Thoughts on reading re-evaluation (deep warning!)

Bo Eder

Bo Eder

Platinum Member
So I got a chance to see a group of kids performing the other day (mostly violins and a few violas and two cellos) and they were from what is termed a "Suzuki" school - I think this is the actual name of the school, but I'm using it here as a generic term for schools who teach the kids how to play by rote first.

For a group of kids from 8 to 18 years of age, they sounded surprisingly good. I had never seen a performance by students from a school like this. I delved a little deeper with one of the instructors and discovered that that's what they do. They teach the kids to play first. They learn how to read later.

When I thought about it (and I'm sure others have thought about this as well), but music is the only language where students are forced to begin reading it at the same time they start playing. Well, maybe not so much drummers or guitarists, but most of the other instruments like horns or strings, or keyboards, you get the instrument, and you're immediately strapped in to learning how to read music at the same time. I was totally taken by surprise how mature these string players sounded, simply because they learned how to make a good sound first. I mean, I've seen kids struggling for years before they made a nice tone on a violin as they learned through the regular method of going through books with teachers. These kids I saw seemed to enjoy playing more and were much more expressive.

So I was witnessing a conundrum of sorts. These kids learned how to play their instruments by simply imitating what they saw and heard - much like how we learned to speak our given language. You notice you've been speaking your language for a while before you took an actual English course in school (for you American folks)?

Part of me thinks this is a good thing. If you can get the kid to love what he's doing, I think you've created a player for life, right? I think the theory and methodologies can be learned at any time from anybody - if they discover they can play an instrument first and love it because they're making good sounds, they should be absolutely dangerous when they start learning how to read. I even think they might take to learning how to read faster because they have an instrument they can immediately apply it to.

Has anyone thought about this? So much of our teaching is based on playing and reading - but in other things you don't use that approach (like language). It makes me wonder why the standard music learning methodology involves having to read at the same time. What if they taught playing first and reading second to all kids at the grade school level. I wonder how many more kids would continue to be playing well into adulthood. What do you guys think?
 
I couldn't agree more. I think in many cases our downfall as human beings is that we have a tendency to rush things. We don't give ourselves or other people the time to assimilate and DO stuff before we impose the complete package - in this case, reading music. There's also, in my view, a mistrust of playing and a corresponding tendency to make it serious.

About a year ago, my teacher and I did an experiment. I was learning written-down pieces at the time and we'd both noticed my propensity towards being very mechanical, so I asked him to teach me my next piece completely by ear. It was a piece that was new to both of us: he had to learn it from the written notes, I just copied what he played and remembered it.

The result was that I learned it far more quickly than he did; I enjoyed it more than he did; and consequently, I played it better than he did.
 
Great post Bo!

It's certainly something to think about. I've always worried that my reading is just not up to scratch and my piano playing would vastly improve if I spent more time on it but, whenever I've looked at videos on how to play block chords or whatever I go away and force them into everything I play and it sounds terrible, whereas when I just work out things by ear I write more musical stuff.
I often get compliments for the compositions, 'how did i work that out' etc. Then I learn thr theory behind what I've done and why it affects the sound that way, incase I need to get that feel/mood again.

Our ears are the ultimate tool in music, why anyone would swap to their eyes being the main sense is beyond me.
Obviously sight reading has it's benefits and everytime I hear a great score I wonder if I'd be able to write something that good if I studied it more but, on a whole I pay attention to my ears.

Theory is just an equation of what works, it isn't going to make me write with feeling.

I'm teaching my kids to talk, they won't start learning to read and write for another couple of years...

You've really hit the nail on the head for me as to why people who play strings or brass intruments sound terrible for about 10 years.
The theory effictively shuts down the senses which is really ineffective for feeling, which I think music is all about.
 
Heck of a post, Bo. very interesting.

I agree that a huge part of keeping a child's interest in any instrument is giving them the ability to play music quickly - so that they can take pride in creating a good sound, melody, rhythm, etc. If the student is learning and makes little or slow progress towards making an agreeable sound, the interest will wane (this did happen to one of my kids on ... you guessed it ... the violin).

I offer one counterpoint:
I played piano until a teenager (and I switched to drums). I am blessed/cursed with good ears. My ears/memory always enabled me to learn my piano lessons very quickly, but I was really learning them by ear. As a result, my sight reading suffered and to this day is far below average (on piano/guitar ... I'm average on percussion sheet music). I didn't realize how I was "cheating" myself until too late.

but ....
Your analogy of reading & playing music to learning to speak & read was quite interesting, I never thought of the similarity. It is commonly thought is that kids are supposed to be able to learn new languages easier when younger. But the learning is both practical (listening/speeking) and theoretical (reading/writing) .... and guess what? The practical is the bulk of the initial learning (in Canadian french immersion programs anyway).

cheers,
radman
 
Interesting topic...Are younger kids ready for abstract thinking {notes on a page] before the benefits of hands on experience?? Some are perhaps ,i believe most would take their instrument further if taught to just play and have a good time,at first.
 
Great ob Bo. The results are the most compelling thing to me. I'm going off how you said they sounded "surprisingly good". That speaks volumes to me. It makes sense to learn the joy of the instruments, and how to make a pleasing sound first. That's enough in the beginning. And it doesn't matter what age you start IMO. Learn the beauty of the instrument first, the details can wait until the student is past the point of struggling with the instruments tone. First things first. Reading music isn't the most important thing in playing a musical instrument. Finding joy in the instrument first makes the most sense.

And it doesn't change things for the people who already found their joy. It does make sense to all the people who quit prematurely because they skipped the total joy of the instrument because the discipline was "more important".

This is directly connected to the whole learning process in other areas too. A love of learning isn't taught, adults want kids to become memorizing machines able to regurgitate semi useless facts on command. That to me has nothing to do with a love of learning.

Kids are missing the forest for the trees

Where's the human-ness? We are not robots. There's plenty of time to learn to read.

I can imagine people saying that reading is best learned early, and even though I agree with that, I don't think reading should be placed above a person's sheer joy of the instrument, ever. Especially in the beginning. It's better to have the student wanting to learn to read on their own rather than being force fed 1/2 note triplets.

Excellent intelligent topic Bo.
 
I have a cousin that plays trumpet in the Cincinnati symphony. He can't just pick up his trumpet and improv, he has to have music in front of him in order to play a song. I can't comprehend how some one could be so amazing at there instrument but needs music to play. I think most of those symphony cat's are like that. Bo I could not agree more with you.
My problem is I learned how to play by ear, I also can read but, I can't sight read on the spot.
A good balance of both would make a well rounded musician.
 
yesdog said:
I have a cousin that plays trumpet in the Cincinnati symphony. He can't just pick up his trumpet and improv, he has to have music in front of him in order to play a song. I can't comprehend how some one could be so amazing at there instrument but needs music to play. I think most of those symphony cat's are like that. Bo I could not agree more with you.
My problem is I learned how to play by ear, I also can read but, I can't sight read on the spot.
A good balance of both would make a well rounded musician.
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Great story Scott. (nice to see you around too stranger!)
Reminds me of the Motown percussionist Eddie "Bongo" Brown. They would give him sheet music to read. He covered them with girly magazines and proceeded to play great percussion parts. I know an amazing piano player who can't play without music in front of him. I'll never understand that.
 
Suzuki is a valid method-- mostly it's used for teaching strings-- but I don't know enough about it to debate its strengths/shortcomings, and haven't really discussed it with teachers with experience with Suzuki students. I guess in general I'm not really concerned with the question of how to make the greatest number of little kids sound good. I'm not convinced that that should be a major goal of early musical education. Poking around discussions of it online, this comment caught my attention:

Most string players I knew when I was in school learned through the grade school strings program, myself included. The few people in my high school orchestra who did not learn through the public school system were usually taught using the Suzuki method through private instruction. From personal experience, the two friends I had back then who learned young using the Suzuki method of listening to the pieces on tape before playing them could not count. They could duplicate rhythms, but could not sightread decently and had problems with off-beats, syncopation, and complicated rhythms. String players in general get a bad reputation for not being able to count because of the Suzuki method.
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Even if that's just the result of mediocre teaching, I would have problems with any method that results in average students being that rhythmically primitive.
 
toddbishop said:
Suzuki is a valid method-- mostly it's used for teaching strings-- but I don't know enough about it to debate its strengths/shortcomings, and haven't really discussed it with teachers with experience with Suzuki students. I guess in general I'm not really concerned with the question of how to make the greatest number of little kids sound good. I'm not convinced that that should be a major goal of early musical education. Poking around discussions of it online, this comment caught my attention:



Even if that's just the result of mediocre teaching, I would have problems with any method that results in average students being that rhythmically primitive.
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That's quite interesting as a couple of weeks ago a guy was booked into our studio to record a whole musical theatre production type thing and he got some absolutely great players in who he's used to working with.
These guys could read and play so well and their expression was sensational, they are highly in demand.

However, this wasn't their usual 'gig' and they had to play to a click. Every single one of then struggled. Classically trained tenors, saxophonie players you name it.

One of themwas so out of time that I can only credit them for coming in on the first beat, then it was a totally different tempo from there on. It was absolutely shocking.
Take after take...
In the end the best take was still dreadful and I had to spend hours correcting the time with Melodyne on every one of them.

I was looking at my co-worker in disbelief, we couldn't understand how these guys who get paid so much money and are in such high deman just could not play to a click at all.

Even if you don't practise to a click playing in time is playing in time. surely you can't get THAT good and be that bad?
 
yesdog said:
he has to have music in front of him in order to play a song.
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I'm not an amazing drummer or an amazing musician, but when I realised that I couldn't play without music, I knew that it Had To Stop. (Naturally, I blame my mother, who used to berate me for looking at my hands when I played the piano instead of reading the music :/ )

I'm in a painful place at the moment, trying to learn to trust myself - which is difficult, because although I have confidence in my technique, I honestly don't feel "worthy" of interpreting music.

I recall a lesson I had, ages ago, when we did sight-reading. I was on the slow side, but dead accurate. Ok, so I can read music. What I have trouble with is playing what ISN'T written.

toddbishop said:
Even if that's just the result of mediocre teaching, I would have problems with any method that results in average students being that rhythmically primitive.
Click to expand...

Yikes. But what is more important, rhythmic accuracy or *insertalternativeofchoice* ? I know the most rounded musicians do rhythm AND everything else, but if something has to give?? (For me, it's rhythm every time, at the expense of absolutely everything else, including feeling, but that's probably because it's what I do.)
 
My mother was a concert pianist. I took piano lessons starting at age 4. She learned under a very strict environment and subsequently I learned to read music, practice scales, improve technique before I could even read English very well.

In my mother's account of her childhood learning years on piano, she always expressed this negativity about the strictness of her teachers and the chore of practice.

Naturally, a lot of that rubbed off on me. It was years before I was actually playing music and even longer before I learned to improvise and have some fun with it. I was fortunate in that I developed a good ear and eventually when I rebelled against continuing piano, I took up the trumpet. Because I had a solid background in reading music, I picked up the trumpet quickly and had a lot of fun playing in school bands.

One of my trumpet teachers did two things that have always stuck with me. After a lesson or two, when I came in for my next lesson, he told me that I wouldn't be playing the trumpet for that day's lesson. He gave me a bugle and told to just play it for a half an hour and try to be a musical as I could. Just play a song as best I could. It was very liberating not having to concentrate on reading and playing a written piece of feeling stuck in the monotony of practicing scales.

The other thing he did was for about the next 6-8 lessons, he played piano and I had to improvise and play a melody over his piano parts. Eventually the light bulb got switched on and the joy of making music with others was forever implanted.

I've never taken any formal lessons on drums and my playing would certainly benefit from it but I still have time to seek out some lessons soon.

My son's teacher never let him get off the pad and snare and eventually he got bored and quit. A lady I work with told me her son was taking drum lessons and thinking of quitting. I told him to bring him over to my house and I would give him a lesson on learning how to get on the drum set and learn to be able to play it quickly.

I am by no means qualified to be a teacher in the rudimental or classical sense, but I had this kid playing a money beat and grooving in 4/4 in less than an hour. She offered to pay me but I declined and I gave him about another 4 lessons before I sent him on his way. It totally revitalized his interest in drumming. He got a kit, stuck with his other lessons and now after a few years is quite a good player.

In a nutshell, I think the Suzuki school's approach is fantastic. It just makes sense.

You might be able to read about how to learn to ride a bicycle but there's really no substitute just getting on and doing it. Ah, the bike analogy is a little weak.

I think you're language analogy Bo is spot on.
 
In addition to being a drummer, I'm also an orchestra teacher so I have some experience with this "learn to play it or read it" conundrum and I agree totally that the learning a language analogy is a good one.

In my experience the Suzuki method is great for getting young kids starting to play, and they do learn to play more advanced music earlier than those students that are taught to play and read more or less concurrently. It is tempting to listen to students that play complex music and think "wow they can really play," but you might in fact be hearing the only thing they can play. Also keep in mind that whatever performance you hear is the result of months (sometimes years) of teaching that single piece.

Being taught almost entirely by rote has benefits and drawbacks. Biggest benefit is you can sound like a more advanced player more quickly. But to continue the language analogy it is as if you are given a lot of SAT words to repeat and while you can say them correctly and use them in the one pre-prepared sentence you've been given you don't actually know what the words mean.

The anecdote ToddBishop posted is an extremely common situation. Students that spend their formative early years playing without reading have a very hard adjustment period when finally exposed to reading music.

While it might seem like it would be overwhelming to present reading early to a beginning musician it can actually be a bigger benefit to them in the long run if done well and incorporated smoothly. Reading is a skill that needs time and practice to develop, just like playing the instrument itself. If you wait too long to start to develop that skill you lose out on building a strong foundation in both skills.

I think the reading vs. non-reading "war" will never end because it is easy to make a convincing argument or at least provide clear examples of why a certain way works (or doesn't work) for certain people.

As a player I have learned different instruments in different ways and I see clearly the strengths and drawbacks of both ways to learn things. As a teacher I know that if I want to give my students the best possible chance to become a well rounded player they need to know how to read music AND play their instrument.
 
Winston_Wolf said:
In addition to being a drummer, I'm also an orchestra teacher so I have some experience with this "learn to play it or read it" conundrum and I agree totally that the learning a language analogy is a good one.

In my experience the Suzuki method is great for getting young kids starting to play, and they do learn to play more advanced music earlier than those students that are taught to play and read more or less concurrently. It is tempting to listen to students that play complex music and think "wow they can really play," but you might in fact be hearing the only thing they can play. Also keep in mind that whatever performance you hear is the result of months (sometimes years) of teaching that single piece.

Being taught almost entirely by rote has benefits and drawbacks. Biggest benefit is you can sound like a more advanced player more quickly. But to continue the language analogy it is as if you are given a lot of SAT words to repeat and while you can say them correctly and use them in the one pre-prepared sentence you've been given you don't actually know what the words mean.

The anecdote ToddBishop posted is an extremely common situation. Students that spend their formative early years playing without reading have a very hard adjustment period when finally exposed to reading music.

While it might seem like it would be overwhelming to present reading early to a beginning musician it can actually be a bigger benefit to them in the long run if done well and incorporated smoothly. Reading is a skill that needs time and practice to develop, just like playing the instrument itself. If you wait too long to start to develop that skill you lose out on building a strong foundation in both skills.

I think the reading vs. non-reading "war" will never end because it is easy to make a convincing argument or at least provide clear examples of why a certain way works (or doesn't work) for certain people.

As a player I have learned different instruments in different ways and I see clearly the strengths and drawbacks of both ways to learn things. As a teacher I know that if I want to give my students the best possible chance to become a well rounded player they need to know how to read music AND play their instrument.
Click to expand...

Ah. I didn't think that they could be spending years on their small collection of pieces so that is a valid point. But the whole enjoyment factor was something I never see at a regular school orchestra concert performed at high school (or even college) age and younger. I figured once you had them playing, they would simply apply that to other pieces.

That said, and I'm not being argumentative, but I've met and know a few music educators that said exactly what you said. Part of me wonders if what you said is more part of the state-sponsored music education dogma or not. And forgive me for saying it, but here in California, we have more of our fair share of music teachers who shouldn't be teaching, know what I mean?
 
I learned to play trombone in fourth grade. Played it well when I had a sheet of music in front of me. Take away the music and I didn't know a lick. The only thing I could play by heart was When the Saints Go Marching In. So when I started playing drums, I took a different approach and learned everything by heart.

I can still read enough to figure out a drum part or a practice sheet, but in no way can I sight read anymore like I did on trombone.

It's the same way with the guitar. I can read tab pretty good, but usually I just strum chords and sing. I've taught myself quite a few songs just by messing around with the guitar and figuring it out on my own. I also play a lot of songs from song books, but you take the song book away and I am lost. Sure, I can put it to memory, but it takes just as much time memorizing it as it does trying to figure it out on my own. It's like the brain is wired two different ways.

That's just my experience.
 
I think for those who can read but can't improv or write anything themselves it's a bit like that tern people use for beginners using expensive equipment - 'all the gear, no idea'.

Because that's what it is, they've become a tool but a one that doesn't think for itself. It's a tragedy.

People should really just try to strike a balance between the two to really excell. But this argument will never really end.

A beautiful piece of music sounds no better or worse played by someone who can read music compared to someone who can't.
If their technique is up to scratch.
 
Interesting thought.

I am totally pro-reading, but now that I think back...

I took piano lessons as a kid. And briefly in college. And perhaps one other time. But I could never grasp it. And I think back, yeah, the having to read. Reading the rhythms, no problem, but the notes on the staff, forget it. I still don't get why the bass clef staff is different than the treble clef.

Even now that I write for strings and keys, I do it all on the piano roll. Doing on the a staff is just doesn't jive with my head.
 
I think humans are this way in many things . How many of us learned a game or sport by reading a book on dribbling a basketball or soccer (football)? We play first then at the advanced stages we may have some structured learning. We play football for years before we learn intricate play books. We learn to swim before we ever, if ever, see any books on the different strokes. Music is the same way. We can learn to play by ear, and then add lessons or reading.
 
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