Re: [Shaku] Stan Richardson's Tsuru no Sugomori

>From: Karl Signell <signell@umbc.edu>
>
>Writing a musical phrase on paper interposes an alien obstacle and
>subtly (or not so subtly) transforms the music into another medium.
>The music is in the sound, not on the paper.

..and the finger is not the moon...

I would argue that transcribing is a useful part of figuring out what the
player is doing. While you could learn to play Stan's T-n-S by listening
to it repeatedly and attempting to play along with him, it is far easier
(and, I would argue, more efficient) if you can chop up the piece into
phrases, or parts of phrases, and work on it in those small bits.

Writing down what you've figured out is merely an intermediary step in
the process of memorizing the piece.

While I agree that learning by is is *an* efficient, and perhaps *more*
musical way to learn, I'm not convinced that written scores transform
the music or interpose obstacles between player and sound. I see
them more as aids to learning.

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Received on Thu Mar 5 14:40:52 2009