linuxaudio.org

On Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:55:03 +0200 (CEST)

Julien Claassen  wrote:
> Hi Jack!

quoted text
>    You're welcome. I sometimes wonder: Is it so strange for a

> musician to know these facts? Might be, that I'm just used to it, on

> the other hand it's such a simple method of learning. Not very

> self-reliant, but I wouldn't say rare. Or am I wrong here? I suppose

> this method is especially appealing to jazz musicians, as they have

> to learn, not to play by sheet music, but to improvise. The most

> important thing for some kinds of jazz is - as I believe - grasping

> the basic theme, taking it up and then working with it. Well, this

> type of workflow is not so common among classical musicians, I

> daresay. Hm... Warm regards Julien

> 

Hello Julien,

your method is indeed very common in jazz and very unusual in classical

music. I have studied for years classical guitar at public classic-music

school (which here in Italy, in my experience, are at a good level) and

the method is learning the notes from the score - AFAIK blind people

usually learn first the braille-score by heart. Record-listening is

indeed encouraged but only to study the expression, the touch etc.

Personally I have grown sick with this, not so much for classical music

which is a very good thing to study, but for the attitude of training

executors quite unaware of what is going on in the music "behind the

scenes", harmonically etc. Let alone composition: most classical

executors have great difficulties in playing a few notes of their own.

So I moved on to study jazz and... I found it much more challenging!!

The difficult part is developing the ear, and indeed a very

useful exercise is to "take down" solos - more or less how you learn

Bach (play some bars, try it, repeat etc). Of course there are

transcriptions of famous solos but you don't learn as much if you

learn something from a transcription rather than by ear. 
One difference: in jazz, once I learned a phrase, an entire solo or

part of it, almost never will I execute it that exact same way in my

solos.
kind regards,

Renato
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