I come from a musical family on both sides. My great grandmother played guitar and sang in church and all of my dad’s family plays some type of instrument and most sing. Even my husband enjoys playing guitar. I was not born with the ability to by an instrument. I really wanted to play piano but my grandmother said my fingers just weren’t long enough I do sing though.
Anyway, I was watching a movie about a band with my husband today and it got me thinking about reading music. I learned musical theory in school so I can read music while my husband and dad can’t. They play by ear. So, can you read music?
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I can't read music. People tried to teach me, but I just still can't. I learned to play the recorder and learned which holes to cover to get an A and an H en so forth, so when I got a sheet of music to play, I'd painstakingly write down the H, G, A, F etc so I could reproduce it. That I can't even do anymore though; I forgot it since sadly.
What I can still do is look at sheet music and make some statements about it, and I can use it to support me in 'singing by ear' because I can see if I'm supposed to go up or down and how quickly the notes shift and whether it's a little or a lot and also how many 'shifts' there may be in a single word and so on. So I can use sheet music to give me clues about the music, but not to actually read it.
I can read music! I've played flute for most of my life (few breaks in years, so I'm not considering myself that great). I'm not necessarily good at sight reading though. Meaning the first time I look at something, I can't hear it in my head or sing it very well. I typically take the sheet music and follow along with it while I'm listening to the composition on YouTube to get a feel for the motion of the music. Depending on how complicated parts of the music are, it becomes easier for me to memorize how it sounds and play it from memory rather than reading it. I tend to mentally panic when I see complicated parts and freeze up. Sometimes when I have parts memorized, I don't follow the sheet music enough and I get lost. Other times I can gloss over entire lines because I know how the music goes.
I do sing though.
