On Feb 9, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Counting and subdivision only take one so far; eventually one just has to recognise the rhythms as something one has seen before and knows how it sounds.
I tell my students this almost daily. They don't get it. They read rhythms the way our daughter read out loud at the breakfast table at a tender age, "Hoe - moe - gen (hard G) - i - zed." I couldn't come up with a better description of the way many student musicians misunderstand the process of reading and absorbing musical meaning from written symbols and fail to integrate the information. Written music is seen by those people as a set of automated behavioral instructions rather than as a language. I don't think I'd enjoy hearing them read French either.
Chuck Chuck Israels 230 North Garden Terrace Bellingham, WA 98225-5836 phone (360) 671-3402 fax (360) 676-6055 www.chuckisraels.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
