Fact: Assuming student industriousness, results of common methods will preclude learning to read.
**In this article I hope to convince you that nearly everything about how music reading is taught quarrels with how reading is learned. The happy flip side to that slightly grim thesis is this: the more we align our teaching with how reading actually happens, the more our kids will read music as (pardon the pun) readily as they read language.**
Four major literacy roadblocks exist in the way we traditionally teach: 1. Music theory is unhelpful in initiating reading. 2. We don't actually teach reading; we unwittingly teach decoding. 3. We neglect the power of prediction, and 4. melodies aren't good starting points for reading.
I'll examine each of the above claims and their impacts and I'll offer a common-sense solution to the challenge of fostering readers. But first, lets clarify what we mean by reading.
Reading Defined
The process of reading is simple enough to define: we look at squiggles, they speak fluently in our heads and we comprehend. Then, based on our comprehension, we predict what may come next.
Music reading should be just as simple to define: we look at squiggles, they sing fluently inside our heads and we comprehend; predicting what may follow. Let's try it:
So, you looked at squiggles. Did they sing inside your head? Or did you need to check some of it by singing aloud or consulting an instrument? Was it fluent or halting? Did you musically comprehend: hearing D as the tonal center/keynote (not G), feeling the LONG-SHORT-SHORT lilt of the meter, sensing the character--the moxie--of the mixolydian mode? While it lacks a tempo marking, based on your comprehension did you set a brisk but not hyperactive tempo? Did you interpret a confident mezzo-forte to forte volume in spite of no dynamic marking? Can you predict what may follow?
Your honest answers to the questions above make plain the extent to which you were reading or not.
If you were taught the way I was taught, here's what you probably knew: by the key signature you knew every F was actually F sharp. You also knew the opening intervals were descending thirds. Perhaps you even knew the first one was a minor third and the second a major third. While all of these things are true, the problem is this: tonal music theory knowledge doesn't sing.
Rhythmically, you were cognizant of the fact that the quarter notes at the end of most bars get pulsed evenly. Due to the presence of the three beamed eighth notes, it's possible you unanticipatedly recalled the mathematical truism that the dot = 1/2 the value of it's attached note. But again, regardless of these facts about notation, rhythmic music theory knowledge doesn't groove.
Recognizing that antiseptics are necessary to healing, allow me to apologize in advance as this next sentence is going to sting a bit:
Music theory is of little to no use in learning to read music.
I know that may sound incorrect; even shockingly wrong, but please try to not reject it out of hand. Allow me to explain.
The value of music theory is largely in how it explains written notation, just as the value of grammar is in how it explains written language. As we begin to be editors, grammar and/or music theory become quite useful. But neither one is of much use in beginning to become readers. To become a reader is to learn to associate symbols with comprehended sounds.
If only I had learned that when I was younger; I'd be a much better reader today. *GRAMMAR ALERT!! The immediate prior sentence had a verb construction in the pluperfect tense!! Do you actually need to know that grammatical fact to be able to read the sentence? Of course not. And it's the same with music theory: you don't need to know it to be able to read music.
Now, here's where the plot thickens: not only is music theory unnecessary for learning to read, the entire process of what we call 'learning to read music' is actually directed away from reading and towards something which ought properly be termed 'decoding'.
To delve into this dilemma we must carefully unpack how decoding gets taught under the misnomer of 'reading'. Afterwards we will compare decoding with how bona fide reading is actually learned.
How Music Reading is Traditionally Taught
(Subtitle: Why almost no one likes ''Sightreading'')
"Good morning class! I'm Mr. Malanga, and today we start to learning to read music! Here we go! See these 5 lines? Memorize this sentence to name them: Every-Good-Boy-Does-Fine! Or this one: Empty-Garbage-Before-Dad-Flips! Or even: Elephants-Great-Big-Dirty-Feet! And, even easier, the spaces between each line spell 'FACE' Isn't that amazing, kids?!" ....and later... ''Look!! Now we can spell words like EGG on the staff, and DEED. Ooh!! Try to spell CABBAGE!''
Also this:
''Students, today we start learning to read rhythms! It's easy and fun! OK!! See this note? It gets four beats. And see that one? It gets two beats. And that one there gets one beat. So, easy right!?! Now you're ready to do this worksheet on adding & subtracting with those notes!! Isn't this great, kids!?!''
Also this:
''Students, today we start learning to read rhythms! It's easy and fun! OK!! See this note? It gets four beats. And see that one? It gets two beats. And that one there gets one beat. So, easy right!?! Now you're ready to do this worksheet on adding & subtracting with those notes!! Isn't this great, kids!?!''
After more than a century of trying to teach music reading this way, the futility of decoding methods should be seared into our collective consciousness. But for many reasons, this fruitless way of teaching remains embedded even though it's patently obvious virtually no one actually learns to read (comprehending & predicting as squiggles fluently sing in our heads).
The truth is: trying to learn to read music the 'EGBDF, 2 minims = 1 semibreve' way doesn't work because reading doesn't work this way. Decoding does; but it's of dubious value. In spite of what we may have been taught, music reading is neither mathematical nor alphabetic.
₩ΘⱤⱭṦ ᵯ3Ɏ ᶀӚ 4╚₱H4B3ŤļϾ, Ҍᵾ╥ ЯǢDȈȠϬ Ȉᴤᴨ'ṯ.
To start with, we don't need the alphabet to read. You just read the subtitle above and it contains almost no letters. Actually, it's quite easy to list lots of things we read that don't involve an alphabet: most street signs, many desktop computer icons, all of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and modern day Chinese, the equation: 47-39 + (16 * 2), sign language, and, that ;-) emoticon your lover just texted. These are just a few examples of the long list of things that are readable that have no need of an alphabet.
We don't need an alphabet to read because reading is really about Knowing Stuff, then letting symbols remind us of the Stuff We Know.
Also, the look of the symbols themselves is unimportant. Which is why regardless of whether or not you've noticed the multiple recent font changes, it hasn't stopped you from reading the past three paragraphs.
(I point the fonts issue up because I have forsworn the many 'literacy' programs that seem to be more focused on the calligraphic (font) beauty of notation than whether the students are writing anything they or others could comprehend.)
So, by and large, alphabets are unnecessary and the appearance of the squiggles is not impactful.
OK, but when we are using an alphabet, what effect does scrambling up the order of the letters have? Surely the order of the letters in a word matters? Actually, since reading isn't alphabetic, the order isn't as important as you might suspect.
We don't need an alphabet to read because reading is really about Knowing Stuff, then letting symbols remind us of the Stuff We Know.
Also, the look of the symbols themselves is unimportant. Which is why regardless of whether or not you've noticed the multiple recent font changes, it hasn't stopped you from reading the past three paragraphs.
(I point the fonts issue up because I have forsworn the many 'literacy' programs that seem to be more focused on the calligraphic (font) beauty of notation than whether the students are writing anything they or others could comprehend.)
So, by and large, alphabets are unnecessary and the appearance of the squiggles is not impactful.
OK, but when we are using an alphabet, what effect does scrambling up the order of the letters have? Surely the order of the letters in a word matters? Actually, since reading isn't alphabetic, the order isn't as important as you might suspect.
Try it:
I’st asomlt ismsopilbe to blveiee taht yuo cluod aulaclty raed waht yuo aer sieneg! Btu rsceearh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy sohws, ti dsne’ot mtaetr in waht oerdr teh ltteres ni a wrod aepapr. Teh olny iproamtnt tihng is taht teh frsit adn lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset cna eb a taotl mses adn yuo cna sitll raed ti wtih vrey ltitle pboerlm, bcuseae raednig is nto dnoe lteter by lteter, btu by petratns cllead ''wrods''.
Did you do it? If you truly went for it, I'll bet it was hard work, and you likely did it haltingly, aloud, and with no comprehension; precisely the opposite of what you're now doing. I suspect you still heard and understood the original message in spite of trying to 'read' what's really in front of your eyes. Lastly, it isn't enjoyable because you literally get nothing out of it but meaningless sounds. This is what we unintentionally do to kids with this approach to music reading: hard work for musically meaningless sounds.
Basically, when we're moving word by word in language or pattern by pattern in music we're almost always reading. But if we're moving letter by letter or note by note we're almost always decoding. So, at this precise moment you're reading, not decoding. However now, sn fds sghr ldrrzfd, xnt ltrs cdbncd.*
[*CODEBREAKER: Each italicized letter is one 'below' the true letter. So, 'sn fds sghr' decodes as 'to get this'. If you want the rest you'll have to decode it for yourself.]
But we persist. We rationalize. "Hey, the band up the road sight-reads better. Mine will too if I work the kids harder at it," or "My daughter passed her ABRSM Grade 3 exam with Merit, and it included sight-reading."
Sight-reading! To me that term is the final--almost perfectly Orwellian--nail in the coffin. When we christen this halting, non-comprehended product ''sight-reading'' it sounds as though it is a way-station on the path to fluent reading, when nothing could be further from the truth. Make no mistake: if we persist in teaching this way our students will learn. They just won't learn to read, though they might kdzqm sm cdbncd.
...And the problem goes deeper than reading vs. decoding, alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic:
CONTEXTUAL CLUES ARE CRUCIAL:
Earlier I used the famous 'Cmabrigde Uinervtisy mxied up ltteres rahserech' to demonstrate the pattern nature of reading vs. the presumed, but incorrect alphabetic conception of reading. Two things went unnoticed when that particular meme went viral. The first is somewhat trivial: the research actually came from Nottingham (not Cambridge) University. However, the second bit of information is essential to any discussion of reading: prediction plays an enormous role in helping us to read.
But don't take my word for it; demonstrate the power of prediction to yourself by trying an unscrambling activity. Set a timer to allow yourself 30 seconds to solve as many of these as you can:
hdrazas hirotsic amncheeivtnes Fcsicnaro sifitneicc rsnopsees ekurtaqahe cutnery udinnatsredng psregrsos rnicudeg hghilghit
Teh 1906 Sna Fcsicnaro etaquhkrae wlil mrak a cnteury of pregrsos in
undnatsreidng etauqhkrae hdrazas and rnicudeg teihr rsiks. Tehre are
palns to hghilghit the sicfitneic amncheeivtnes and scolail rsnopsees
taht hpapneed as a rseult of tihs hirotsic eenvt.
While it requires effort, I suspect you probably read almost the entire passage before the timer went off. The paragraph has 38 words in it, including words from the first list that you couldn't decipher before. The question is: why can we read and comprehend the second one even though it is triple the length and also contains words which, just moments ago, were unsolvable?!?
Here's why: When we read, we're not solving or decoding anything; rather, we're predicting meaning. As we read, we are continually deriving context/gist. Through our understanding, contextual clues prime us for what to expect next.
By using context to facilitate prediction, we intelligently ignore literally thousands of words in our total vocabulary such that we can quickly home in mentally on the few likely candidate words to follow. Before we've even seen it, we really do have a pretty good idea of the words that are coming up corkscrew.
...unless, of course, we are suddenly presented with flummoxing folderol like that last sentence!! Your surprise and/or confusion at seeing the word 'corkscrew' when you were expecting the word 'next' proves you were predicting.
So, context clues allow us to predict meaning, and meaningful predictions propel us forward in reading by priming us for what's coming next. It's wonderful. Literacy!! KABOOM!! :-)
Now the less-wonderful news: because the importance of context in generating musical meaning is not yet commonly understood, precious few published materials make use of the power that musical predicting offers in easing the path to music literacy.
And there is one last bit of darkness before the (in my opinion) blazing light:
We must always remember that a melody is really TWO languages braided together: the language of tone and the language of rhythm. Thus, we have two systems to read simultaneously when dealing with melody. With my youngest students I call the two systems ''the dots'' and ''the sticks''. Tone is ''the dots'' (the note heads on the staff), and rhythm is ''the sticks'' (the stems & beams). In my classroom we learn to read tone patterns and rhythm patterns separately. We then combine them later to begin to read melodically.
FOUR TOUGH PROBLEMS - ONE EASY SOLUTION:
If you have followed me this far, you'll recognize that we have four major problems that have left us with rampant musical illiteracy. They are:
- Like grammar, theory is for seasoned editors, not beginning readers.
- We teach decoding under the misnomer of reading.
- Extant materials neglect the power of prediction.
- Melody isn't a great starting point.
Keep reading, it gets good... :-)
How Reading is Actually Learned
(Subtitle: Why the average person often curls up with a good book, but never with a good score.)
The squiggles you're currently scanning merely represent what language presents (i.e. meaningful sounds). The symbols themselves really are just squiggles. They have no intrinsic, built-in meaning. At some point in the past we personally had to give these symbols the meanings that we now take from them.
We're adept at this because of the sequence & emphasis of our experiences particularly from birth to age 5. For us old farts, meanings and squiggles are so thoroughly alloyed in our minds that we can't recall a time that they were separated. But one look at some gorgeous Armenian squiggles provides a helpful reminder that symbols and meanings don't automatically go together:
- պահել ընթերցմամբ
If, like me, you have not at some point in the past given meaning to squiggles like those, you weren't able to take meaning from them just now. (Copy it & translate it if you wish.)
Since it's not automatic, how do meanings and squiggles become glued together such that we can later read them? A great way to understand the whole process is to reflect on how you helped your children become readers.
First, you read a rhyming story to your child. If it was compelling, then night after night she would request that same story; absorbing its content. As she listened, she was simultaneously learning to comprehend the story as a whole, and as a concatenation of parts (Woe be unto you when you tried to skip a page, or you altered a word here or there; remember!?!).
One fine day, after absorbing the story by ear and the illustrations by eye, she became curious about the black squiggles at the bottom of the page that your finger was tracing. The rhyming structure of the story combined with your moving finger stimulated her first reading experience via the magic of contextualized prediction:
As you read for the 47th time: "Once upon a time, in a marshy bog,
You noticed her attention differed. The trees were covered by a hazy fog.
So you tried something new... But in that bog, and among that fog
You steadily slowed as you read: There did croak a..great...green......."
And then a magic moment later your daughter pointed to four squiggles at the bottom of the page and happily exclaimed, "...frog!" KABOOM!! Literacy!! :-)
Squiggle Dubbing
For you to be reading this now, at some point in the past you conferred meaning onto these squiggly patterns called words. In the beginning stage of reading, we tell squiggles what to mean, not the reverse. By the power vested in her mind & index finger, she dubs a pattern of squiggles with a meaning that she already understands through the story and her life experience ( "...frog!" ). This is how all reading begins, as squiggle dubbing.
Notice too, that she dubs whole words with meaning, not individual letters (No child ever asks a parent what the 'r' means in 'frog'.).
This is because--as you will recall--letters aren't important to reading, only words are; and not just B3C4U53 0UR M1ND5 CAN D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5 (as the ubiquitous internet meme happily, but hazily suggests). No, the truth is we can read such things as msispleld wrods and NUMB3R5 5UB5T1TUT1NG 4 L3TT3R5 with little difficulty because we are continually deriving context & predicting as we read initially word-by-word and later in life phrase-by-phrase.
Of course, for a beginning reader the words themselves are important, but only to the extent that they represent easy concepts. Word length, for example, is far less important than conceptual difficulty. In this case, at least, size doesn't matter. We teach kids to read "dog" not because it has only three letters, but because a dog is easy to conceptualize. The meaning is the key. To put it another way: if letter-density was important, kids would learn words like 'eon' or 'hex' long before they learn words like 'kangaroo' or 'hippopotamus'.
Joyful Sightreading
While the subtitle immediately above might be an oxymoron right now, if we bring all the language learning ideas we've reviewed back to music reading we can make joyful sightreading a possibility.
We simply have to start with familiar music (that's the 'story'), and get them dubbing squiggles; giving meaning to contextualized patterns (those are the 'words'). The patterns we have them 'squiggle dub' must initially be conceptually easy ones (Tonic patterns in Major, or Macro/micro-beat patterns in Duple); precisely the patterns that show up in music where rhyming words show up in stories: right near the end of passages. Using easy patterns in powerful places allows for context clues and predicting to supercharge reading.
We must also reject as misguided the music theory based ''note-density'' sequence of teaching that would have our students counting a dotted half note followed by a quarter note before reading two eighths & a quarter, four sixteenths & a quarter. The first has two notes, but it's difficult. The second has eight notes, but it's easy. Pattern two is easier to conceptualize so it should be taught first in any sensible program.
And that's it. Make learning to read music mirror learning to read language and...Literacy!! KABOOM!! :-)
I envision a future where it's normal for parents to solfege through purpose-designed early childhood music books with their young ones. If that day comes, then it should be unsurprising to see the average citizen cozy up to a Brahms score or an Ellington lead sheet, or heck, even some guilty pleasure like a Clayderman chart (Shades of Musical Grey, anyone?!).
Regardless of the material, they'd be in for an evening of hearing squiggles fluently burst into meaningful sounds as they joyfully sight-read for pleasure. Just imagine the flowering of music literacy that would follow in a few generations. Let the squiggle dubbing begin!! :-)
.....Stay tuned, as there is more to come soon on decoding using instruments vs. reading and how we ought to separate learning to play from learning to read then combine them after each is working well....
Personal Note: Edwin E. Gordon’s Music Learning Theory provides the basis for virtually everything in this blog. I urge all parents & teachers to discover the efficacy of MLT. Start here: www.giml.org.
