Re:How My Children (N=2) Acquired Absolute Pitch
by pclmulqdq on Thursday June 22, 2023 @03:22AM
(#36428994)
I'm sorry you had that experience as a kid - it sucks to have your passion drained like that.
Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.
Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by listening to the piece over and over just becomes intractable.
It also has nothing to do with how old a piece is - modern composers also use written notation as the primary communication medium of their musical intent (new music often comes with a MIDI mockup which is a poor replacement for a past recording).
Finally, I would suggest that the point of music education is to give you the tools to express your musical ideas. Some people want to play Liszt and Paganini - those pieces are really fun.
Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.
Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by listening to the piece over and over just becomes intractable.
It also has nothing to do with how old a piece is - modern composers also use written notation as the primary communication medium of their musical intent (new music often comes with a MIDI mockup which is a poor replacement for a past recording).
Finally, I would suggest that the point of music education is to give you the tools to express your musical ideas. Some people want to play Liszt and Paganini - those pieces are really fun.