In one of the question and answer sessions following a Campfire performance in a local high school, the inevitable question was asked: "Does someone have to read music to be a songwriter?" I had run into so many songwriters and potential songwriters who worried about their inability to "write" music, I immediately replied, "No." The student was overjoyed, but the music teachers and school administrators were not. I knew immediately I had committed a political atrocity in this high school where I was attempting to help a faltering music department. I'm actually glad I answered without thinking, because it did not cause me a moral dilemma that way. I answered what I believe to be true. I've seen so many sight readers who can't carry a tune and even more great songwriters who can't read a note. It's vastly more important, in my opinion, to have/develop a strong ear. After all, the melody is going to start in the songwriter's head, not on the paper, although it may end up there.
Of course, it's desirable to know as much as possible about music, and that includes reading it. It opens new horizons in a way that knowing how to read a language does. When you can really read scores, you can study Mahler and Mozart and Beethoven the way poets and lyricists study Shakespeare and Joni Mitchell and Charles Bukowski. Also, reading music helps expand a writer's understanding or music theory. How easy would it be to increase your vocabulary if you couldn't read words? It wouldn't be impossible, and it would be easier for aural people than for visual ones, but reading would simply make it easier for everyone. Seeing the word helps. Similarly, seeing the melody on paper and seeing the notes that shape the chord deepen the understanding.
For a person with no ear, though, reading music is a moot point. It's like people who get bar mitzvahed by memorizing the syllables phonetically, having no idea what they're saying. I have met a number of keyboardists who can play fluently with sheet music, but they never tried picking out a song by ear. This is not a good sign. Usually if a person has a natural ear, he/she will have started playing by ear at some point. It can be developed by listening and playing what you hear, but it is a totally separate skill from the reading of music.
More often I will meet a musician who plays by ear but who has never tried to write a melody. He or she will have the consideration that not reading music would inhibit the "writing" of a song. What people may not understand is that songwriting is not "writing down songs." It's creating them. As Janis Joplin used to say in interviews, "I don't writes songs, I just make them up." Well, so does everyone else. It has nothing to do with notation. And it concerns me that people would stop themselves from doing something they may have native ability in, simply because they have never studied the process of notating or reading music.
When I was around four years old and was picking out things on the piano, after my father showed me a few chords, I had the circle of fifths figured out in a very strange way. I considered myself the C chord, my parents were F and my grandparents were B flat. I sensed the order of progression (or age or importance, in my case), but I had never been exposed to what it was actually called. All education really is in this area, it seems to me, is a codification and naming of what can be observed on their own by talented people. So if you don't know to call something a IV chord, it still functions as one. You can still recognize it when you hear a song, the way you would recognize a face in the crowd. Knowing how to play it from sheet music will never give you that recognition. It can expand it, but it's no substitute for a good ear. A student who can pick out the chords to a song he or she hears is far easier to teach than a student who can sight read like mad but can't play the chords to "Desperado" without the sheet music.
A lot of excellent songwriters have studied music when they were younger. But I find they frequently did what I did to my piano teacher. "Could you just play it once, Miss Brown, so I can hear how it goes?" And from then on, it was looking at the music, and playing by ear.
© 1996 Harriet Schock
Webmaster: Jeff Mallett (jeffm@lyricist.com)