[oriolid]

Honest question: Did you read my post and write that all by yourself? If yes, why are you so hostile to the idea that music can be effectively communicated through writing and reading? Yes, you can teach a beginner to strum a few chords without any context, but once you want to play with others you need some concepts to be able to communicate and when you have to learn those concepts writing them down is the easy part.

Your language course sounds really odd to me and I'm not sure if I should believe it actually happened.

I don't really get why you are so hung up with C major. Sure, if you play piano the first few pieces are probably in C major unless one of them is Chopsticks but the method books that I have seen have all exercises in different keys almost from the beginning.

[NikolaNovak]

- Yes I read your post, though I had the exact same question, as I feel we are talking past each other a bit :<

- (Yes, I wrote that by myself though that's a strange question to ask :)

- Yes that course was real. Two years of Latin, 1995, Prva Susacka Gimnazija u Rijeci. You can wake me up at 2 am and I can recite "Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terrae Terrarum Terris Terras Terris" in about 6 seconds (just measured:). And that's literally what our exams were for two years - conjugate this verb; recite declension of this noun; give me a list of propositions; at no point did we actually learn to speak it conversationally, or tested on reading comprehension or speaking skills. Extreme example but it exists!

Now let's see if we can productively engage on same topic together:

- I am not talking about "reading or writing" or "music theory" or "Communicating with other musicians in general". I am making claims very specifically about western music staff notation, being taught first or early, for casually interested potential musicians. Not that "communicating music is unimportant" or "professional musician doesn't need staff notation"

As such my claim specifically is:

- Staff notation is provably and demonstrably not necessary, and I claim not helpful, to either start learning an instrument or communicate with other musicians or learn advanced music theory; and further, a lot of fairly advanced fun can be had with music without learning staff notation.

That's it, that's my claim.

We need to arrive at better understanding of where we disagree. A LOT of very good musicians mentally, subconsciously do not distinguish between "Music theory" and "Staff notation". I am NOT claiming Music Theory is not helpful - I am enjoying it tremendously. Understanding what you're playing and how and why is great! But staff notation is completely lateral to learning Music Theory, as I mentioned above but may get missed.

Some examples that may help see where I'm coming from - You do NOT need Staff notation to:

- Tell your bandmate "hey, can you try doing a riff in E major pentatonic?"

- Understand keys, triads, chords, inversions, intervals, etc; or communicate them

- Learn a chord progression of a song

- Learn a solo, learn to improvise, learn to arrange

.... Whopsie, Sorry, kids are waking up from their nap, I'll write more in couple of hours, I'd be eager to continue this conversation, whether here or on Hangouts/Gmail/Whatsapp/Whatever :). But my central point here is - staff notation is perceived by some as necessary to a) learn music theory b) play an instrument c) communicate musical concepts, and today in 2021 there are plentiful counter examples to that, beyond theoretical discussion :)

[AlbertCory]

Surprisingly (maybe) I don't disagree with a lot of what you said.

Exhibit A: Paul McCartney, who's produced some of the most timeless music ever written, and can't read music.

Exhibit Others: it's too early in the morning for me to think of those. Give me some time.

However, everyone who plays on the studio session to record your composed-by-ear masterpiece for the CD will be an excellent sight reader. Guaranteed. They wouldn't have gotten the gig if they weren't.

"Staff notation" is pretty damn flexible, as you'll learn if you try to write a program to produce it as well as music publishers have done for centuries. You already said it's a way to communicate with other musicians, but I'd just add that oftentimes in popular music, that communication is just a score with a tempo and bar lines marked off, with chords and rests in the bars -- no individual notes.

Furthermore, there's immense room for interpretation: if the chord is G7#13, an experienced player will laugh and say to himself "ok, so that's just an altered seventh, and by the way, I always add a ninth to a seventh chord."

[oriolid]

> Yes that course was real. You can wake me up at 2 am and I can recite "Terra Terrae Terrae Terram Terra Terrae Terrarum Terris Terras Terris".

Interesting. My high school German classes involved repeating "an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor, zwischen" until everyone remembers it and that didn't really mean that there wouldn't have been conversation practice. Maybe it's the Latin language, I have heard similar stories from others too.

I guess it's possible to learn music theory without staff notation if you really try to do so, but to me it sounds just incredibly stubborn to not make the connection between the notes and the lines that dots are drawn on. The connection between the sounds and the letters is much more arbitrary than the connection to dots on lines and you don't seem to have problem with it. If anything, the note that's either H or B depending the culture is written the same way on staff everywhere. And if you're afraid of C major, you're not really getting away from accidentals by just using letters instead of staff notation.

Edit:

> Staff notation is not inherently logical and representative of patterns in 12 note equal temperament. It's just an archaic system we are stuck in though others have been proposed

Most music in European tradition is written in diatonic, not chromatic scales, and while equal temperament is common, it's not all there is. The staff notation with key signatures is just too handy for writing down diatonic music to ignore. Of course it's not a perfect fit for other tuning systems but from "let's play the riff in E minor pentatonic" I'd guess you're not thinking about going atonal or outside 12-tone system either.