I realise this is a tongue-in-cheek title but for anyone unaware, sheet music is a very clinical and skeletal approximation of music. Like the difference between reading I Have a Dream and actually hearing MLK deliver the speech. It’s why you can have 1,000 different recordings of a Mozart piano concerto – and why they’re all superior to a PC playing a MIDI file (most accurate representation of sheet music).
Having said that, and despite sheet music being about as far from ‘lossless’ as a stickman drawing, musicians are particularly good at ‘visualising’ music. So much so, that a brain scan can’t distinguish between a musician actually listening to music and a musician merely replaying music in their head.
I would argue it’s more like the difference between reading a book and watching a stage play of the same story. The difference is level of literacy. At a certain point, you learn the language well enough to be able to use your imagination to create the color of the story for you as more than just words (notes) on the page. Up until then you might know what the word is, what it means, and even how to speak it out loud, but it could be difficult to internalize how that word fits in with the work as a whole.
Those who haven’t honed that skill or haven’t had the opportunity, however, are best served with a performance of the work. There is no shame in this. Experiencing a performance can be just as beautiful, maybe even more than what your imagination creates from what’s on the page with facets you hadn’t even considered in your own interpretation, but making that interpretation is a skill, just like literary analysis.
I realise this is a tongue-in-cheek title but for anyone unaware, sheet music is a very clinical and skeletal approximation of music. Like the difference between reading I Have a Dream and actually hearing MLK deliver the speech. It’s why you can have 1,000 different recordings of a Mozart piano concerto – and why they’re all superior to a PC playing a MIDI file (most accurate representation of sheet music).
Having said that, and despite sheet music being about as far from ‘lossless’ as a stickman drawing, musicians are particularly good at ‘visualising’ music. So much so, that a brain scan can’t distinguish between a musician actually listening to music and a musician merely replaying music in their head.
I would argue it’s more like the difference between reading a book and watching a stage play of the same story. The difference is level of literacy. At a certain point, you learn the language well enough to be able to use your imagination to create the color of the story for you as more than just words (notes) on the page. Up until then you might know what the word is, what it means, and even how to speak it out loud, but it could be difficult to internalize how that word fits in with the work as a whole.
Those who haven’t honed that skill or haven’t had the opportunity, however, are best served with a performance of the work. There is no shame in this. Experiencing a performance can be just as beautiful, maybe even more than what your imagination creates from what’s on the page with facets you hadn’t even considered in your own interpretation, but making that interpretation is a skill, just like literary analysis.