My apologies for thread drift, but I just gotta stick this in.

I don't know who you ran into at Cornish, Thomas, but if it was a couple of decades after I was there, it couldn't have been Lockrem Johnson. He left Cornish in 1969.

But I'm not sure what he would have said to you. Reading and writing music is pretty essential to any kind of institutional study of music. Much class instruction in music theory involves the teacher writing notes on the blackboard (in music department classrooms, staff lines are drawn permanently on the blackboards—painted on) and the students taking "notes" (literally) on manuscript paper. Assignments often involve writing chords, chord inversions, and chord progressions with smooth movement from note to note within the chord changes (not easy to do), or the teacher giving you a melody line and leaving you to fill in chords (there are no "right" chords, there are only chords that "work") or write a countermelody to it, or both. The more advanced the class, the more complex the music becomes. Other instruction involves going through, say, the score of a Beethoven string quartet, determining what Ludwig did, and trying to figure out why he did it that way (he "breaks the rules" a lot, but he does it for good reasons). For a musician in any field of music, this kind of study makes all kinds of light bulbs turn on. The point is not to teach you a whole bunch of rules you have to obey, it's to show you a whole range of possibilities that you probably wouldn't think of on your own. I can't imagine a music school anywhere that wouldn't consider being able to read music just as essential as a college English department would consider the ability to read essential to studying literature and/or learning to write short stories, novels, or poetry (as in rhyming).

This is not to say that one can't be a top-rate musician if one can't read music. One of the best (and best known) operatic basses of all time and a mainstay of the opera world some years back, Ezio Pinza (probably most famous for playing Emile de Becque in the stage production of "South Pacific"—Some Enchanted Evening), couldn't read music. It didn't inhibit his singing at all. Except that instead of being able to learn an operatic role or a popular song by picking up a score, reading it, and memorizing it, he had to be drilled by a voice coach until he had it memorized. That's doing it the hard way. Not to mention, the expensive way. The score to Mozart's Don Giovanni (one of the roles he was most famous for) costs a few bucks, but a voice coach charges by the hour, and it would take a whole lot of hours to learn the lead role by rote as he had to do. One is tempted to ask, "Why not learn to read music?" but I personally couldn't come up with a good answer for that. Perhaps you can. I'd honestly like to hear a good rationale for this.

Many jazz musicians don't work from written music at all, and I'll venture to say that the vast majority don't spend much time looking at scores. Being mainly improvisational, it just isn't that essential. But—most of the best jazz musicians do read music. For example, trumpet player Wynton Marsalis studied at Juilliard, and he can switch back and forth between jazz and classic with no problems at all—great at both. His thorough knowledge of music makes him highly versatile and good at whatever kind of music he turns his hand to.

I know that there are a fair number (probably more than any other field of music) of folk oriented musicians who not only avoid learning to read music, but are downright hostile to the idea. I think this comes from the feeling that if they learn to read music or if they learn anything about music theory, this will somehow force a lot of rules on them and limit what they can do, or inhibit their freedom of spirit, or otherwise somehow corrupt their purity as folk musicians. Nope. Doesn't work that way.

Granted, Doc Watson can't read music. Being blind, it isn't something he had much choice about. But he knows one helluva lot about music theory. In a workshop at the 1964 Berkeley Folk Festival, someone asked him how he can play fiddle tunes on the guitar so fast and clean. His response? "I practice scales at least a half-hour a day, every day." Looks of shock and horror!! Someone else asked him about a picking pattern he used on a particular song. As he tried to explain it, he said, "Well, it's a sort of arpeggio. 'Course," he added with a wry grin, "I'm not supposed to know words like that."

I've had guitar students that didn't want to learn to read music. I try to talk them into it, but if they're adamant, I teach them anyway, using chord diagrams and showing them stuff rather than using written music. But it's a whole lot more difficult to get ideas across. And here are a couple of biggies: they deny themselves the possibility of being able to learn songs from song books; and are often too afraid they're going to make some kind of horrible musical mistake to really try to experiment very much. So much for freedom of expression. Almost every question I have run into on Mudcat having to do with chords, scales, modes and such are answered in the first few chapters of a good text on music theory, but to understand it, you kinda have to be able to read the examples—in music notation.

Good musicians I have known who don't read music are good not because of their inability to read music, but in spite of it. And that includes folk musicians. Other than the sort of irrational fear that some folk musicians have of being "tainted," I can't really grasp the idea of not wanting to learn to read music.

But—whatever works for you. That's what matters. But I really would like to hear a good rationale for not being able to read music.

Don Firth