Looking At Music

What is it that allows a musician to play a song on an instrument by ear or in other words only hearing the song and then being able to play it, and other musicians need to read the notes in order to play?

This was a question asked on Quora. I had been thinking about the different ways of looking at music, and how it is approached. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the bucket drummers; Many of them play by imitation without regard to meter or pulse. They are simply following one another as a form of "flocking". All musicians have a different mental model for music.

When I was first learning music in the late 1970s, I would typically play along with the radio and records. Later on, after I had graduated from music school, I found I couldn’t remember how I did it. My early playing was essentially the memorization of patterns--not unlike typing. Some are very good at this and can play things exactly how they are played on the record. But when you see a band play live, they usually don’t sound like the record, because the songs are through-composed into a finished form that can be performed without a pattern, and with variation and improvisation allowed. Scored music is in itself a pattern, with hardly any variation allowed. Reading music also uses different parts of the brain that are involved with sequential actions— like knitting or crocheting. If you gave fifty people instructions to knit a sweater within an hour on a clock, they wouldn’t be thinking of ways to improvise, because their minds are focused on the primary task. I think that’s essentially what’s happening when sight-reading.

The approach to performance depends on where the mind is focused. I experience this all the time with various musicians I have played with that have different ways of thinking about music. Pattern players need patterns, so you can’t use a lead sheet with just chord symbols as you can with jazz players. Jazz players typically don’t use (or like) to play by patterns—except the (few) bass players and drummers that don’t mind playing repeating patterns underneath—but they’re always going to stylize it.

Some musicians like to play parts of music in isolation: Hendrix's Foxy Lady was just the isolated tritone of a dominant 7th chord. Metal musicians always leave the thirds out, shredders play endless flurries of arpeggios. But this isn't how music had been typically composed: Loud tutti sections in symphonic works with continuous 16th notes might happen for 4 bars, then move on to another section. When you form a particular mental model, it is how you interpret the entirety of music. Some may look at music as a vehicle for dancing, and harmony is less important. Some see music only as a sound: guitarists and bassists strive for the perfect tone, at the expense of the music. The tone might be cool, but their sense of rhythm and time might be bad.

In the mid-1990s I changed how I looked at music again, and began to use a more "painterly" approach, and moved away from the song form and music theory. I liked the idea of making a radical change by leaving the "music" out. It was essentially a philosophical position I took to look at music differently. It was a shift in the mental model of music.

Here is an excerpt from the book, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play on how we understand how things work. What's your mental model in your work? If you made a radical shift in how you look at it, might it activate dormant creativity?