The Grand Staff

I mentioned in my last post I couldn't read a single note of sheet music. This is no longer true.

My piano teacher says I learn really fast. Since I have no median against which to measure, I don't know if this is true or just nice encouragement. But in about a week, I have learned to read music, albeit in a clunky manner.

The piano in the practice room at the University practice room, where we meet for lessons, is an exact replica of the one my First Grade teacher had in our classroom. She used to pound out such militant songs as "Marching to Pretoria," and Ach du Lieber Augustine," etc. since it was assumed in the early Sixties all we youngsters would be shipped off to war, so they taught us military songs to sing at an early age to bolster our spirits and prepare us to accept whatever fate awaited us, whether it be maiming, death, venereal disease, or post traumatic stress syndrome. Music, you see, is unlimited in its healing and restorative powers.

My goal is to learn to sight-read. If you don't know what sight-reading is, this is what you're doing now. When we read text, we don't read a letter at a time. Although this is how we first learned. We learned the alphabet, then put them together in simple words, then simple sentences, then we learned to read phrases, thoughts, books. Most of us don't even stop to recognize individual letters anymore--we grasp whole blocks of texts as our eyes scan ahead.

Sight-reading music is the same way. You learn to read those little dots and squiggles so intuitively your eyes, brain and fingers work together to translate them into sweet music. Hopefully. Sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way at the beginning. As my untrained fingers stumble across the keys, the resulting cacophony apparently drove the neighbor's hamsters into eating their own young.

Reading is all about pattern recognition. If we stopped to identify each individual letter, it would take us days to read a page in a book. Likewise with music. My first attempts to memorize the notes of the Grand Staff were painful. Then I began to recognize patterns. Fortunately, there are only seven notes: ABCDEFG-- so the memorization doesn't seem that hard--but since they can climb off the five-bar staff into the air, sink below the staff into the deep blue sea, and with the piano there is a separate staff for each hand, each with a different set of rules, it can be a bit daunting. Then you have sharps and flats and key signatures. Oy.

But this week, it all began to come together.

Yes, there are people who've made entire musical careers without ever learning to read a note of music. When I was searching for a piano teacher, I saw all kinds of ads on Craig's List from people who were retired from Rock, Blues and Jazz bands who promised to teach you to play guitar and piano without you having to learn music theory or having to learn to read music at all. Fine, if you want to be the next Ozzy Osbourne or Stevie Ray Vaughn. But what if you want to play Chopin or Brahams? I guarantee you you're not going to play that stuff by ear unless you're a hydrocephalic prodigy.

So if you can sight-read music, you can place a completely unknown piece of sheet music in front of you, place your virgin fingers on the piano keys, and as you read the music, your fingers will--with practice--hit the right keys and you will play that piece of music. Maybe not perfectly the first time, but you'll get the idea of it. If you're really good, and have a good ear, you can read the music and hum it out. Wow. What power!

So I've been studying not only how to recognize the notes, but how to recognize the intervals, which is the distance between two notes on the staff. This is essential in developing speed, apparently. There are seconds, thirds, fourths and fifths. These are the intervals I've learned to recognize quickly so far. Beyond that, there are sixths, sevenths and octaves. Having an academic background in engineering, with lots of emphasis on calculus, I saw a fast way to spot these various entities. There is a binary, odd/even code that makes it very easy to spot them. So reading intervals was very easy for me. I'll start on the 6-8 intervals next week.

Learning the notes took some serious practice though. There are repetitive relationships, but they're offset from the treble staff to the bass staff, and just cockeyed enough to confuse you just when you think you have them down pat. Not on the Grand Staff itself, but when you start getting into those notes that float off into the air or drop below it. These things drove me crazy until I worked out a system to help me "tie" them together.

But my first lesson went very well. I'm playing with both hands, very crudely but am playing harmonic intervals and starting on chords. My second lesson is coming up today so I'm very curious to see how I do.

I'm very happy.