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I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Vernacular (ii)

It's pretty obvious that reading and writing music takes place quite a bit in "vernacular" genres. Studio musicians in commercially popular genres are adept at reading music, and any jazz combo of more than five people will have written arrangements. Ray Charles would dictate his arrangements to someone else, just saying the names of the notes he wanted and their duration.  Surely Ray was a vernacular musician. I just find it too limiting to define vernacular genres as those transmitted orally or aurally. In this sense maybe "popular" is a better name for it than "vernacular."  

For that matter, even classical music is learned "by ear" in the more profound sense, even when the musician is reading off the page. They say that the notation system is not adequate for writing down jazz, but it is not really adequate for classical music either, in the sense that you need to know how to play it in a stylistically appropriate way, with the right kind of rubato for Chopin, say.

Many jazz pianists are or have been adept at classical music, or "classically trained."

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