Is it necessary?
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I’ve had this post circulating in my mind for several weeks now, and I finally decided to just get it out today even though I didn’t have a good place to record it. Are my thoughts worth sharing even if my lighting is terrible and I look like garbage? I decided that they were, though perhaps the Internet will disagree with me. I also regret not using the piano to demonstrate my troubles with identifying “V” versus “V7” chords when I was in college…
…but if I waited to share this until it was perfect, it would not get shared. So here are my thoughts on participating in musical cultures where note reading doesn’t have the same primacy that it does in the U.S. – especially as someone who started to learn to read notes at the same time that I first started learning to play music. I think music teachers in the Western tradition have A LOT to learn from these cultures, and that freeing our music education from strict dependance on the written note will ultimately make music education more accessible to folks with learning differences. What’s YOUR experience with note reading as a teacher, a student, and/or a musician?