"Tunes are not laid-down successions of notes. Without fail, in my experience, people who see the tunes that way always play badly."

Steve, I can agree with that up to a point. But in the same way that one can deliver a speech from a book or script in a variety of ways, one can learn a tune from written music and also play or sing it a variety of ways—the best being to spend some time with it and try it a variety of ways.

The problem you're focusing on is the deficiency of the musician, not any deficiency in using written music as a means of learning the music.

If a concert pianist can learn a twenty-minute classical etude from sheet music, then bring a whole new interpretation to it, someone with a halfway decent musical and/or dramatic sense sure as hell ought to be able do it with something far less complex.

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations twice, a couple of decades apart. The two renditions are quite different, even though in both recordings, he is playing the same notes.

The notes per se do not contain all that much information. Pitch and duration. That's it! And any halfway decent musician should be able to put his or her own individual interpretation on how the notes are played.

Don Firth