Re: Learning to read music for Mandolin
Originally Posted by
grassrootphilosopher
Other than that, (marked in green) whe have the "authority argument" or argumentum ad verecundiam in your statement.
Funny, I was just about to invoke the "authority argument" in defense of your position. Since I spent nearly 20 years teaching college music students (in part) to read standard notation and connect written music to the ear, I have had many opportunities to observe that process. I’d say that reading notation and chord playing can and do go together.
I’d wager that by far, most mandolinists play chord shapes without thinking about the spelling or function of the chord tones. When you’re playing an A chord, you might be thinking about where the “A” is, but most likely you’re plugging in the other notes by following chord shapes in relation to that A note. Or, you might be thinking in terms of third or seventh in the bass (or the top voice, which is how I do it); my point is that the thought process (in a non-notation approach) usually involves envisioning chords as shapes on the fingerboard.
But it’s really not that different, playing in a notation-based chord environment. You learn to read the intervals, and the shapes follow. You start reading music by learning where the notes are on the staff, and on your instrument, and associating the two. Over time, though, you learn to read the distances between the notes, and the fingerings follow. That’s true of single-note lines, but also equally, of notated chords.
It’s interesting to look at some of the music that was published a century or more ago in magazines like Cadenza and Crescendo, which were both aimed at a general audience. The level of skill in reading notated chords, on the fingerboard, was way beyond what you would be able to use today, in a general-interest publication. Perhaps that’s because now, the mandolin is more often associated with aural traditions, where standard notation happens rarely, if ever. But it’s not a limitation on where we can go in the future!
If we are often talking past each other here, perhaps it is because we assume we all mean the same thing by “reading standard notation,” when that process involves various steps: identifying the notes on paper, knowing their location on the fingerboard, translating that to instrumental technique, recognizing the intervals, and mentally “hearing” the notes before playing them (audiation). It is entirely possible to be stronger in some of these areas, and weaker in others. In my view, though, they’re all essential to fluent reading of standard notation.
Exploring Classical Mandolin (Berklee Press, 2015)
Progressive Melodies for Mandocello (KDP, 2019) (2nd ed. 2022)
New Solos for Classical Mandolin (Hal Leonard Press, 2020)
2021 guest artist, mandocello: Classical Mandolin Society of America
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