Author: Steve Epstein
Date: 2000-01-26 22:54
This is great stuff! I always thought guitar players knew a great deal more about the structure of music than I did:-)
My adult clarinet playing experiences have been driving me more and more to try to play by ear. I'm still very poor at it, mainly because I know that I can sight read a tune a lot faster than I could ever learn to play it by ear, so I give up too easily. Then I could kill myself when I look at the music and see it's made up of no more than a half dozen or so different notes, with lots of repetition. I'm talking about folk and pop, etc. Sometimes (by myself), I'll play the chords "open" as they are written above the melody, then play the melody, bar by bar or phrase by phrase, just to teach myself to "hear" better. It doesn't translate into immediately greater ability to play by ear, but I'm hoping that in the long run it will help. At one time, I "couldn't sing". Suddenly, the other day, I found myself humming a tune I had played many times in a manner that was recognizable to me and others!
It has been said that folk music (and, by extension,pop), is intended to be played by ear; folk musicians could not create too much complexity because then they could not transmute it to others. Even if it sounds complex, like Balkan stuff, it's not; it's just based on different scales.
I eagerly await more on Allen Cole's site.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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