song was and when she told me I pulled it up on Youtube. I played the song for her and told her to listen to what the kick was doing. She started doing that. Then I told her to listen to the snare and do THAT. She promptly did and her eyes got real BIG.  She was PLAYING MUSIC…not reading dots.  That took less than 5 mins!

…just saying.

To Read or Not to Read...that is the question!

The following is a recap of my blog for Guitar Player magazine.

To Read or not to Read?!?!
There are millions of guitarists in the world and yet the majority of them don’t read notation. Why is that?

I myself am a self-taught guitar player who made a living playing by ear and lightly dabbling in “reading”. I went on to write movie scores (by hand, also self taught) and learned to conduct orchestras so I have some perspective on the subject of “reading” music.

First off, reading notation is only one of several ways to learn a piece of music. Notation in it’s current form has been around for about 500 years. If you consider the fact that music has been a significant part the human experience for tens of thousands of years you have to ask yourself - how did people learn music before there was notation? Music was handed down from generation to generation by listening and watching and mimicking what you saw and heard. Humans are genetically predisposed to remember melodies. In fact humans remember melody more readily than literal information. I bet you learned the alphabet with a song. There are anthropological reasons for this but that’s another story.

Secondly, there are 2 kinds of reading. Reading to memorize a piece of music and what’s called sight-reading. Sight-reading is a discipline all it’s own and it’s HARD. Sight- reading a single note line is one thing but reading chords on the fly is quite a different matter. The other kind of reading is what most of us do. We slowly analyze the dots and sound them out on our instruments and while it’s a pretty good way to learn a piece of music it has it’s draw backs as well. It’s important to note here that “reading” music is predominantly a “left brain” activity. It’s an analytical process, however music is an emotional experience and that leads us to the third aspect of “reading music”

Thirdly, reading notation distracts you from the emotional aspects of playing music.
In my years conducting orchestras I experienced this firsthand. When your brain is engaged in analyzing the music so that you play the right notes, the emotion of the piece gets lost. It just does... I’ve seen it over and over. Music without the emotion is flat and lifeless (my opinion). I believe most all of us are drawn to music in the first place because of the way it touches us emotionally.