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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves.

Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".

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That’s not actually a great analogy, since many musicians get along perfectly well without being able to read music notation.

Fair few that make living as musicians and not entertainers.

You'd be surprised - for a number of musicians it's not about sight reading notation and playing fom there, it's about developing musical talent and variations and adding in formal notation reading | writing later.

I've known a family of three siblings who all played in the state orchestra in their teens and only one was a fluent reader, the other two were extremely good musicians that practised hard and either very slow worked through written music note by note, or, once familiar with a piece looked at a page of music with a helicopter view, not reading" individual notes, but tracking off entire blocks .. like seeing a page of text w/out wearing glasses.

From the same music roots, some years later, Tim Minchin- admittedly more an Entertainer than a pure Musician - but none the less someone that made their name and living from performing original and relatively complex music on stage playing piano and singing - also doesn't read music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Y0ZDBkB4c

I used to play in a couple of competitive bands, I always ended up in 1st / 2nd chair, but I always started in lower chairs because I can’t sight read music and would botch my auditions.

Once we were in the room and playing, and I got to hear the music, I was good and the notes on paper made sense- but out of context the notes didn’t do it for me.

Apparently, it wasn't all that uncommon to not be able to read or write music and to have a scribe pen it down for you.

https://www.straightdope.com/21343780/if-irving-berlin-could...

Composer but not musician.

Tim Minchin - musician and composer.

Doesn't read | write sheet music (see youtube interview linked in GP comment)

Oxford English Dictionary:

musician - A professional performer of music, esp. of instrumental music.

Wikipedia:

Timothy David Minchin is a British-born Australian comedian, actor, writer, musician, poet, composer, and songwriter.

Also - pretty much the entirety of Indonesian traditional ensemble musicians (Gamelan and other) going back to the bronze age - no sheet music so no reading writing music - they train like Homer delivered poetry and use non Western scales - their music is available in notation, but notation created by westerners.

Here's a bit about Western students learning to learn music w/out using sheet music ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHgdrzgtBik

They're not some minor outlier either, btw - "With over 278 million people, Indonesia is the world's fourth-most populous country".

Many of the greatest jazz musicians of the 20th century didn't know how to read music, and jazz is rather famously considered overly complex and obtuse for the typical listener. Notation is useful, but it is not music.

The volume of fairly famous or otherwise well-established musicians in rock, funk, and even jazz with a poor or non-existent ability to read or write music notation is not insignificant.

Then there are all the non-western scale musicians who learn other systems, or use some variation of solfège to explain musical ideas.

I think it's a fair conjecture to say that the overwhelming majority of musicians throughout human history likely didn't know formal musical notation.

The same absolutely cannot be said of mathematicians, physicists, and those in other fields that rely highly on mathematics.

I'd say Michael Jackson was a musician given I'd never seen his videos but loved his music as a kid and still do. Dude did his own compositions & simply sang the parts to other musicians.

That said, dropping math standards is a bad idea.

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