Obi Wan: "...from a certain point of view."

I recently met a fellow horn player and professional musician whom I have admired for many years.  In the course of our conversation I mentioned that I give presentations on dyslexia in the  music world, and he became animated, saying that he is dyslexic.  He is the retired principal horn of our local professional symphony, has played with the symphony for over 30 years, and memorized every symphonic work he ever played.

In case you're not familiar with memorizing symphonic music, that amounts to an amazing ability to listen and commit to memory parts embedded in everything else that's going on at once.

And dyslexics are the ones who supposedly have learning issues?  Really?

I played piano for Mass on a regular basis for almost 30 years.  When tempi reached beyond my reading capabilites I used chord symbols and made something up.  And for all of those years I looked at my methods as cheating because I couldn't play what was written.  The one and only paying church position I accepted I got fired from because I was not following what was on the score.  It took me a lot longer than it should have to realize that my "cheating methods" are what jazzers do every time they pick up an instrument. But from my point of view I was copping out because I couldn't play what was written in the score (tackling classical scores meant memorizing as quickly as possible).  As a result I've gone through most of my musical career thinking that I can't improvise any better than I can read, when in reality I've been improvising since grade school to compensate for my reading issues.

Speed reading.  Speed playing.  Speed perfection.  Speed rules everything, and not just in music.  Speed with accuracy IS the ultimate combination.  But our addiction to speed and accuracy risks the loss of uniqueness, interpretation, relation, communication.  Mis-communication outruns every gain we make in technological speed and accuracy, while our addiction narrows our boundaries of acceptability.  Gradually "different" becomes "dead", "dyslexic" becomes "unacceptable", and Darth Vadar has killed Luke's father. 

Well, "...from a certain point of view."  -Obiwan Kenobi, Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi