Klarinet Archive - Posting 000305.txt from 1997/02

From: Roger Shilcock
Subj: Stan G. Linda S. et al. on musical illiteracy
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 06:35:39 -0500

I began picking out notes a piano from printed music when I was roughly
the age for starting school, and by the time I picked up the clarinet I
already knew the clefs, note values, common Italian directions, and so on,
and had taught myself to
read a score. Thanks to the enlightened system (?!) at Lancaster
University, my degree is two twenty-sevenths in music.
I think that for even this kind of informal and defective musical education
to be an asset in playing an instrument, one has to have reached a
certain level of competence*. So many of the difficulties to be
overcome are physical and technical, and these are much more important in
the early stages. Musicality (whatever that is) is highly desirable, but
that's something rather different.
Roger Shilcock
*Have I reached it? I dunno