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I disagree with this to a certain extent. If we were talking about reading a book out loud, I would disagree almost entirely (based on the way it's worded), but as long as we're not reading aloud, the motor skills function is not necessary for reading. Once we start reading aloud, it is every bit as difficult as sight-reading piano music with one exception, which I will discuss at the bottom.

First, most people read around 250-300 words per minute. The average word has 3.5-4.5 letters in it. That's about 1200 letters per minute. Rachmaninoff's 3rd piano concerto, known for its many notes, still doesn't approach this figure. (Consider 30k notes, approx, at 43 minutes.. averages to nearly 700 notes per minute. Even if you take out the minutes the piano doesn't play, it averages less than 1000.)

We make up for reading by recognizing words instead of individual letters. However, for those who do not immerse themselves in musical scores, they do not pick up on groups of notes (chords, runs, arpeggios, groupings, etc). They simply see notes. Well, if you have to read all letters in order to understand words, you'd be reading books a LOT slower. So, now compound the idea that you don't recognize the "words" of music with the idea that there are nearly 3x the number of "letters", and the answer seems pretty clear.

Music is a language like any other, except we don't understand it as words, but rather process it as groups of sounds.

One major difference in processing power lies in the fact that we practice reading/speaking 8-12 hours a day since birth, but we certainly don't do that with music. Most of us read something every day we are alive, and I would wager nearly everybody speaks throughout the day. We also tend to speak in the language we read. These actions reinforce each other and make reading easier.

I would also wager that virtually nobody walks around reading scores of music for hours every single day. And I would quite easily wager that nobody puts their fingers on the keyboard as often as they speak. (For people with speech impairments, substitute sign language, writing with a notepad, etc.)

The second problem is voices. When we read/speak, there is only one voice we are trying to capture. It is either the voice of the character, your voice, or the voice of the person we're listening to. Processing multiple conversations simultaneously is something the brain is not hard-wired to be able to do. It can be practiced and learned, but you will still miss some things. The same goes for music: multiple "voices" create a particular sound with each passing bar of music, and the brain is not pre-wired to be able to deal with this. It has to be trained to internalize at least part of the process so it can consciously focus on one task.



All of this, of course, is disregarding the need to find the keys on the keyboard, which is both a similar, but also entirely separate, issue. Similar in that it is required for adequate sight-reading. Separate in that it has very little to do with the ability to literally read the "language" of music.

Hi Derulux ... you’d make a good lawyer for the Defence.

The problem with those who has been hard-wired into the
present system of notation is that they can’t see further than their nose ...
and settle for a crippled sight-reading lifetime.

But what if you change the form of a keyboard score ...
into an accurate graphic representation of the
PITCH, DURATION AND GROUPING OF NOTES ?

Makes the Rach PC3 a piece of cake.

Uh...no, the bass line is not a singable melody, it's just a bass line. And the tessitura of the "countermelody" is out my range.

Ha! I've been told that before. Most people who know me told me either to be a lawyer or play music professionally. Of course, being as stubborn as I am, I went an entirely different route.

Most of the time, I just like to point out different ways of thinking. But I always base my hypotheses on facts, and if someone brings to light facts/ideas I hadn't previously known or thought of, I consider them honestly and will quite often change my hypothesis to accommodate the new information(after some deliberation/discussion, of course).

Actually, it isn't a language like any other. One of the several reasons why it isn't: people have danced to music since prehistory, but do not dance to language.

Take away all the empty cascades of notes, but what are we left with? I cannot think of one major piano concerto which has more padding than Rach 3. He says nothing new, but rewrites his 2nd concerto with extra guacamole and the bloated interior of an unhealthy burrito made with pork carnitas.

I was reading through Beethoven's Op. 53 this afternoon, which I performed some years ago, but Beethoven makes his point in a fraction of the time, and far more efficiently.

Some things remain a mystery.

Gosh, btb, makes me wish you had some kind of examples handy for some kind of new graphical representation of scores.... But you wouldn't have anything like that to share, would you?

-J

I think his second concerto is a better piece of music, but I think the third works better as a real "warhorse" sort of concerto, where the soloist stands in front of the orchestra. There aren't really any moments in the second concerto where you can sort of stick out as being virtuosic. The fact that Rachmaninoff wrote his third in preparation for a concert tour I think reflects this. It really says the same thing as the second, just the language is less raw and is more introverted. It offers the soloist more possibilities in terms of varied expression and subtleties, which works for some performers (like Horowitz).

And before instruments, those people used their voices.

I always had the idea that we "process" music more as emotions than as groups of sounds...I guess it depends on what level you are looking at or what your point of view is...

Certainly motherese, which some evolutionary psychologists speculate is the origin of music, was all about emotional regulation and social connection.

In a very condensed sense, first we experience the world, then we learn to read, then we read to learn. We have it backwards in music. When reading a book we experience an inner life as rich as the world we live in. When it comes time to read to learn we already have knowledge about the stuff we need to learn. In music, when we start with step three we start with zero knowledge about the world of music.

Of course this is just one model, but I think it's the most practical, and it makes sense to me.

However it all initially transpired (and I'm not at all convinced they used their voices prior to rhythmically beating on things), the point remains - people dance to music, but not to language, and therefore, music isn't a language like any other.

It has been proven that music is processed in the same areas of the brain that language is - Broca's area. However, I don't think it's scientifically correct to say "music is a language" but rather that music and language share many similar properties. Here is an interesting article on research on the subject:

http://cel.huji.ac.il/courses/structureandprocesses/Bibliography/Fadiga_Annals_2009.pdf

Interestingly enough, there appears to be an association not only with music and language, but also with dancers and athletes as well as pointed out in the above article. Yet you would not say that sports are a language. I'm sure some may say dancing is a language and could make a case for that. I suppose in a loose sense of the term 'language' as something that communicates a thought or feeling, perhaps you could say music and dance are both languages. Not sure about athletic endeavors, though.

Yes, I know that music is, at least partially, processed in the same part of the brain as language. But that doesn't justify saying it is a language like any other. To me, anyway, it clearly is not.

I was agreeing with you that saying it's a language isn't quite accurate. Also, I wanted to post again because I decided having 6 quotes looked neat.

As a player of mostly contemporary music, I haven't memorized anything in years...except just recently. There's one non-tonal piece where the texture is constant, and motives are so self-similar but always different. Somehow, playing from the music did not help! So, with a goal of recording it this summer, I'm memorizing it. The hand movements, the intervals, the sonorities. I'm working a page at a time, from the last to the first.

It's only three to five minutes, but an insane three to five minutes.