4 ms·

I am immediately reminded of the opening of Lockhart's essay "A Mathematician's Lament"[0]: > A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds

by xeonmc 3y ago

I am immediately reminded of the opening of Lockhart's essay "A Mathematician's Lament"[0]: > A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory. “We are helping our students become more competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.” Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer. > Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school... [0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf http://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart-MathematiciansLament.pdf

supernova87a 3y ago
I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves. Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".
- bradrn 3y ago
  That’s not actually a great analogy, since many musicians get along perfectly well without being able to read music notation.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Fair few that make living as musicians and not entertainers.
    - defrost 3y ago
      You'd be surprised - for a number of musicians it's not about sight reading notation and playing fom there, it's about developing musical talent and variations and adding in formal notation reading | writing later. I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses. From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c
      - zozbot234 3y ago
        [dead]
      - JieJie 3y ago
        Apparently, it wasn't all that uncommon to not be able to read or write music and to have a scribe pen it down for you. https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-couldn-t-read-or-write-music-how-did-he-compose https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-could...
        TylerE 3y ago
        Composer but not musician.
        3y ago
redwall_hp 3y ago
We live in that world: copyright, as it has become, is fundamentally incompatible with music as a field. To say nothing of the issues it creates for covering, sampling, remixing, and setting new words to existing tunes (a time-honored musical tradition), there are increasing numbers of law suits over things that basically boil down to existing in the same genre or using the same fundamental musical laws. Even if the suits don't go unfavorably, simply publishing an original song opens one up to a major risk. It's been interesting to watch Adam Neely, a music theory YouTuber and practicing musician, become increasingly disillusioned with copyright after analyzing a handful of high profile music lawsuits...all of which were as ridiculous as Oracle v Google.
- rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
  I hope this has been tested by now, but not sure: Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement | Damien Riehl | TEDxMinneapolis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU
TylerE 3y ago
That feels like a rather misleading analogy, as learning to read sheet music is the cornerstone of music pedagogy.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The analogy is quite on-point. In the 18th-century conservatories that trained scores of outstanding composers[0] the "cornerstone of music pedagogy" in the early years was singing, making up little embellishments or variations on existing melodies (these were called passaggi or diminutions) and using solfège (or rather an early variety thereof, based on the hexachord) to reverse the process and discover the deeper, simpler melodic structures underlying existing pieces. In later years the best students would be sat at the keyboard and taught to improvise entire pieces from a bassline. Paper was very expensive, so sheet music was little used: wax tablets would be used as a scratchpad when needed. Merely playing written-out pieces was seen as sub-par, something for those who couldn't attain the more highly valued skill of actual improvisation. That whole skillset is all but lost now, long supplanted by a hyper-competitive culture of supposedly 'virtuoso' performance. It survives to some extent in organ playing, and the jazz tradition as a whole may or may not be an offshoot of some popularized ("folk") variety of it. [0] See Robert O. Gjerdingen Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians. (2020) Oxford University Press.
  - defrost 3y ago
    re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746694 I've no idea why your comment was flagged and moved to [dead] - it seems fine as a comment to me. That said: > you're still talking about performing existing pieces from a very well-defined canon My first comment in this thread could not have been "still talking" - and I contrasted two things, - reproductive orchestra performances by people trained in composition and improvisation two of whom considered themselves unable to read music (responding to the person above me) and an "entertainer" considered by many to be a real musician (that's a whole thing in itself, isn't it) who also can't read, composes his own music, and improvises around his own work during nearly every performance. I'm actually siding with yourself, the formalities in both mathematics and music are important and useful but they aren't fundemental for a great many with talent in those fields - they can intuit they way through to a large degree and teaching based on intuitve methods can make great inroads when introducing new students to these subjects. Formalities can come later (or drilled in parallel), they have their place - but having a 'feel' for these subjects carries a great deal of weight, if not more.

by xeonmc 3y ago

supernova87a 3y ago

I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves. Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".

bradrn 3y ago
That’s not actually a great analogy, since many musicians get along perfectly well without being able to read music notation.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Fair few that make living as musicians and not entertainers.
  - defrost 3y ago
    You'd be surprised - for a number of musicians it's not about sight reading notation and playing fom there, it's about developing musical talent and variations and adding in formal notation reading | writing later. I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses. From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      [dead]
    - JieJie 3y ago
      Apparently, it wasn't all that uncommon to not be able to read or write music and to have a scribe pen it down for you. https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-couldn-t-read-or-write-music-how-did-he-compose https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-could...
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Composer but not musician.
        3y ago

redwall_hp 3y ago

We live in that world: copyright, as it has become, is fundamentally incompatible with music as a field. To say nothing of the issues it creates for covering, sampling, remixing, and setting new words to existing tunes (a time-honored musical tradition), there are increasing numbers of law suits over things that basically boil down to existing in the same genre or using the same fundamental musical laws. Even if the suits don't go unfavorably, simply publishing an original song opens one up to a major risk. It's been interesting to watch Adam Neely, a music theory YouTuber and practicing musician, become increasingly disillusioned with copyright after analyzing a handful of high profile music lawsuits...all of which were as ridiculous as Oracle v Google.

rainbowzootsuit 3y ago
I hope this has been tested by now, but not sure: Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement | Damien Riehl | TEDxMinneapolis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU

TylerE 3y ago

That feels like a rather misleading analogy, as learning to read sheet music is the cornerstone of music pedagogy.

zozbot234 3y ago
The analogy is quite on-point. In the 18th-century conservatories that trained scores of outstanding composers[0] the "cornerstone of music pedagogy" in the early years was singing, making up little embellishments or variations on existing melodies (these were called passaggi or diminutions) and using solfège (or rather an early variety thereof, based on the hexachord) to reverse the process and discover the deeper, simpler melodic structures underlying existing pieces. In later years the best students would be sat at the keyboard and taught to improvise entire pieces from a bassline. Paper was very expensive, so sheet music was little used: wax tablets would be used as a scratchpad when needed. Merely playing written-out pieces was seen as sub-par, something for those who couldn't attain the more highly valued skill of actual improvisation. That whole skillset is all but lost now, long supplanted by a hyper-competitive culture of supposedly 'virtuoso' performance. It survives to some extent in organ playing, and the jazz tradition as a whole may or may not be an offshoot of some popularized ("folk") variety of it. [0] See Robert O. Gjerdingen Child Composers in the Old Conservatories: How Orphans Became Elite Musicians. (2020) Oxford University Press.
- defrost 3y ago
  re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37746694 I've no idea why your comment was flagged and moved to [dead] - it seems fine as a comment to me. That said: > you're still talking about performing existing pieces from a very well-defined canon My first comment in this thread could not have been "still talking" - and I contrasted two things, - reproductive orchestra performances by people trained in composition and improvisation two of whom considered themselves unable to read music (responding to the person above me) and an "entertainer" considered by many to be a real musician (that's a whole thing in itself, isn't it) who also can't read, composes his own music, and improvises around his own work during nearly every performance. I'm actually siding with yourself, the formalities in both mathematics and music are important and useful but they aren't fundemental for a great many with talent in those fields - they can intuit they way through to a large degree and teaching based on intuitve methods can make great inroads when introducing new students to these subjects. Formalities can come later (or drilled in parallel), they have their place - but having a 'feel' for these subjects carries a great deal of weight, if not more.