Journal · On Practice
Off the Page
On the oral tradition, the musicians who freeze when nothing is written, and why the music you play should first live in your memory.
Reading music is a gift. Depending on it in order to play is a quiet cage.
In the Western musical tradition, reading is a fundamental ability. Children in the conservatories read music from a very early age, and everyone who passes through the system reads. And it is a wonderful thing. At a high level, reading opens door after door: you learn new material far faster, and writing down your own compositions becomes easy. It is a truly important and beautiful skill.
But not every tradition gives reading such a dominant place. In fact, the Eastern traditions were entirely oral until recently. For centuries the music was passed from teacher to student by ear, never written down. There are reasons for this. One of them is that these traditions place improvisation at the very heart of the music. The musician studies the structures upon which he builds his variations, and it makes little sense to write down what is meant to remain fluid.
The ability to read is, as I said, a real gift. But becoming dependent on reading in order to play is a very different story, and not a good one. When the only thing you can play is what is written on the page in front of you, you become very, very limited.
Think of the classical musicians. They can play some of the most magnificent music ever written, with flawless technique and dynamics shaped to the smallest breath. And yet many classically trained musicians discover, often to their surprise, that when the score disappears, so does much of their fluency. Sit them at the piano with no music in front of them, and they suddenly face a different challenge altogether: not interpreting someone else's thoughts, but expressing their own.
Playing music is very much like speaking, expressing yourself through a language. The closer your playing is to the way you truly talk in life, the more personal, expressive, and intimate it becomes. One of the things we are really after when we study an instrument is to shrink the distance between ourselves and the listener as far as it will go: to make the instrument as transparent as it can be, so that the listener feels our spirit, our heart, our emotions, as directly as possible. Now imagine being able to speak only what is written on a page. It would be absurd.
The closer your playing comes to the way you truly speak, the more of you the listener actually feels.
When we play, we want to be spontaneous. We want to react to the musician beside us, to open an immediate channel between our consciousness and the instrument. This is the exact opposite of reading. You want to picture music in your mind and execute it at once, the way an idea forms inside you and you simply speak it out.
So begin now, whatever you are reaching for. If you dream of improvising, know that improvisation asks for exactly this: the capacity to see a musical idea and play it at once. But the same is true if you simply wish to play the music you love as if it were your own speech, to let a language live in your hands. Either way the starting point is one and the same, and it is simple: memorize what you are playing. A groove, a phrase, whatever it is. Sing it. Close your eyes and listen to it. See it and hear it inside your consciousness, the way you notice a thought moving through you. Begin with short sentences, and you will find it grows easier. What you have memorized has a far better chance of being embodied and absorbed, of becoming part of your own voice. And giving your whole attention to listening and expressing will always serve you more than splitting it between yourself, your fellow players, and the page.
Let me be clear about one thing, so it is not misunderstood. Memorizing, on its own, will not teach you to improvise, nor to speak the music freely. It is the language itself, the one you study patiently over time, that does that. Memorizing simply helps you internalize the language. It is a tool in the process of learning, a way of carrying what you study deeper inside you. It serves the learning of the language. It is not a shortcut around it.
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