Music From the Heart: music reading vs. playing by ear

Reading the music or playing it by ear?

I must say right off that I have been blessed with being an excellent music sight reader. I used to fool my piano teacher by stumbling over the lesson on purpose as I sight read it the first time it was assigned. I could have read it perfectly but I gave myself a break by making him think I needed practice on it. The next week with very little practice, I played it flawlessly for him. And I have to admit I used that trick in many a lesson--vocal, organ, and piano--throughout my private lesson career. I am ashamed now that I wasted so much time doing that instead of speeding ahead on skills. Things that come easily are often not valued and we just float through.

In choirs I could read the piece through on one try, and was impatient while so many of the singers had to have parts played over and over for them. They were learning to sing it by ear, because their sight reading skills were lacking. Oh, I was disdainful! I longed to sing in a group that just practiced on diction and dynamics, not notes.

My grandmother would often ask me to just play a hymn for her, and I would, if the music for it was at the piano, but lacking that, forget it. No way. Anyway I knew kids who played piano "by ear" and it just didn't sound right, so I thought. It had to sound like what you read off the page.

So later when I forgot my music one day at nursery school, the kids went without singing the rhymes that time. My grandmother's "tsk, tsk" ing came back to me. What could be so hard about this. I knew all the theory. What could be so hard.

I soon discovered it was hard. The reality of it is that it is NOT the same skill at all. It uses an entirely different part of the brain. It actually skips one whole step of music performance. It doesn't have to transfer the printed music reading over to the right brain. It starts over there. It has a direct line to the music playing via your fingers, your voice, or your breath. People who play by ear had to learn that skill just like others learned the reading notes skill.

Now the problem with a good sight reader learning to play by ear is that you absolutely must not look at the music. It was so hard. I just wanted to take a peek at the sheet music to see the shape of the notes. Did they go up or down? Did they skip or repeat? I had to have it in my mind's eye. Now I was forcing myself to learn the cues not with my eyes, but my ears. When one has a somewhat photographic memory, one loses the hearing skill that is necessary for this music making style.

I worked hard. I remember I called out my music theory. Most folk songs have only 2 or 3 chords, and you only have to determine which 3 they are. Actually that's very simple. There's a formula --I, IV, V. (I will explain this in a later article which will be a printed version of my playing by ear course I've taught for years) . Then there's the melody. I remember John McCutcheon saying "If you can sing it, you can play it." There's much truth to that. So I took the melodies I knew already and added chords with the instrument I was playing, according to my formula.

Gradually, playing by myself, but also doing a lot of jamming with people late into the night, I became proficient at playing by ear. Now, if I'm playing with a new group, or playing piano accompaniment without rehearsing, I use the chords and patterns I've learned and just read the melody line. It's a whole lot quicker than practicing reading the accompaniment and usually is far more elaborate than what's written on the page. You see, in doing so, I've been able to skip a whole step in music translation

Music needs to come from the right side of your brain. Yes, after years of practice, reading musicians can rapidly transfer that from one side of the brain to the other. But have you ever heard a fairly competent classically trained piano player try to play some jazz or pop off the printed page? Lots of them sound really quite stilted. They're reading, not listening. Once they start listening to what it really should sound like, which is not what's on the printed page, they can get it.

My own children are not music readers. They play guitar and bass and mandolin far better than me. They play great bluegrass and old timey music much better than me. One of them plays the fiddle. I can hardly play any of these instruments well, but I taught them how to play them. It's not the instrument I taught them to play. That's the technical stuff. That's what they practice over and over and over. No, it's the thinking in patterns, listening for cues in the bass for a chord change coming, it's the guessing which chord must be coming, the listening to the other harmony in the voices, it's going for the spirit of the song, the soul of the music. Either way you get there, that's where you have to end up--playing and singing it from the heart.