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Re: Why Momorize Scales, etc?

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-01-29 01:02

When you read written language, you tend to read to a large extent by recognizing whole words or at least parts of them (regardless of how you first learned to read). It would be a very slow process to read each word in a long piece of writing phonetically, letter by letter. When a skilled reader runs across a word he doesn't recognize, he still has the ability to "sound it out" and may be able to make an educated guess as to the word's meaning, or he can look it up in a dictionary. But to do that for every word in an essay or a story or a novel would make reading a laborious chore.

Scales, along with arpeggios and other patterned "rudiments" mostly give you a vocabulary that makes reading music easier while playing them builds basic technique. You can read every note of a classical concerto one at a time or you can see (recognize) much of it as familiar patterns of scale and arpeggio fragments, which takes much of the labor out of the learning process. When you run across a pattern that doesn't fit - a synthetic scale in a 20th century piece or even one of those almost diatonic scales or arpeggios in classical repertoire with a note left out or a chromatic change somewhere in the middle, it's easier to decode how the specific pattern differs from the memorized diatonic version, having read most of the context without the need for such close scrutiny or analysis.

Besides that, rudiments are useful for developing many other areas of technique in inverse proportion to the attention you need to pay to the notes themselves. If you can completely take your mind off the notes, you can concentrate on tone, smooth fingerings, etc.

One question: when you read your scales from printed music, what do you use? Is each chromatic sign (sharp or flat) marked next to each note that needs one, or are you reading scales with key signatures at the beginning?

Karl

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Why Momorize Scales, etc? new

CarlT

2011-01-29 00:41

Re: Why Momorize Scales, etc? new

kdk

2011-01-29 01:02