On Reading Music

I had to go down to the County Law Library to do some legal research last week, and I also had to take my wife to our friend’s house so she could do work on the gardens there. So I left my car and my wife at our friend’s, walked a mile or so to Wilshire and Western, took the Metro train to the Civic Center station, and walked about a block to the law library. Believe me, the Metro fare ($3.00 for a day pass) was cheaper than the combination of gas money, parking ($6.00 to $12.00 per day), and irritation value of trying to drive in downtown Los Angeles traffic. Besides, I had twenty minutes each way to read. I brought with me the Curwen score of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor, which in my opinion is the most beautiful setting of the Latin Mass that I have ever heard.

As an experiment, I decided to see how much of it I could read. In the twenty minutes or so on the Metro going downtown, I read through the bass and tenor lines of the Kyrie, well enough so that I could hear each of these lines in my head. On the way back, I read through the remaining (alto and soprano) lines of the Kyrie, again well enough to hear each line clearly. I figure that if I were to put another hour or so into it, I could memorize the entire Kyrie, all of its lines, and have it by heart well enough to be able to conduct it, or to teach it, or even to sing it.

I wasn’t always like this. When I started singing in adult church choirs, at the age of 24, I learned any music by the usual way for most singers: I’d listen to it as the organist or pianist would play out each part. Gradually, I got to the place where I could pick out individual lines upon hearing the whole piece played, and I was always good at memorizing music.

When I came to St. Andrew Russian Catholic Church, however, the choir director there, the late Dr. Frank Ryan, finding that I could sing bass or tenor, was in the habit of switching me from part to part to fill in where a section lacked strength. In the course of a Divine Liturgy, I’d probably sing each of all four parts. Because I had the funny idea that one should pray the Liturgy and not just sing it, I therefore got into the habit of memorizing all of the lines of a choral piece. I also started looking at the books, and saw the wealth of beautiful music that remained unsung, because we did not know it. So I started teaching myself how to read music, both individual lines and entire choral pieces. And strangely enough, a year after Dr. Ryan’s untimely and unfortunate death, I was asked to direct the choir. For the last twelve years, I’ve either been the main or the assistant choir director at St. Andrew’s (three times, I’ve stepped aside when there was someone I thought more qualified to be available; two of those times I found myself to be mistaken (sigh)). Fortunately, we have a much better choir director than me now: Gabriel Meyer, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, a superlative director and composer, and an all-around neat guy.

In retrospect, I suppose that I received an excellent apprenticeship in choral singing and conducting. I also suppose that it helped that in addition to my years of singing in good Episcopal, Anglican, and Roman Catholic choirs, I was fortunate enough to be involved in a master chorale for a fair number of years, and have read through and sung much of the standard choral repertoire.

Nonetheless, I’ve noticed that most people, including those who have supposedly gotten a musical education, are still poor sight readers, or are even musically illiterate. I have thought this a great pity, as I have found that learning to read music is a very simple thing to do. Anyone who has access to the internet, or who can spend less than twenty dollars, can learn to read music in less than a month. Anyone who is willing in addition to buy two or three books, and to read through them, can learn how to read well enough to become a member of a professional choral group in six months to a year (assuming of course that one can sing, but as I have mentioned before, that is also an easy thing to learn).

Actually, just about everything that I learned about reading music is in Plato’s Republic. As I recall, in the third or so book of that dialogue, Plato had Socrates say that in order to learn a song, first you learn the words, then you learn the rhythm of the song, and then finally you learn the melody of the song. Basically, in learning to read vocal music, you need to break things down into these component parts, gain skill in learning each of the parts, and then put things back together again.

Reading words. It is a great pity to have to say this, but our present educational system appears to have done a poor job in teaching children how to read English, and how to read other languages. As regards English, for a good number of years teachers had taught that it was more important to learn what a whole word looked like, than to be able to know the individual letters and to spell or sound out a word. This appears to have been a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. We have since learned that our capacity to recognize whole words comes from the antecedent ability to spell or sound out the individual letters, and then find the gestalt of the word from that spelling. The result has been several generations of illiterate or semiliterate “graduates” of grade and high schools. Perhaps the less said about attempts to teach foreign languages in this country, the better.

Again, Plato, in his Republic said and taught it better: in order to learn how to read well, one must recognize individual letters and their combinations until they become automatic. While I assume that anyone who can read my weblog is literate in English, I do not assume the same about literacy in other languages. Thus, in order to sing languages with a latin alphabet (such as Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, etc.), it is necessary to know what the vowels sound like, what vowel combinations or diphthongs sound like, what consonants sound like, and what consonant combinations sound like. Similarly, with languages with non-latin alphabets (such as Greek, Russian, Slavonic, etc.), I have found that it is useful to first learn the vowels, then diphthongs, then start combining them with consonants, and then recognizing the sounds that combinations of consonants make.

Translating this into a practical example, if one is reading sheet music in English, read through the words first. If one is reading sheet music in another language with which one is unfamiliar, get an alphabet guide (a page in most grammars in which one can see the sounds of the alphabet). Then scan through the text of the song and sound out the vowels in it; then go back and sound out any diphthongs; then sound out the consonant and vowel combinations, then the consonant combinations. Then slowly sound out the words until one can read them aloud without stumbling over them. In the course of my church and professional choral singing, I have sung in perhaps twenty different languages (less than half of which I can actually read). I have found this method of learning texts to have been more than worth the effort.

Rhythm When one can read the words easily, the next step is to read the rhythm of the music. To do this, you will first have to recognize such things as the staff, the notes (whole note=bird’s egg=four beats; half note=bird’s egg with line=two beats; quarter note=dot with line=one beat; eighth note=dot with line and one flag= half beat; sixteenth note=dot with line and two flags= quarter beat) rests (same durations as above, but I’m not going to describe them), ties, dotted notes, and meter. All this information can be found in the first seven lessons of www.musictheory.net. The lessons are very short, so even someone wanting to take their time could easily get through them within a week. Of course, if you want to take longer, that’s no problem. You have all the time in the world. The most important thing to recognize about all this stuff is that it is the alphabet of rhythm. How to read the rhythm I explain below.

There are two fundamental skills that you need learn in order to read rhythm: how to beat and how to count. Basically, you learn to beat by tapping your finger or your toe to a constant beat. Listening to the ticking of an old fashioned watch or clock or metronome is one way, feeling one’s heart beat is another, one’s pace while walking is another, saying da-da-da or its equivalent is yet another. While you are reading the lessons on www.musictheory.net , get into the habit of keeping a regular beat, in any way that you can without bringing attention to yourself, until it becomes habitual and comfortable.

When you can keep a beat, the next step is to count to it. First, count to two. This means keeping a beat, and counting (first aloud, later silently) one-two-one-two-one-two. . When one is comfortable with this, try counting in three: one-two-three-one-two-three-one-two-three. . . When one can count in three habitually (aloud and silently), then try counting in four: one-two-three-four-one-two-three-four. . . until this too becomes habitual, both aloud and silently.

When one can count habitually in two, three, and four, then you can start to halve (or divide in half) the beat. This means keeping the same beat, but adding a beat within it: for counting in two, it would be one-and-two-and-one-and-two-and. . . For counting in three, it would be one-and-two-and-three-and-one-and-two-and-three-and. . .For counting in four, it would be one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and. . . All this gives one facility in counting eighth notes.

Finally, when one can habitually halve a beat, one can learn to quarter the beat. This means keeping the same beat, but halving it again. For counting in two, it would mean saying (first aloud, then silently): one-ee-and-a-two-ee-and-a-one-ee-and-a-two-ee. . . until it becomes habitual. For counting in three, it means doing the same for one-ee-and-a-two-ee-and-a-three-ee-and-a. . . For counting in four, it means doing the same for one-ee-and-a-two-ee-and-a-three-ee-and-a-four-ee-and-a. . . All this gives one facility in counting sixteenth notes.

Once one is able habitually and silently to keep a beat, to count in two, three and four, to halve the beat, and to quarter the beat, one has developed most of the skills necessary to read the rhythm of the overwhelming majority of vocal music scores. Most scores are written in either 2/4 (counting in two), 3/4 (counting in three) or 4/4 (counting in 4, also called C for “common time”). All other meters can be read by examining the top number of the fraction (which gives the number of beats per measure), and the bottom number of the fraction (which gives the duration of the beat). Thus, for example, the meter 3/2 gives three beats, where each beat is a half note; the meter 5/4 gives a meter of five beats per measure, with each beat being a quarter note; the meter 7/8 gives a meter of seven beats, with each beat being an eighth note. On those occasions where the music does not have a meter (that is, where it does not have a fraction in the score), one simply treats the notes as a succession of beats, and one reads the rhythm with a constant beat or pulse.

The final skills that are necessary for reading rhythm are, once one has found the meter or meters of a score, to habitually count the notes or rests in the appropriate way: a whole note with four beats, a dotted half note with three beats, a half note with two beats, a quarter note with one beat, an eighth note with a halved beat, and a sixteenth note with a quartered beat, and to do the same with the appropriate rests, dots, and ties.

When one can beat, count, decipher meter, and correctly count notes, rests, dots and ties, one has all the skills necessary to read rhythm in music. One gains skill in reading the rhythm of scores by reading a large number of scores. I would suggest finding sheet music that one likes on the internet and reading that. For those who are Roman Catholic, perhaps the only benefit of such hymnbooks as Ritualsong and Worship and Praise, or the hymns in most GIA or OCP missalettes, is that they are sufficiently simple rhythmically to be read easily. And if one’s homilist is down to the standard of most Roman Catholic priests, (i.e. unable to preach his way out of a paper bag), one can devote the homily towards something useful instead, such as reading the words of a hymn or two, and then reading the rhythm of those hymns. (Of course, if your parish is graced with good hymnals, choirs, and homilists, rhythm reading at the homily would be an inappropriate use of time. Try getting to church five or ten minutes before liturgy starts, finding out what hymns are going to be sung, and reading the words and rhythms then instead).

When one has read through the words of a score, and has separately read the rhythm alone of the score, one is ready to read the words in the rhythm indicated by the score. After some period of time in reading, one will find that it is a simple matter to read the words and the rhythm at the same time. Take your time, though, and don’t rush; you’ll get there eventually.

Melody Reading This is where you will need to buy some equipment. Fortunately, for most people, all you will need will be a chromatic pitch wheel ($8 to $10) and a tuning fork ($7-$10), each in C. If you have access to a piano or an electronic keyboard of good quality, so much the better, but neither are essential. Do not buy one of those ten to twenty dollar toy keyboards; most often they are not in tune. The advantage of the wheel and tuning fork are that they can be kept in a trouser pocket or purse, and carried around just about anywhere.

Now, when you are able to blow a note on the pitch wheel, find the low C and blow it until you are able to hear the note on it. Don’t blow too hard: if you do, it may damage the reeds or vibrators in the wheel. The wheel should have the letters of the scale and a representation of the note’s place on the treble clef (more on that later). Then find the D on the pitch wheel and blow that. Listen to the sound and pitch that it makes. Do the same with the E, F, G, A, B and high C on the wheel. When you are comfortable with doing so, blow each note of these eight pitches in turn C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. This is called the scale in C major, by the way, but you really don’t need to know that right now.

What you do need to do is this: blow the C on the pitch wheel, and then attempt to match the sound of the pitch wheel with your voice. Alternate between blowing the note and singing the note. This is an important musical skill called “matching pitches” or “tuning’, which you need to develop before you can sing in tune. Most people who think they are tone deaf (with the exception of the very, very few with genuine auditory nerve damage, perhaps one in ten thousand), are simply those who have failed to develop this skill.

As a side note, if you try this and have real difficulty hearing or matching pitches, I suggest that you may want to invest a few more dollars (between 20 and 40) in purchasing a small chromatic tuner. I like the Yamaha because it has lights that light up for each pitch, with a little side bar which shows how far under or over the pitch you are. Use the Yamaha by first blowing the note on the pitch wheel near enough to the Yamaha so that it can pick up the pitch and display it on the Yamaha. Then use your voice to get the Yamaha to light the same pitch. This adds a certain amount of feedback.

When you are able to match the C, do the same with the D, and so on until you feel you are able to match all the notes in the scale. Then try singing up and down the scale until you can hit each note clearly. Use the pitch wheel occasionally to test how well you are singing the pitches. When you are comfortable with singing this scale, use the tuning fork (remember the tuning fork?) to find the low C of the scale. To use the tuning fork, you hold the stem firmly between the thumb and forefinger of your dominant hand, then you strike the tines against the base knuckle or fleshy part of the thumb of your other hand, then quickly hold the tines of the fork near your ear to hear the tone. If you strike it too softly, you won’t be able to hear the fork; if you strike it too hard, you’ll hurt your hand. If you try striking it against just about any other hard surface (like wood or metal, etc.), you’ll just damage the fork.

When you can use the tuning fork to find the low C, and can sing the scale up and down, Then sing the scale up and down, using these words:

C - Do
D - Re
E - Mi
F - Fa
G - Sol
A - La
B - Ti
C - Do

Do this until it becomes a part of you.

This is called the major scale, and is the basis for about half of all songs sung in most of Western music. Most of the rest is comprised of the minor scale. Try singing a scale down, and go past the “Do” to “Ti” and then “La”. Sing the scale from “La” to “La”. That’s the minor scale. (Of course, over the years Western musicians have “tweaked” the minor scale in at least two different variants, but this will work for right now.)

There is one last skill that you need to develop before you can read music, and that is building a scale. If you have done the exercises above, you should be able to sing a major scale (in C) and a minor scale (in A). Try the following exercise: pick a pitch which you can sing with comfort. Call that “Do”. Then sing a major scale on that pitch. When you can sing that comfortably, pick another pitch. Call that “La”. Sing a minor scale with that pitch as the beginning. Continue these until you can find just about any note, and can sing a major or a minor scale from them.

When you are able to do these things, you have all the skills necessary to read the melody of music. Of course, there are also some things that you also have to know. For this, I suggest you review the first seven lessons of www.musictheory.net, and then read the next five lessons.

What you first need to know is the pitches for the treble (or G) clef (you know, the one that has the squiggle that looks like a cursive G on steroids or hallucinogens), and the bass (or F) clef (the one with the curved line and two dots). Each of them has five lines and four spaces. The pitches for the five lines of the treble clef (from bottom to top) are E-G-B-D-F (the sexist mnemonic for this is Every Good Boy Does Fine). The pitches for the spaces (again from bottom to top) are F-A-C-E, as in, “the mnemonic for this one is staring you in your _____”. Likewise, the pitches for the five lines of the bass clef are (again from bottom to top) G-B-D-F-A (Good Boys Deserve Failure Always), and the pitches for the spaces for the bass clef (yet again, from bottom to top) are A-C-E-F. The student is invited to make a mnemonic for this last one, or for any of the others with which he or she is dissatisfied. Just don’t tell me what they are.

When you have gotten to the point where you can tell the name for any pitch on the bass or treble clef, you’re ready to learn the final valuable lesson: Where’s Do?” Basically, you have three choices.

1) If there is nothing on the left side of the staff other than a time signature, then “Do” is anywhere there is a C. Usually, however, there is a pattern of funny little symbols, either cross-hatches (musically literate people call them “sharps”) or things that look like the lower case letter “b” (musicians call these “flats”).

2) Sharps. If there are one or more sharps on the left side of the staff, look where the last sharp (reading from left to right) is on the staff. That will always be the “Ti” of the scale. The next space or line above the sharp will be the Do.

3) Flats. If there is only one flat on the staff, it will be on the “Fa” of the scale. If you sing from “Fa” four notes down, you will find the “Do” there. If there are two or more flats on the staff, it’s even simpler to find “Do”: The last flat of the pattern (reading left to right) will always the “Fa” of the scale. The second to last flat will always be the “Do”.

Once you have found the line or space where the “Do” is, then you’re ready to start reading the melody. You can do this in two ways:

1) You can pick a pitch at random that is comfortably within your range, use that pitch as the “Do” of the scale you are supposed to be singing, build a scale from that “Do”, and then sing the notes written on the staff from the reference point of that “Do”. This is an easy way of getting the “shape” of the melody, especially when you want to read something, but have left your pitch wheel or tuning fork at home. Getting skill in singing this way is also important if you want to sing together with other people (especially chorally), and for one reason or another, they have started with a pitch different from the one it is written in.

2) If you want to be pedantic, you can read the note to find the place on the staff where the “Do” begins, use your pitch pipe to sound out that note, build a scale from it, and then sing from that “Do”. Developing skill in singing this way has the advantage that it will better enable you to sing with musicians who are playing in the actual key that something is written in.

For those who are interested, this method of reading is called the “Flexible Do” system. There is another method of reading called the “Fixed Do” system, and I may discuss it in another essay. I think there are two final points worth mentioning before we close on this topic:

1) It will often happen that the melody does not begin on “Do”. What you need to do first is to find “Do”, and then sing either up or down until you find the note that begins the melody. Then go from there.

2) Most post mediaeval melodies involve not just movements from step to step on a scale, but also involve jumps of several steps. These “jumps” are called “intervals”. When you are first learning how to read, the best way to handle these jumps or intervals is to first sound out the steps, then attempt to sound out the interval. An example of that would be if there were a jump from “Do” to “Fa”. First sing Do-Re-Me-Fa, and then try singing Do-Fa. Gradually, with practice and with some reading, these intervals will become easy to negotiate, and reading melodies by sight will become easy and almost automatic.

To sum up then, in order to read music, it is best to break the process down into its component parts. First, read the words of a musical text. Then read the rhythm of the musical text. Then read through the melody. Then put the words to the rhythm, and finally the rhythmical speaking of the words to the melody. Gradually, if you continue to read on a regular basis, you will find that you do not have to break things down, and that you can read the words, the rhythm, and the melody at once. You may even find that with practice, you will be able to hear the music in your mind’s ear as you read through it.

POSTSCRIPT: I have found two books in particular that have helped me to go on from simply being able to read to developing good musicianship. The first is a graded reader of musical melodies and rhythms called Melodia. I recommend it to anyone wishing to develop ability in sight reading. The second is Solfege, Ear Training, Rhythm, Dictation, and Music Theory, by Marta Ghezzo. This book involves a systematic training in movable and fixed Do solfege, all major and minor scales, the mediaeval and contemporary modes, dynamic markings and musical terminology, intervals and chord reading, and even in the atonal, serial and aleatory music of the 20th century. Anyone who is willing to read through these books, and to learn what they have to say, will be more than a match for any mediaeval, classical, romantic, modern, or post modern Western music that is thrown their way.