Tuesday, October 4, 2016

To See or Not to Sea

First of all, I wrote the title on purpose, because I totally missed "died" vs "dyed" in a Facebook post lately and got all upset over the "death" of Betty White.  But strangely enough, the theme fits into my subject.  It's all about seeing versus sea-ing: understanding what your eyeballs are telling your brain, or feeling totally lost; i.e., at sea.

I was turning pages for my husband's performance of J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto today.  You know the old saying about page-turners?  The only thing they can do is screw up.  I never had any issues turning pages until someone told me that.  But I'm getting off track.  Anyway, he was in the middle of the first movement and began to frantically nod his head.  I had been following the left hand line, so I knew where he was, and he wasn't at the end of the last score yet, so I waited.  More frantic nodding.  I decided that his head movement was telling me to turn the page rather than emoting to the music, so I turned said page, still thinking it was way too early.  But by then I'd lost where he was anyway, so I figured it best to get to the next page.  Fortunately I didn't screw him up, and the movement ended, and after that I decided that no matter where I thought he was, when his head started moving, I would turn said page.  The third movment goes lickety-split, and he took it faster, and my eyeballs couldn't even follow the left hand, so I turned pages whenever his head moved and things went fine.

Later in the day, I asked him about it, specifically what he sees when he's reading the score.  His answer, that he glances at the entire line, boggled my poor brain.  I have trouble absorbing one measure at a time, and here he is, deciphering whole strings of them.

I wish I could do that.  I wish I could read what I see, play what I read, no matter what the speed.  I can't even read along when I've memorized and know the score.  Here he was, reading whole lines at lickey-split tempos that my eyes couldn't keep up with, much less my brain.

So, it's kind of like catching the difference between "dyed" and "died".  Or "see" and "sea".  My tendency is to misunderstand the first (and sometimes the second, third, and so on) time I read music, and that makes for getting seriously lost with no hope of getting back on track.  I can't trust my brain to correctly understand what I'm seeing, so I have to re-read over and over to make sure I got it right.

And that, unfortunately, means that whenever I try seeing the score, I end up lost at sea.

1 comment:

  1. Love your blog! Very helpful in understanding what it maybe like to do music with a reading difficulty. Thank you!

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