I just read two interesting books by classical pianists: Piano Notes by Charles Rosen and Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk. Both addressed the connections between the physical act of playing the piano and the intellectual and emotional aspects of listening to music. This was all interesting to me because I enjoy listening to music (including classical piano music), but I can’t play or read music, nor can I sing in tune, nor can I recall any piece of music or even any long passages of music (setting aside a few very short songs such as Row Row Row Your Boat and Happy Birthday and songs such as The Star Spangled Banner that I’ve heard thousands of times). I can recognize any passage from my favorite music, but I can’t hum anything from beginning to end.
I was discussing this with musician/composer/music-theorist Dmitri Tymoczko (one of whose sayings is “Math is like flypaper for smart people”) and he had some interesting but not completely conclusive responses. Here’s our conversation thread:
Me:
It struck me that when I read a book or see a movie–or follow a spoken story or a logical argument–I see the entire narrative as a sort of fixed structure, within which I can scan forward and backward or jump around at will. This is helpful to me when I am giving a talk–I can pretty much ad lib and feel the structure developing as I speak–or I can see the structural flaws of talks by others. But when I listen to music–even familiar music, pieces I’ve heard hundreds of times, and even when I’m focusing–I’m more like a Turing machine, perceiving only the current instant and with only a vague, peripheral-vision sense of everything that comes before or after.
I’m sure that you have a vision of each piece of music as a whole. But you’re an extreme case. What about people who are not professional musicians or composers? I’m not quite sure how to think about this. Part of it must be the ability to read music (which I don’t have)–if you can attach the sounds to the images, then there’s a direct visual mapping. But I’m guessing that many people who can’t read music can still envision an entire piece. I’m not quite sure what that would feel like–but, as noted above, I can analogize it to my ability to store an entire 3-hour movie (yes, we just saw The Brutalist, and I highly recommend it!) in my head. Conversely, I imagine there are people who perceive books and movies the way I experience music, only in the moment.
Any thoughts? This is perhaps something that William James figured out many years ago…
Dmitri:
I see several interlocking problems
(1) you lack the conceptual categories for making a musical map
(2) a lot of music involves really subtle distinctions that take training to hear
– e.g. a Mozart symphony can be pretty similar from part to part
unless you know what to listen for
(In other words, you are what we musicians call “a muggle.”)(3) you lack confidence. there’s something weird going on where you can make maps of a certain crude kind, but you discount that, because you want something much more detailed.
(4) you lack experience playing a rock band, where people literally use maps to tell people what to do
What if you took some song you like, I dunno, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and made a little map? Use the words to guide your sense of the parts.
Part 1a: “That’s great it starts with an earthquake …”
Part 2a: “It’s the end of the world”
Part 1b: “Six o’clock TV hour”
Part 2b: “It’s the end of the world” (Introducing “time I had some time alone”)
Part 3: “I feel fine” extended, wordless vocal
Part 2c: “It’s the end of the world”
Part 1c: “The other night …”
Part 2d: “It’s the end of the world” (Time I had some time alone there the whole time)
Part 2e: “It’s the end of the world” (two voices in harmony)
Part 2f: “It’s the end of the world”Now if you want you can get more precise: for example, part 1a is twice as long as the other part 1s, and it introduces two new chords at the end.
The more maps you make the more you will start to hear these things.
You gotta crawl before you walk. I worry like you are expecting either automatic or nothing, rather than being willing to take the baby steps. Like “I can’t understand this graduate text in statistics so I am not going to even try …” So much science involves the long, slow accumulation of knowledge. Music too!
Rock bands use these kind of maps all the time, when teaching songs to each other. Part 1 is the verse, part 2 is the chorus. Usually there is a 3rd part called a “bridge.”
Now imagine some classical piece that is really simple: say a slow part, a fast part and a slow part. There’s a map. Here’s a beautiful piece by Messiaen that uses that map. (This should be listened to really loud.)
When I do improvised pieces I often have a little map just like this, maybe with five parts.
Or try Mozart’s Turkish march. I bet you can hear the parts coming back.
I do think there’s a basic thing going on which is that music is like a language, and you are sensing that you haven’t really been trained in the language. You like music, but feel frustrated because you can’t connect with it intellectually. That’s all very reasonable and fair. This is one reason why we like to train kids in music when they are young.
I mean, I go to Italy and see all these glamorous people happily yapping about risotto and such. I always wish I could join in. They are happy to speak English with me but I feel like the risotto yapping would be richer if I could learn Italian. Unfortunately I wasted all my time learning music and figuring out what the Grothendieck construction is …
Dmitri adds:
You might like a book by Jerrold Levinson called “Music in the Moment.” He’s anti-map and pro turing machine. I think he takes things too far but it is a good book, a bracing challenge. He’s right about a lot.
OK, I went to the library and checked out the Levinson book, and I absolutely hated it. I found it so annoying that I blogged something about it–or, at least I thought I did! But now I can’t find the post. Anyway, here’s the story. Right near the beginning of his book, Levinson writes that music is inherently “in the moment” in a way that visual art isn’t because music is perceived over time, whereas you can look at a painting all at once. My problem with this argument is that stories are perceived over time: we read books one paragraph at a time and rarely go back, and we watch a movie in sequence just as we listen to music–but for books and movies I can hold the entire structure–plot, themes, scenes, characters–in my mind, while the story is being told and after also. I have no problem watching a movie or reading a book, partaking in its instantaneous nature, while still holding it in my head as part of a coherent whole. And I’m pretty sure that Dmitri can do this with music too. To my mind, Levinson’s argument was entirely ruined by him not addressing why it doesn’t hold for stories.
To get back to the music-understanding thing, I talked with someone I know who is a good singer and I asked her if she visualizes all of a song at once. She replied that sometimes she’ll start with one passage in the middle and then track the song backward and forward until she’s built the whole mosaic. She also said that if she likes a song, she’ll listen to it over and over until it all makes sense to her and she can see how the chorus, the verses, and the bridge fit together.
In my post, Playing music, listening to music, background music, talking about music, I wrote:
Many writers have discussed how the experience of music has shifted over the past century or so from playing music, to listening to music, to background music–and this all affects how we hear music and how we talk about it. The story is clear enough. Until very recently in music history, if you wanted music you had to sing it or play it yourself, or go somewhere where people were performing. Changes in performance spaces corresponded to different developments of musical style and content. Records and radio made it possible to just listen, and to listen to a much wider variety of music than you’d encounter in your daily life or even going to the occasional concert. And then, as the decades progressed, we gradually moved to the modern condition of music always being available in the background.
It’s my impression that, in general, music is more interesting to play than to listen to. Combinations of notes that don’t sound like much can be interesting to explore, and playing music is a form of exploration or experimentation: even if you’re playing a piece note by note, at each step you’re implicitly experimenting in that you always have a choice to play it differently. Beyond this, I can well imagine that some music can be more interesting than to compose than to listen to or even to play–indeed, it’s not hard to compose patterns of notes that are unplayable by a human using traditional musical instruments. So some of the development of modern music has to be a move from interesting-to-listen-to to interesting-to-play to interesting-to-compose.
Charles Rosen discusses this in his book. One thing he points out that I hadn’t thought about is that if you’re playing music at home, or if you’re in someone’s living room listening to someone play, you can read the music along with hearing it. In a live concert you might not be reading the music but you can watch the playing, which is particular helpful if different themes are being played by different instruments. As Rosen puts it:
Playing Bach for oneself or for a friend or pupil looking at the score (the way the Art of Fugue or the Well-Tempered Keyboard or the Goldberg Variations would have been played before 1770) raised few problems; nothing had to be brought out, the harpsichordist . . . experienced the different voices through the movement of the hands, the listener saw the score and followed all the contrapuntal complexity disentangling the sound visually while listening. Bach’s art did not depend on hearing the different voices and separating them in the mind, but on appreciating the way what was separate on paper blended into a wonderful whole.
Rosen continues by explaining why it is a challenge for modern performers to bring out these patterns through sound alone using various tricks of phrasing and emphasis that would not have been needed in Bach’s time. I’d say it’s an interesting paradox, that the most faithful presentation of the music would not be the same as its original form, but I guess this occurs all the time when appreciating art of earlier centuries. We can’t read Chaucer straight-up, and even Shakespeare presents some challenges; when looking at old Italian paintings it helps to have some background on the Biblical scenes being displayed; etc.
Regarding music: its traditional form is haptic and visual as well as aural. If you listen to recorded music, it’s just aural. Listening to music without playing it, reading the score, or watching the players is a little bit like hearing a Carl Stalling score and only imagining the actions of Bugs Bunny and his pals. It can still be great, but it’s only part of the experience.
Rosen’s book had many other insights too. I recommend it. He jumps back and forth between his own experiences playing the piano, more general reflections on the history of classical music, and discussions, too technical for me to follow, of particular pieces of music.
Rosen is different from me! He writes, “When I hear music, I prefer to lose myself in it, not to drift outside in my own personal world with music as a decorative and distant background.” Rosen thinks about music the way I think about books and music. I wonder if there’s anything that Rosen did like to have in the background, the way I like music in the background. Baseball, maybe? I think of the ideal baseball-game experience as being outside on a nice day, eating hot dogs and having pleasant conversation with the sights and sounds of the game in the background, with occasional periods of intensity and focus.
Rosen also wrote, “The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing.” I guess this isn’t quite true of pop music, or of the careers of musical performers–if you play in a wedding band, your job is to play what the guests want to hear–but I can see how it would be the case when considering what of the music of the past will survive.
Jeremy Denk’s book is a lot like Rosen’s–indeed, the younger man thanks the elder in his acknowledgments–with lots and lots about what it feels like to play the piano, the way that it complements other instruments, the way that different styles are appropriate for different pieces of music, and the sense of a musical community that encompasses teachers, students, performers, and composers. As with Rosen, Denk has some technical bits that I couldn’t really follow, but when the book was over I felt I had a better understanding of music than I had before. When it comes to learning about music, I found this inside-out approach to be much more helpful than various books about how to understand music. I did get a lot out of David Byrne’s book, but that was really more about art and culture in general, not much about music in particular (despite the book’s title).
Most of Denk’s book was about his experiences as a child and youth learning how to play the piano, and it includes many inspiring and heartfelt tributes to his teachers. As a teacher myself, I appreciated that! And it was interesting to think of the ways in which teaching music is different than teaching statistics. He also talks a bit about the social environment of being a music student, and some of that sounded horrible. Not that Denk was a horrible person, more that he was inside a horrible system. It’s so competitive! He went through recital after recital, competition after competition. OK, sure, you could say that all of academics is competitive in that you need to get good grades if you want to move forward. The piano competitions seemed different, though, in that the different students in the program were competing with each other in a way that I don’t see in schools and universities. Maybe part of it is that so many kids are good at music, but there are very few touring-pianist careers of the sort that Rosen and Denk have had. The other funny thing about the Denk-in-school thing is how easy it all came to him. I mean, sure, he had struggles and frustrations, but pretty much his school experiences were a series of steps forward. This reminded me of my own path through school: many of the students struggled but it all came easy to me, and I could focus on my interests without having to worry about not being able to keep up. It was kinda fun to read a memoir by someone who’d had the same experiences.
My being tone deaf led me to zero in on
” And it was interesting to think of the ways in which teaching music is different than teaching statistics.”
So, I went to
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/different-from-or-different-than
“A considerable amount of ink and pixels have been shed over the past several hundred years, in a valiant attempt to force the English-speaking people to choose the correct word to use immediately after different. From is the word most of the usage guides want you to use, especially in the US, so if that’s all you wanted to know you can leave this article now, untroubled by information on semi-literate 18th-century grammarians and the mysterious mating habits of the comparative adjective. But to the rest of you … let’s go.”
It continues at length and ends with, “If you are British, or would like people to think that you spent enough time in the United Kingdom for it to have influenced your approach to language, use different to whenever you feel like it.”
Imagine my surprise this morning when I came to my favorite statistics blog hoping to up my quantitative game a little bit …
Haha!
Perhaps there’s always the possibility to learn something, or see something, or read something, or hear something from someone or something, even though it may not be apparent at first thought, or sight, or sound.
I like certain music a lot, and usually enjoy the post about music on this blog although it often seems to involve classical music which I personally don’t like. What I wanted to share is that I think there might be connections between many things, one of which is the possibility of things influencing other things which may not necessarily be obviously connected.
For instance, I can clearly remember listening to music on several occasions that seemed to do something in my head. It’s like opening a door to a room in one of the corridors of my brains which I hadn’t opened before or I perhaps wasn’t even aware of. Perhaps it can also be compared to entering a lift and exiting on a new floor which I hadn’t been to before or perhaps I wasn’t even aware of.
I think I have similar sensations with viewing certain videos or pictures about certain architecture and interior design, or certain pictures or videos about nature. It feels expansive, wide, open, and free. I like that a lot. I also think it may have helped me in my scientific writing, if only in teaching and/or reinforcing the general idea that perhaps one can try to create something (e.g. music, architecture, scientific writing) according to one’s own vision, wishes, and standards. Maybe someone else may even like it, or may do something useful with it, or may learn something from it in some way, shape, or form.
One of the other topics that come up from time to time on this blog that I tend to like is writing and titles.
I can’t help but think about the title “Notes on Piano Notes” as a possible title for this blog post…
Anon:
You write, “I like certain music a lot, and usually enjoy the post about music on this blog although it often seems to involve classical music which I personally don’t like.”
I like pop music too. The problem is that the writing on pop music seems to me to mostly be much less sophisticated than the writing on classical music. Rosen and Denk go into the connections between the experience of playing the instrument, the sound of the music, and the role of the performer and the audience in a way that I don’t typically see in pop music. That book by David Byrne was great, but it wasn’t so much about the music itself, and then there’s the vast mass of pop music criticism that’s about the impression it leaves on the listener and on the background of the songs but not so much on the music itself.
It could be that the possible sophistication and/or discussions concerning classical music resembles that of poetry that was featured on here a few weeks ago if I remember correctly. Just like with poetry, I think I appreciate the possible relative simplicity. It may also explain why next to classical music, I don’t like jazz music as (at least certain forms) of jazz music is all over the place and way too irregular or “busy” for my brains and liking I think.
I can’t discuss music in technical terms or notes or such things, I can only really discuss lyrics which is close to writing and ties in to my previous comment above. One of the things I enjoyed when attempting to write song lyrics was the choice of a rhyming structure, and then using words and sentences to “fill in the pieces of the puzzle”. It reminded me a lot of my scientific writing.
I enjoy lyric writing a lot, but found it pointless to write more lyrics because I can’t sing or play an instrument and my attempts at sending the lyrics to some musicians or poetry websites have been relatively unsuccessful. That sort of seems to have paused my lyric writing at this point in time.
Anyway, one of the songs and lyrics I came across a year ago or so concerning all of this is a song titled “High On Gettin’ By” by Vincent Neil Emerson. I like the following lyrics in it: “Like a bird caught in a store, I’ve been searching for the door”. I also like the accompanying music a lot. I am sure there must be some people who can also talk about more modern music like some people can talk about classical music. I know some you tube channels talk about more modern music in such fashion: “Rick Beato” and “Justin Hawkins rides again” which may be interesting for you and/or some of the readers here. I think Rick Beato has a video titled “The most complex pop song of all time” which might be relevant in all of this.
I’m like Andrew and Paul, mostly tone deaf. I can hear when someone else wanders from the right key, but I can’t hear myself do it. I thought I just needed practice so I worked pretty hard on getting one song in key. Then on a whim I recorded myself on my phone and discovered that nope, I was still not staying in key.
I am currently reading Oliver Sacks’ “Musicophilia” which covers a lot of the same material as this blog post, but in terms of reflections about neural pathologies and what they tell us about musical cognition. The most recurrent theme seems to revolve around the magic age of six. As with many other aspects of cognition, we all become muggles in various ways after turning seven because our brains stop developing. Most folks are no longer good at learning other languages after age 6. Sacks finds evidence that musical abilities that seem to be universal – or at least far more common – in young children are often lacking in adults, and that the dividing line also falls around age 6.
Sacks notes that in the US absolute (some say “perfect”) pitch is rare, but in some cultures where music is constantly present during childhood, a majority of adults have (retain?) it.
Some neural pathologies such as autism or localized brain damage prevent or destroy language or visual cognition, and there is a striking correlation between these cognitive pathologies and musical savantism. Blindness is the best known.
Put together, this all suggests that folks like Andrew, Paul, and I were once better – perhaps much better – at learning musicality than we are now. We had actual talent, but it withered away as we aged because we focused on language and vision instead.
My experience is that children < 6 vary pretty widely in their ability to stay on key. And I suspect that lots of musician parents have tried and failed to inculcate perfect pitch in their kids, starting from an early age. There's probably some truth to the general story but I doubt it is as simple as one would like.
Dmitri,
Sacks doesn’t claim that children are born with the ability to sing. A child singing out of tune would be analogous to a 3-year-old saying, “My daddy getted me a bunny for Easter.” They can both learn and by the time they are seven, will likely have mastered it.
Sacks describes two forms of absolute pitch. (I actually have – or had, one has passed – two brothers-in-law with functional absolute pitch who had the two different forms.) One is the “savant” form, where the person has a sort of tone map in their head. They can hear a note and immediately say “F sharp.” My bro-in-law Ken has had that ability from early childhood. He never learned to read music because he could play anything he had heard by ear. For me there is no map at all, like a person born blind trying to comprehend a description of the color scale.
My late bro-in-law Leigh had the other form. He could not immediately name the note; he did not have a detailed map in his head. But he had tone “landmarks” and could steer from there. He had memorized the pitch of middle C, and he knew his pitch intervals, so he could count from middle C to figure out any note. He was quite good at it, but it might take him ten seconds of mentally humming notes to himself while staring blankly into the distance.
I have two children, who were both given lots of musical experience, fairly similar experiences to one another, and who were remarkably different in their musicianship, including pitch constancy and general singing ability. The differences were really striking even from an early age (say, ages 3-6).
Not sure what to make of it, except to say that I was paying very careful attention during the early years. My guess is there’s a substantial genetic component.
Very interesting comment. I always thought that musicality had a substantial genetic component, but perhaps early childhood exposures have great influence. Mozart famously was very musical at a young age, but his father was an accomplished musician, and his sister was a child prodigy who spent a lot of time with him from infancy on. Modern musicians often speak of their time in the church choir when they were very young. Separating genetic versus environmental influences might be very difficult. I googled for musicians who were adopted, but most were raised by aunts (John Lennon, Bo Diddley) which obscures the nature/nurture dichotomy.
“But when I listen to music–even familiar music, pieces I’ve heard hundreds of times, and even when I’m focusing–I’m more like a Turing machine, perceiving only the current instant and with only a vague, peripheral-vision sense of everything that comes before or after.”
This thought reminds me quite a bit of Kierkegaard’s Musical Erotic, which I read years ago and struggled greatly to understand.
To my recollection, he makes the claim the music as an art form is primarily characterized by immediacy. The experience of music is sensory, it’s “in the moment” where each note gives way to the next without greater reflection and this occurs solely over the dimension of time. To distinguish it with other forms of art, I believe the idea is that there is no mediating representational layer in between the music and your sensory experience. When watching a stage play for example, your experience of it is dependent on signs/concepts — when the actor says a line or performs some action, you interpret it via its _meaning_, that meaning exists between the content of the art and your experience. I think Kierkegaard would claim that music, more than other forms of art, lacks this idea of mediating concepts, it’s pure immediate sensory experience (I don’t believe he would claim this is absolutely true, just that music is “purer” than other art forms in this sense).
I think he would also claim, to distinguish music from books/literature as art, is its temporal nature prevents reflection. Whereas when reading a story, one can pause and reflect on the meaning and story. In music, you cannot pause and reflect because once you pause, the immediate sensory experience of listening to music is gone. I believe distinguishing music as not having any mediating concepts between its content and your experience is important here, since you can reflect on concepts and how they make you feel (as in the case of a coherent story), but with nothing between the content of music and your feelings you cannot reflect on that (absent perhaps being able to see the music performed again?).
I am probably butchering Kierkegaard’s arguments here – I don’t believe I understood the text terribly well. This essay is embedded within his work Either/Or, in which Kierkegaard writes from a fictional perspective of a person having discovered a set of letters between two authors that are debating living the aesthetic life (from which the Musical Erotic piece comes) or the ethical life, so I don’t even know if saying “Kierkegaard argues…” makes sense here. In any case, I found this bit on music interesting enough to stick with me.
I think an interesting question to this point is how much Kierkegaard’s perspective on music was influenced from living in a pre-recording world — I imagine the feeling of music’s immediacy is strengthened when you don’t have the ability to go back and re-listen to pieces, they exist only as echoes. This also only gives the perspective of listening to music, and completely ignores the people who compose/play music, who I imagine have a completely different perspective as talked about in your post.
Amas:
Regarding your last paragraph, Rosen would argue that until the past century or so, there weren’t so many people who listened to music but didn’t sing or play an instrument.
I payed clarinet for about 10 years (with lessons until the teacher gave up on me) and became fairly technically proficient but I have no sense of absolute pitch and could not tune my clarinet (or later guitar) without help. More or less gave it up in 11th grade to choose chem over band. I used to sing Ok with a good sense of pitch interval but (next note as interval to current) if someone tried to sing harmony I had to give up
This context reminds me of the intro to A Mathematician’s lament: https://island94.org/2010/10/no-wonder-you-werent-good-at-it
Ben:
That post is kind of amusing, but actually I wish that music had been taught to me, or forced down my throat, in that way. I learned approximately zero in all of elementary school. It would’ve been just fine had they taught us how to read music, given us exercises in which we had to transpose a score into a different key, etc. Had my friends and I received that instruction in school, I think we’d be better people now.
Andrew, you will have forgotten or perhaps never knew that I played violin from fourth through ninth grade, something like that. I think my parents thought it would be good for me, and perhaps it was. I didn’t like it, always practicing about the minimal amount that I could get away with. I wish I had asked to learn the guitar instead, I’m sure that would have been just fine with my parents. I was pretty terrible at the violin but at least I did learn to read music. I’m glad to have retained what little musical knowledge I had, so I guess I agree with Andrew that this made me a “better person” in some small way.
But, for whatever this is worth, in spite of that modicum of musical training I am in Andrew’s situation when it comes to not having a ‘map’ for pieces of music. There are some pieces I could sing or hum from start to finish (although nobody, including me, would like to actually hear that happen), but not all that many, and I have many favorites that I can’t do at all. There might be memorable bits that I can sing along with when they come up, but when one of those ends I don’t necessarily know what comes next; I can hum along with it but I can’t hum it from scratch.
In my case, part of this might be due to simply failing to attend. I usually let music wash over me, rather than focusing on it intently. Maybe if I watched movies by letting my mind wander and only paying attention at certain times, I would end up with similarly fragmented understanding of movies, too.
Many of my favorite musical pieces have no words at all, but I think almost all of the ones I could hum from start to finish have words, and not only that many of them tell a story. The lyrics force a rhythm that helps my recall the tune. Hey, I can even do “Louie, Louie”, whose lyrics in the most popular version are famously unintelligible, because _I_ know the actual lyrics. (The FBI investigated the lyrics, and the result is a matter of public record https://vault.fbi.gov/louie-louie-the-song/Louie%20Louie%20%28The%20Song%29%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/view , including some dad’s transcript of what he thinks he heard on the record).
Phil:
Wow, I never knew that you ever played the violin, nor did I know you could read music. Good for you!
Now that we’re on the topic, I did take piano lessons for a year or so when I was about 8, and at the time I did learn to read music. I didn’t mind the lessons, exactly, and I liked the idea of being able to play the piano–my sister can play, and I enjoyed listening to the pleasant sound of her practicing in the background in the evenings–but, I never really committed to it either, and my parents didn’t push me to continue. I don’t actually remember why I stopped. It was probably that my parents asked me if I wanted to do it another year, and I said no. I’m almost certain that I showed no particular talent for music–I think I was as good as the other students in the group, but nothing special–and I’m pretty sure I was close to tone-deaf then too. So, yeah, I wish I’d had a few more years of lessons, at least enough so that I could go to a concert and read the score!, but I understand why my parents didn’t push me to continue. I think the issue wasn’t so much me not wanting to practice, so much as my parents not wanting the trouble of taking me to music lessons and hassling me to keep practicing, if I didn’t really care about it.
Anyway, not long after stopping the lessons, I forgot how to read music. I mean, sure, I can find C on the piano and on the score and count from there, but I cannot look at a sequence of notes on the score and envision either the notes on the piano or what it would sound like. And that’s a loss.
Regarding Louie Louie: Sure, but that’s a really simple song, close to the Row Row Row Your Boat level. Can you hum all of “Don’t Worry Baby”?
Andrew, I learned Clarinet in middle school, had to switch away when I got braces, then learned some jazz guitar in high school, and took some music appreciation and basic music theory courses in college. (One of my friends teased me the other day in a super sarcastic voice “Wow, in high school you were into math *and* jazz guitar, you must have been a Chick Magnet!)
That was 25+ years ago. I’ve always loved Jazz, and can listen to a jazz piece and anticipate what is coming up. These days I play bass and keys by ear. I can read music in the sense that I can kind of hum the tune slowly when reading it, but can’t read in the sense of sight reading a piece in any instrument the way I could in middle school. Also a year ago I built a uniform chromatic keyboard from an Alesis Recital MIDI keyboard, and I play that a bunch in my living room along with spotify playlists.
Usually I can anticipate what’s coming up enough that I can play bass or keys improvisationally with recordings or other players. However, even pro Jazz musicians tend to use “charts” that help them coordinate the structure of the piece (see The Real Book). My sister was dating a Jazz upright bassist and basically his day to day life was show up at a club, pull out the real book, and follow along with each piece the band wanted to play that day.
It takes a tremendous talent and dedication to be able to just show up and play bass with guys you’ve never played with before out of real book or some other charts and do it well, including taking solos and improvising bass lines based on the chord changes notated above the staff… but even those guys don’t tend to do it from some kind of internal chart of the whole song.
When you look at guys like the Grateful Dead, who had like thousands of songs they’d done, and could play shows for 6 months straight practically without repeating a song… that’s a level of musicianship that’s **crazy** even for many pro musicians. I think a lot of musicians experience music as a flow rather than some “whole chart” in their head.
Here’s a task for you. Go get The Real Book on Kindle or paperback (it’s $30 on Kindle and you don’t have to find a spot to store it). Load up spotify or youtube, and listen to a jazz piece (suggestions, Afro Blue, Autumn Leaves, or My Funny Valentine) and don’t worry about the pitches, just follow the flow of the song, using the rhythm and timing. I bet you can do it with very little practice given at one point you knew piano.
Now, listen to 3 different performances of whatever song you chose, and compare them. It’s a fascinating process, because Jazz isn’t fully a written tradition, nor is it entirely an improvised tradition. Jazz is improvisation within a structure. So every performance will be different, but the chart will still be relevant to each one.
Daniel:
I don’t think it’s accurate to say “at one point I knew piano.” It’s more accurate to say I took some non-serious lessons when I was 8 or 9 and I’ve long ago forgotten it all.
You don’t have to enjoy the Grateful Dead, but it’s worth it for the sake of the argument to listen to the following anyway. In 1990, Branford Marsalis (sax, age 30 at the time) sat in with the Grateful Dead in Nassau Coliseum and played what’s widely considered an amazing set of Dead/Jazz fusion. My guess is he knew the songs, but he certainly didn’t write out what he was going to play. He learned them by ear, and played this by improvisation… take a listen.
https://youtu.be/my-1HAGiytA?si=xJEgcxsoC5OwhcMd&t=3251
Andrew, I assume you could follow “Happy Birthday To You” written on a staff while playing piano when you were 8. That’s enough that I think you could listen to Afro Blue and follow the Real Book chart. It’s really just a sketch of the outline of the music. But you could see where the different parts are. You could then get some understanding of how professional musicians keep track of the structure of music enough that they can coordinate playing improvisations on a song that they haven’t practiced over and over every day for months.
That’s how it’s done. It’s not some magical ability to keep track of everything in their head.
Here’s another example of not using a written chart, but doing some kind of amazing superhuman musicianship… Drumeo has a series of YouTubes where they play a pop music track to a drummer after removing the drum portion of the track… They make sure the drummer has never heard the track before. Then the drummer listens to it in any way they want, once, multiple times, taking notes or not, whatever and figures out how to play drums for the song.
Here Jess Bowen absolutely CRUSHES in one take Bulls On Parade by Rage Against The Machine. Does she do this by thinking “here comes the xyz, next I’ll do the pdq?” She has NO NOTES here, she just “feels” the song’s flow. Craziness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSX7D-dJRBo
I guess the point is I don’t think having a chart in your head is necessary to be an amazing musician, nor is even knowing how to read music (though it will make things easier).
Daniel:
I never said I thought the ability to keep the music in one’s head is magic. I can keep the entire plot of a movie in my head, and that’s not magic; it just seems normal. I believe you that with sufficient preparation and effort I could follow that jazz piece that you mention. I’d just be doing it from scratch. I’m pretty sure that whatever I learned at the age of 8 and have now forgotten would count for nothing. But, yeah, given my enjoyment of music, maybe I should put in some time to try to learn to read music, in the same way that it can be fun to learn any entirely new skill if you’re willing to put in the work.
I imagine it is contained in Denk’s book, but his 2013 New Yorker piece also called “Every Good Boy Does Fine” is a wonderful piece about the power of the relationship between teacher and student.
https://archive.ph/9Oifa
He’s talking about his piano teachers, but it’s resonated with every PhD I’ve introduced to it, because I think the advisor/advisee relationship is often similar.
I can’t read its last lines without tearing up:
> “There’s a labyrinth of voices inside your head, a counterpoint of self-awareness and the remembered sayings of your guides and mentors, who don’t always agree. Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.”
It’s “exactly where they always wanted you to be” that gets me.
I haven’t read Rosen or Denk on this, but the simplest response to Andrew’s question would be to say that a musical motif *is* a character, much in the sense that a character in a novel is a character. Much of classical music is about the transformations and juxtapositions such characters undergo. A great way to experience this, IMO, is to listen to one of Haydn’s piano sonatas. He introduces his themes without any disguise and then sets about toying with them. Many are almost banal (I know some folks who would drop the almost), but his art lies in stretching and bending them until they produce interesting musical experiences, invention for the love of invention. He provides repeats, which really help to keep track of the structure.
As music developed, themes became more difficult to keep in your head. They got less tonally resolved, composers started playing cubistically with cell elements (Beethoven’s da-da-da-daaaaah), and gradually it became necessary to hear a piece a few times before the structure clarified itself. With nontonal music it’s often *very* difficult to pick out the themes and structures, and some composers don’t really work this way at all. That’s where non-musicians sometimes feel left out. I’m a non-musician, but I’ve had a lot of exposure to music, including in the classroom, and I can usually pick up what’s going on, and when I can’t I just enjoy the moment in Levinson’s sense. (That’s how I hear, Saudade by Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, for instance — is there another way?) (I used to sometimes follow the score, but haven’t for a long time.)
My practical advice is to just let a piece wash over you the first time you hear it, then go back and actively try to pick out themes and development. Almost everything written in the last 100 years or so requires multiple active listenings.
Ahh…here is a big thank you to my mom…and my grandparents and the whole Italian culture. My mom went to her first opera when she was four — and her father was able to tell the usher with surety that she would not make a sound.
I grew up with music. Opera is great, because the music is associated with a story. Maybe that is a good way to start? But, also, we “did our homework” before a concert/opera. We would listen to the music, read books about the composer. I went to the opera before there were super-titles. So you had to know the stories…and as you learned the story, you also could hear where the music was going, how the aria was being introduced. You waited in anticipation as your favorite part was getting closer.
As I got older we’d read about the piece and listen to the music with the score in front of us. My kids, I must admit, did not go to the opera in an opera house until they were closer to 7 years old and knew how to behave. But with videos easily available, they watched operas well before that age. So music was always around – all four are music lovers – one gravitates to ballet music, one is a professional musician now. It felt like it came naturally, but I suppose not all families teach their kids about music like we did.
Andrew – you say “nor can I recall any piece of music or even any long passages of music … I can recognize any passage from my favorite music, but I can’t hum anything from beginning to end.”
Does this mean you don’t get the situation where a song gets stuck in your head and keeps playing over the whole day? You made a comment about ‘Dont worry baby’ and that is now on endless repeat in my mind.
Tom:
Bits of songs do get stuck in my head all the time, but never the whole song–that’s too much for me to swallow.