Do you even need the tadpoles? Playing first, reading music later — or never

"Do I need to learn to read music?" It is one of the first questions I am asked, usually a little apologetically, as though the honest answer might count against the person asking. So here is the honest answer, and it is not the one people brace themselves for: not to start with — and, depending on what you want from music, possibly not at all.

The tadpoles, and what they are for

Tadpoles is what a great many children, and a fair number of adults, call the notes: the black blobs with tails climbing about on their five lines. It is a good word, and I use it. The grown-up name is staff notation, and it is a magnificent piece of technology — a thousand years old, and still the best way anyone has found to hand a piece of music to a person who has never heard it.

But that is what it is: a way of writing music down. It is not the music, any more than a recipe is the dinner. Music was around for a very long time before anybody wrote it, and most of the world's musical traditions are still passed on almost entirely by ear. The tradition I went to India to study — some of the most sophisticated music on earth — moves from teacher to student by demonstration and imitation, and uses notation, where it uses it at all, as a reminder of something already learnt. Nobody who has heard a great sitar player thinks the ear is the lesser route.

I say all this as someone who reads fluently, uses it every working day and teaches it. I would not be without it. But it is a tool, and the question is not whether it is worth having. The question is whether it is the right first thing to put in front of somebody who has just walked in wanting to play.

Why the piece is a better door than the page

When somebody starts lessons with me, the first thing I ask is what they want to play — the actual piece, not a genre. It might be a film theme, a hymn, a Beatles song, a riff off a record they have worn out, a nocturne their mother used to play, or the thing everyone was singing at a wedding. Contemporary or three hundred years old, it does not matter. Then we take that piece apart and start putting it back together, from the first lesson, by whatever route gets sound out of the instrument soonest: I play it and they copy; we find the shape of it under the hand; we sing it; we put the record on. Chords, scales, reading and theory come in as tools when the piece turns out to need them — and learnt that way round they stick, because you have a reason for them.

That is not a shortcut, or a way of keeping people happy until the real work starts. It works better than starting at page one of a tutor book, and here is why.

The reason you came is the reason you will practise. A group of researchers in Australia followed children who had started instruments in school band programmes and, ten years on, asked the ones who had stopped why they stopped. The answers came back in the language of feeling no good at it, feeling out of place, and feeling pushed — and even "no time", once people explained it, tended to mean that something else had come to matter more. One of them, asked why they had stopped, wrote that they had been forced to practice music that was not of my choosing. And the paper carries a warning aimed at teachers like me: that studio teaching which prescribes scales without a reason, leans too hard on grade exams, and works from repertoire completely determined by the teacher is the kind that makes motivation hard to keep.¹ A page of dots to decode before you are allowed to make a sound, and a book of pieces chosen by somebody who has never met you, is a fair description of that.

The piece you chose gets practised differently. A smaller study watched one young beginner on the clarinet practising the pieces her teacher had set and then a piece she had chosen for herself. On her own piece she spent longer, kept going when it got difficult, and used the kind of strategies — singing it, fingering it silently, thinking it through — that you normally see in far more advanced players.² One student is evidence, not proof. But I watch the same thing happen most weeks, and I suspect you can remember it from something you once taught yourself.

You already know how it goes. If you love a piece, you have it in your head, and that means you know when you have got it wrong. That is a feedback loop no page can give you. Twelve bars of graded nothing has no sound to check against; the only judge is a teacher, once a week. The piece you love has your ear correcting your hands between lessons, for free, and it does not get tired.

Sound before symbol is how everything else is learnt. Nobody teaches a toddler the alphabet before letting them speak. This is not a private eccentricity of mine — it is the founding principle of the Suzuki method, which lists learning to play before learning to read among its important elements, next to listening, and calls the whole approach the mother-tongue method, from watching how easily every child learns to talk.³ I am not a Suzuki teacher and I do not start people at three. But on this point an approach to instrumental teaching used all over the world and a music teacher in Thames Ditton are in agreement.

And for a great deal of the music people love, the page was never the source. A Beatles song, a blues classic, a film theme, the riff you cannot stop playing — these were made by people playing and listening, and written down afterwards, approximately, by somebody else. Paul McCartney put it plainly to an interviewer: I don't read music or write music. None of us did in the Beatles. He does not, he said, see music as dots on a page.⁴ Learning that music from the record is not the lazy option; it is the accurate one. What a swung quaver, a bent note or the feel of a good bass line actually sound like is on the recording and only roughly on the paper.

None of that is an argument that reading is unnecessary. One band, however good, proves only that reading and musicianship are different things — which is the point. A musician who does not read has not skipped a step. They came in by a different door.

When you do want the tadpoles, they come quicker than you think

Now the other half, honestly. Reading is a shortcut and a freedom. It is the difference between waiting for somebody to show you a piece and going to get it yourself. It is how you play with other people from parts. It is the only sane way into most classical repertoire beyond a certain point — nobody learns a Chopin ballade by ear in any reasonable stretch of a life. And the exams push you towards it: ABRSM makes sight-reading compulsory at every grade and puts a theory paper in the way of Grade 6; Trinity is looser about it below Grade 6 and has no theory gate — a real difference between the two boards — but nobody sits a Grade 8 without reading. If any of that is on your list, you will want the tadpoles, and I will gladly teach you — the order I teach it in is written up, and it is not the order most books use.

Here is the good news, and it is the reason I am relaxed about leaving it for a while: reading comes faster to somebody who can already play. To a beginner the dots are an abstract code. To a player they are names for things already known — a scale the hand can already run, a chord shape, a rhythm the body can already feel. Notation is a description, and it is far easier to read a description of something you have met. Given the choice, I would always rather teach reading to a person who can play three songs than to a person who can play none. The second is decoding. The first is recognising.

That is why a child asked to decode dots before they have made a sound so often concludes that music is homework, and the same child, playing the film theme by the second lesson, concludes that music is theirs. The reading can start a term later and will go faster when it does. Nothing is lost. The one honest caution runs the other way: reading fluently at sight is a skill best built in childhood — I have written elsewhere about what the research says on that — so if a child wants to be the person who can play anything put in front of them, do not leave it until they are grown. A term is nothing. A decade is not.

Or not at all

Some of my students will never learn to read music, and they are none the worse for it. The singer-songwriter with a guitar and a capo. The adult who wants to sit down at home and play the six pieces they love. The ukulele player. The bass player holding a covers band together. They are not musicians who have not got round to reading yet. They are musicians. If that is what somebody wants, I teach it, and I do not treat the reading as a debt they have quietly left unpaid.

The same goes for the student who wants to make music up rather than only reproduce it. Improvising and composing are things I teach, and they need an ear, a sense of how chords move and a pair of hands that go where you send them — none of which lives on a stave. Some of the best-organised musical minds I have met never wrote a note down.

What I will always teach, reader or not, is the rest of it: your ear, your hands, your sense of time, and how the music you love is put together — because you cannot play well without those, and you can play beautifully without the tadpoles.

So: do you need them?

Only if the music you want to make needs them. That is the whole answer, and it is a better one than yes or no, because it hands the decision back to the person it belongs to. If you want to read, we will get there, faster than you expect. If you do not, nobody in my teaching room is going to make you feel that you have failed at something you never wanted.

Either way, the first lesson starts in the same place. Bring the piece — the actual one, even if it is absurdly beyond you — and we will find the way in. I teach piano, guitar and several other instruments from Thames Ditton, to children and to adults; the areas I cover take in Surbiton, Esher, the Moleseys, Kingston and the villages between. Get in touch and tell me what you want to play. Not the grade. The tune.

References

1. Evans, P., McPherson, G. E. & Davidson, J. W. (2013), "The role of psychological needs in ceasing music and music learning activities", Psychology of Music 41(5), 600–619. A ten-year follow-up of 157 children who began in Australian school band programmes in 1997; 104 answered, and 75 of those who had stopped gave their reasons in their own words. The quotation is on p. 610; the passage on studio teaching that "may thwart the psychological needs" is on p. 614.
2. Renwick, J. M. & McPherson, G. E. (2002), "Interest and choice: student-selected repertoire and its effect on practising behaviour", British Journal of Music Education 19(2), 173–188. A single-student case study, from interviews and analysis of videotaped practice; the findings above are as stated in the published abstract.
3. International Suzuki Association, "The Suzuki Method" — the association's own statement of the approach, whose list of essential elements includes "the importance of listening to music" and "learning to play before learning to read".
4. CBS News, 60 Minutes, "Paul McCartney opens up about Abbey Road, the Beatles' breakup in wide-ranging interview", correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, broadcast 30 September 2018.