komponisto has an explanation for that, saying that what is being played is not chords, but temporal sequences moving between chords.
What? I don’t understand what that means, which suggests that it isn’t something I said.
Here are some points to consider:
Sight-reading is nice to be able to do, but it’s far from essential. Reading music is the fundamental skill. There’s nothing wrong with learning a work of music layer by layer, component by component. Indeed, complex contemporary music is often too difficult to sightread, even for the world’s most skilled performers; they have to practice it bit by bit, just like you do for the music you play.
If you’re reading music properly, you don’t see
.
What you see instead is
or
,
or, since we’re talking about piano music,
or
.
These are visually distinct stimuli that happen to share some features; you seem to want the shared features to have more significance than they do, which is a form of misunderstanding the notation.
Are you aware of the concept of the grand staff? The upper and lower staffs of piano music can be conceived together as a single entity, with middle C lying in between them. This wouldn’t be possible if, for example, the lower staff used the sub-bass clef, which has the same note pattern as the treble. (Now, admittedly, a lot of piano music doesn’t treat the grand staff this way—often putting the bass clef in the upper staff and the treble in the lower, sometimes both at the same time—and I’m not much of a fan of it myself, generally preferring to regard the each staff as autonomous. Still, I have to admit to finding the notation in e.g. the second movement of Webern’s Piano Variations, which has both upper and lower parts frequently changing clefs, somewhat awkward and confusing -- even though it’s done for a specific purpose.)
You should, in any case, be able to play
with the right hand or
with the left.
I suspect you simply don’t read enough music to get in the habit of seeing the notation the way it’s meant to be seen (and automatically knowing such things as how notes map under transposition). I also have a “highly trained” mind, and I don’t have the difficulties you do, so the thesis of your post seems obviously false to me. In particular, I don’t think you’ve made a convincing case that music is more difficult for amateurs who happen to be scientists than for other kinds of amateurs. If anything, I would (continue to) expect the musical literacy of scientists to be higher than that of the general population, on IQ/having-an-interesting-mind grounds alone.
On enharmonically equivalent notes (e.g. E# and F), you say:
Yes, I know they’re not really equal in most historical intonations, blah blah etc.
but it’s not (primarily) a question of historical intonations. Being acoustically distinct is not a necessary condition for being musically distinct. It’s a question of the “same” entity being conceived differently in different contexts. Homophones in language (two/to/too) are a close analogue: they might actually be pronounced differently in some dialects or some contexts, but even if they’re pronounced the same, they’re still different words. (I don’t think this actually falls within the scope of your “blah blah etc.”)
What? I don’t understand what that means, which suggests that it isn’t something I said.
Here are some points to consider:
Sight-reading is nice to be able to do, but it’s far from essential. Reading music is the fundamental skill. There’s nothing wrong with learning a work of music layer by layer, component by component. Indeed, complex contemporary music is often too difficult to sightread, even for the world’s most skilled performers; they have to practice it bit by bit, just like you do for the music you play.
If you’re reading music properly, you don’t see
What you see instead is
or
or, since we’re talking about piano music,
or
These are visually distinct stimuli that happen to share some features; you seem to want the shared features to have more significance than they do, which is a form of misunderstanding the notation.
Are you aware of the concept of the grand staff? The upper and lower staffs of piano music can be conceived together as a single entity, with middle C lying in between them. This wouldn’t be possible if, for example, the lower staff used the sub-bass clef, which has the same note pattern as the treble. (Now, admittedly, a lot of piano music doesn’t treat the grand staff this way—often putting the bass clef in the upper staff and the treble in the lower, sometimes both at the same time—and I’m not much of a fan of it myself, generally preferring to regard the each staff as autonomous. Still, I have to admit to finding the notation in e.g. the second movement of Webern’s Piano Variations, which has both upper and lower parts frequently changing clefs, somewhat awkward and confusing -- even though it’s done for a specific purpose.)
You should, in any case, be able to play
with the right hand or
with the left.
I suspect you simply don’t read enough music to get in the habit of seeing the notation the way it’s meant to be seen (and automatically knowing such things as how notes map under transposition). I also have a “highly trained” mind, and I don’t have the difficulties you do, so the thesis of your post seems obviously false to me. In particular, I don’t think you’ve made a convincing case that music is more difficult for amateurs who happen to be scientists than for other kinds of amateurs. If anything, I would (continue to) expect the musical literacy of scientists to be higher than that of the general population, on IQ/having-an-interesting-mind grounds alone.
On enharmonically equivalent notes (e.g. E# and F), you say:
but it’s not (primarily) a question of historical intonations. Being acoustically distinct is not a necessary condition for being musically distinct. It’s a question of the “same” entity being conceived differently in different contexts. Homophones in language (two/to/too) are a close analogue: they might actually be pronounced differently in some dialects or some contexts, but even if they’re pronounced the same, they’re still different words. (I don’t think this actually falls within the scope of your “blah blah etc.”)