Wonderful conversation! Thanks to so many of you for the insights and memory prompts. Dahlia's posting about her teaching is really familiar to me, as it is basically how my daughters are taught (the older on piano and the younger on recorder) when they go to their 'formal' teachers who, while preparing them for AMEB exams where all the things Dahlia described are tested, are trying to get them to enjoy the experience of music. Here the recorder teacher has an advantage over the piano teacher because it's much easier to get a consort together and the tradition doesn't often require more than two pianos at once. There is a great bunch of recorder players (all under 15 years old) in about four groups from just the one teacher and there are three or four recorder teachers (in a population of only 25,000) with similar arrangements. They have a great time!

It wasn't the way I was taught, more's the pity. And, with my 'informal' training by exposure to the folk scene, the stuff they were learning was very familiar to me. I just couldn't read the dots!

Then Dahlia described the march! In Australia we have a tradition (from the Welsh) of Eisteddfod competitions which may not have got across the Atlantic, I don't know. All the music teachers encourage their students as it gives them practice at public performance. Most of the adjudicators take a 'teaching' approach to their adjudicating but even so there can be 'odd' results. Most performers (and, more importantly, their parents) take such oddities in their stride.

I agree with Don's comments about a competent musician being defined (although he didn't get quite so specific) as one who was fluent by ear and by sight. It's one of the reasons why, when someone described me as a musician, I'd most commonly reply that I wasn't a musician, but a person who played music. The technical competence that Tattie describes is still beyond me on the Anglo, although singing unaccompanied in any key within my vocal range is a doddle and I can usually cobble a harmony line within a verse or so, when someone else starts the song, if I know the words.

When I described my conversations at dances, with people who despaired at their own failures, they usually volunteered the comment that they couldn't read music. It seemed to me they thought that reading music was the single most important criterion/hurdle/failure about their inability to play an instrument. It was because of this one thing that I usually responded that "I can't and don't read music." Sometimes I'd even go so far as to say that I deliberately didn't read music, as an attempt to encourage them. But I'd always include in the conversation, later, the comment about learning to read when the inability became an impediment.

Dahlia's descriptions reminded me that many people associate an understanding of music theory and the ability to read scores. As a teacher (of other disciplines) I can quite appreciate her position but my own experience (while not necessarily to be recommended) indicates some viability of other approaches. For some years I was part of a high school system that had respect for innovation and I was in it at the deeply innovative end, teaching in a community school. These can take over every part of your life that is spare and I thought, to give the teaching some 'competition' I'd put myself in a position where I could do some proper research on how people learned to play music.

I already had the required 'anecdotal' stuff (this was after the realisation with the psaltery, the flute and the dulcimer), as well as the required pedagogical, psych and physiological aspects of theory and practice as applied to learning. What I needed was a handle on formal music theory so I enrolled at La Trobe Uni in music. The prospectus said it concentrated on 20th century composition (Fine by me!) and was only 30 mins drive away with most of its classes after work finished for the day. Perfect!

Being able to count on my fingers relatively fast I could apply most of my Anglo playing and harmony singing experience to get through the first year theory tests, even though they wanted all harmonies to use major thirds and fifths. "Strange?" I thought, considering the prospectus and the fact that they had the best collection of Balkan music in Australia at the time. I could ignore the obnoxious pedant lecturer who emphasised that "all folk music was derivative from classical music" although, when during a lecture he demonstrated something on an electric keyboard with the comment "At least it's better than a tin whistle!" my response from the middle of the theatre blistered the paint and his bluster. At the time, our band had a whistle player who rivalled Mary Bergin!

My best experience of that course was trying to write scores for other performers in what we called the brake drum, broken glass and prepared piano workshop. Finally I understood what dots were about, because we couldn't use them and had to resort to other written communication on the score. During this exercise I remembered Peter Parkhill's NFF workshop in '73 on Percy Grainger (currently the subject of a museum display in Sydney) and his collecting and transcription. Percy was apparently (I know you afficionados will correct me if I'm wrong) the first to use wax cylinders to make field recordings of 'traditional' singers, in the 1890s, when most were using the sol-fa method.

Grainger transcribed a piece (unfortunately the title escapes me) where every grace note and rhythm change was displayed in minute detail. Where the sol-fa method gave the item a key and a time signature and the classicists described the singer as 'off-key', Grainger showed half a dozen scale changes and rhythm variations in every half stanza, all repeated faithfully in subsequent verses. In the brake drum workshop I started to understand notation but I can still only read "on my fingers". Sigh.

The final straw in my participation in that music course came when the pedant lecturer told me, during a conversation about musical experience, "I don't care what you think you already know about music! You are an empty vessel which WE will fill up with what is important!" Well, that was entirely antithetical to everything I understood about learning anf teaching so I just walked out. I still needed to give the community school some competition so, at enrollment time the next year I fronted up looking for something where my existing knowledge could contribute formally. I chose Prehistory (I already was an ecologist with an understanding of oral history) and the Music desk was adjacent to Prehistory's. The Head of Dept was there and he asked why I wasn't continuing. I explained that they weren't really implementing their prospectus. He commented (with some resignation in his voice) that most of their music students came straight from high school, had been taught that music started with Bach and finished with Beethoven, were highly resistant to attempts to widen their horizons, and ended up as teachers in schools who thought the same as the students. I was unsurprised when I heard some years later that that Dept had folded. Meanwhile, I had become an archaeologist. And I've been too busy to keep at the dots.

I don't mean to divert the thread, but the abilities and attitudes of those of you like Don and Dahlia are not universally applied. There are all too many with experiences like mine. I'm lucky in that I've had a context in which I've been able to develop despite initial drawbacks and, while I thank Jerry for his respect, it is really the others I've sung and played with, both formally and informally (especially the latter) to whom the respect should be directed. I keep my ear to the ground and nose to the grindstone; it's difficult to read the dots when doing so but, you all know the score.

Cheers, Rowan