soseggnchips wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 3:03 pm
hyperbolica wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 1:54 pm
What if musical instruments just sat round the house
You've just reminded me: a guy I play with put a p-bone in his son's toybox. No lessons or anything (he's a bit young for that) but he likes to grab it and honk along in time with songs on the radio. Seems like as good a way as any get started.
I do think there's something to be said for gaining a bit of instrumental proficiency independently of learning to read (alongside, not necessarily before). Like most people I went through that phase as a beginner of playing pieces one note at a time with big pauses in between to decode the next note. I don't remember it being a lot of fun. I do remember I'd memorised a couple of my favourites and would play those over and over.
I'm more than a little late to this thread, and definitely cannot address the OPs question, but just wanted to say that as an archaeologist and anthropologist, this has been a great, thought-provoking thread with strong parallels to a series of lectures I attended ages ago on initial and secondary language acquisition. That symposium was very much focused on early hominin anthropology and the emergence of verbal language, but several lectures touched on the emergence of written language in the Neolithic as a point of comparison, and here is where the parallels with music really start to emerge (although there's almost no doubt that music has been with genus Homo for as long as spoken language, and probably longer).
Seoseggnchips's two paragraphs really highlight the two main ways in which youngsters can pick up a second language, much as they do with either the written form of their native language or a true second spoken language, or indeed via a musical instrument if you see musical expression as an analogue of spoken language. And we've all gone through both forms of learning: we learn our first language, our native tongues, by imitation, experimentation, and trial and error, much as the p-bone left in the toybox to toot along with the radio, and our second by laborious study of the alphabet and the written word. Some folks are fortunate enough to have their second language be a spoken language even before learning to read and write, and as someone for whom second/third/fourth languages do not come particularly easily or naturally, I'll admit my jealousy!
Obviously, learning a language(s) isn't a perfect analogy to learning to play music. It could be argued that learning to read and write doesn't qualify as learning a secondary language since you're learning what you already know how to express verbally, or that music isn't a proper language in that it doesn't have a syntax or vocabular in the same sense that spoken language has, etc. But it's hard to deny that the fundamentals of music acquisition are mirrored by how we acquire language, especially when we consider that written music has only been around for a small fraction of the time music has existed in the human repertoire of expression. I'm sure this would be a surprise for exactly nobody on this thread, lol!
From an anthropological perspective, a curriculum taking advantages of both tactics, reading music along with simply playing music and developing an ear, makes a heck of a lot of sense because it directly mirrors how other aspects of human symbolic expression are learned, and it acknowledges that people might have preferred or optimal ways of learning which favors one tactic over another, or indeed favor something that falls on a spectrum including both tactics to some greater or lesser degree. I think the tendency over the last century or so, at least in the US public school system, has been to start music instruction later, long after that phase between 2-4 years of age where we're literally sponges that can pick up just about anything by simple repeated exposure. And so we tend to start with reading music from day one as we also are trying to learn to play our instrument, which can work of course, but can also create challenges down the road. I know I certainly first picked up a trombone in the first year available in my school district, in 5th grade (I think), 10-11 years old, and I definitely had those long pauses in the first few weeks or months that Soseggnchips noted while my brain struggled to figure out the next note. The only things I recall that we ever needed to commit to memory at all were scales, at first just a couple of the major scales, then later in high school the less utilized majors, most minors, and a couple in other modes. (Well, memorization was strongly encourage for marching band, but it wasn't required. I always committed the playlist to memory because marching with a lyre was just awkward, but I know many people who took the exact opposite approach.) I think it was only in 9th or 10th grade when we first started some limited controlled excursions with improvisation. As a result, although I felt and knew that I was technically competent at the end of high school (certainly not professional level by any stretch of the imagination, but skillful enough that had I wanted I could have successfully applied to college as a performing music major), I always felt woefully underprepared for the jazz gigs my small group of friends and I played. I know I ultimately gave perfectly adequate performances during those mostly improvised sessions, but when I compared myself to, say, friends who had picked up guitar and learned to play without ever seeing so much as a lead sheet, it just felt like I was in some sense doing something different than what they were doing: I was a music reader first and while modestly successful, I struggled to get into the experimental, whereas my guitar buddies were all about experimentation from day one.
In short (acknowledging the irony in that phrase when I use it), based on my own musical challenges, anyone who teaches today using a synthesis of music reading with pure music playing gets a huge thumbs-up from me, because that lack of early pure playing I think was a detriment to my further development on trombone, and perhaps even a detriment to my enjoyment of the instrument, 25 years ago when contemplating post-high school life. I definitely think it's a major reason I, and so many others I've bumped into on this forum, had a long period of time when we didn't play at all. For me, picking up the horn just for the sake of playing a bit of melody for a few minutes, was never a "thing". Playing, for me, was always a process, with a set of tasks, some goal, and a strategy to reach that goal, whether that was a practice session or a performance. There always was a reason for the horn to come out. Once high school was over and trombone wasn't a part of of my daily life any more, I had no real goals with it, and my horns gathered dust. Meanwhile my guitar buddies, almost to a man, still often pick their guitars off their stands and play, having never totally stopped. They might only strum a few chords while watching tv or making their grocery lists, but that's more than I can admit to during the 20 years my horns sat in the closet.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm likely someone who would have benefited from a more "making-music" versus "reading-music" program balance. Or a program with any early "making-music" aspect, really. Which, knowing my struggles with foreign languages, makes perfect sense for me personally: I've had 4 years of college Latin, about 6 years of German between high school and college, and presently about 3 years of Welsh. For every one of which I can pick up a book and have a reasonable understanding of what's being presented (maybe; it's been a long time since I read any Latin or German), but if you say much more than "guten Morgen" or "bore da" to me, I'll probably just stare at you funny while my brain sifts through 30 yrs of detritus to figure out if I understand you or not. But if you speak to me in Hungarian I can hold a 5-year old's level of conversation with you, all from a month-long trip 10 years ago and a few phrases my grandmother taught me, yet I know almost nothing of written Hungarian. I know the book-learned aspects of German, Latin and Welsh quite well but for me, with languages at least and probably with music to some degree, there's a disconnect between book knowledge and the practical expression of that knowledge in speaking/hearing the language or moving beyond the sheet music. It's definitely a left hemisphere/right hemisphere thing, and a program with a good dose of both playing and reading music would go a long way towards minimizing such a division.
TL:DR; The old-school nun who liked to whack knuckles with a ruler when a piano student messes up a chord they misread was a dinosaur 40 years ago, but public school music programs still largely follow that basic paradigm, though probably without the bloody knuckles. Private instructors have long embraced the need for different strategies for different students, that some students may be more sheet-music inclined while others are more intuitive players, and that a strategy involving a stance for each student somewhere on a spectrum between column A and column B and with the fluidity to adjust one way or the other as needed tends to produce the most well-rounded, knowledgeable players.
Sorry for the essay, but it's been a thought-provoking kind of a thread which I much enjoyed reading.
