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Professional horn players are expected to be able to read scores from the printed page, as are classical string players, though soloists memorize their music and are generally not sight-reading when they perform an opera aria or a featured solo with a symphony. The world of reading music revolves around music that is designed to be readable, and it often draws its power from the combining of the voices of the many, and not from the idea that the individual players are being virtuosic. That type of musician usually rehearses and does some homework before a performance, and is reluctant to perform music they have never seen before. The piano player in our church is reading music every Sunday, and like her fellow church pianists, she can reliably provide useful music for services without having either memorized the music or created anything, though I don’t know for sure how many times she has performed any given piece I hear her play, or how much she fills in with small improvisations or omissions.

To a church organist, this might be true, but in the musical world of guitars and troubadours it’s actually very different, and almost a non-issue. It would make sense at a glance that children should learn it, and that musical illiteracy might be as crippling to a musician as being unable to read words would be to anyone. It is natural to assume, especially if you are not a musician, that reading music works in a similar way. A significant percentage of us could read aloud from a book we have never seen before and do a reasonable job of delivering the content to other people, with some expression, probably much better than a robot, at least for a few more years until the robots improve significantly. It is considered to be a basic and necessary activity, and by no means is reading thought of as a specialized skill. We generally learn to read language at such a young age that many of us remember little about the learning experience itself, and its value to us is never in question. Most of us learn to read printed words in our childhood, and from then on we can simply read things and think no more about it. Even if you’ve never played a musical instrument or done any singing yourself, hopefully you’ll still find this discussion interesting, since it is very much a hot-button concern among music students, teachers and performers and their families. When I say “reading music,” I am referring to the idea of using clefs, staff lines, and the various quarter notes, rests and bar lines that the “literate” music world has used for centuries, and not all forms of notation like tablature, lyric sheets or song charts. Reading music is one of the benchmarks of measurement that has long been used to proclaim its practitioners to be superior musically to non-readers, and I especially want to address that idea. I want to hold several things up to the light here, because controversies about “musical literacy” have been swirling around guitar players and troubadours for nearly five hundred years and show no signs of pleasantly resolving themselves. We don’t know exactly when or how the matters of writing, language and musical notation started impacting the world of troubadour music, but it was a long time ago, and the situation has evolved steadily into several forms of friction, conflict and misunderstanding. You just play it.” Reply made by an old-time banjo picker, interviewed around 1850, when asked if he could read music. “Can I read notes? Hell, there are no notes to a banjo. It is available in paperback from this web site or from. In a firmly established practice of The World of Music, high-profile guest editors are invited to design issues and see them through the entire preparation process.This is part of an authorized online posting of Harvey Reid's important book, 'The Troubadour Chronicles,' published in May 2020. strongly encourages theoretical and methodological reflections on the study of the musics of the world.Įach issue focuses on a specific topic. thinks across disciplinary boundaries and embraces a wide variety of approaches to the analytical study of the musics of the world, including indigenous methodologies, post-colonial, critical and queer perspectives and different indigenous methodologies. In this, it provides scholars from a multiplicity of academic backgrounds a forum for the discussion of musics from around the world, their dynamics and their many meanings, manifested in a variety of ever changing forms ranging from highly particular and localized systems of musical thinking in traditional musics to global (musical) cultural flows and consumption. The World of Music is an international peer-reviewed journal seeking a critical understanding of performing arts and cultural practices involving music, dance and theater worldwide, as well as the many contexts in which they come into being.

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