I never learned to read music. That is, I learned enough to be able to plink out a tune from a printed score, provided that score was in C-major scale. But anything beyond that was … well, beyond me. I learned the very basics of time signatures (everything was 3/4 or 4/4 time). That was the extent of my learning. I’d heard of key signatures before, but I didn’t really know what they are.
Studying that stuff now, I understand why people think reading music is hard. It looks complicated at first. And maybe there are complicated things that I haven’t learned yet. But at the base it’s just a language with a small alphabet and a few punctuation marks. A few weeks’ practice, and “sight reading” a simple score is trivially easy. Playing the score–even a very simple one–is a different matter entirely that involves training your body to manipulate whatever instrument you’re playing. But reading the score doesn’t pose a problem.
And then it gets a lot harder.
The key signature is, quite literally, a decryption key; it tells you how to convert the note printed on the score to the note that’s actually played. It’s like those simple substitution ciphers we played with as kids. For example, map the letters a-z to b-a. So the word “bab” would become “cbc”. In musical notation, the key signature is the decryption key.
Simple. But definitely not easy. I’ve played percussion for musicians and have heard them switch key signatures in the middle of a song. I didn’t fully appreciate what that meant until today when I was reading about key signatures. Musicians are doing note substitutions in their heads. While they’re playing! That is, they have a song memorized, I guess in whatever key it was originally written. They know when to play which note. But a key change means that instead of playing a C, for example, they’ll play a D, or maybe an F, consistent with what the key signature tells them.
This is quite impressive. I’m sure it takes considerable practice to do well. To cast it in terms of the simple substitution cipher, imagine somebody told you that instead of counting from zero to nine, you start at five and wrap around. That is, “5,6,7,8,9,0,1,2,3,4”. Then they put a bunch of numbers in front of you and you have to do the substitution in your head, speaking the individual digits at a steady cadence, in time with the beat.
That’s not something you learn to do in a couple days of reading. No, being able to transpose a musical score in your head while you’re playing likely takes many years of practice. I stand in awe of the hard work and dedication demonstrated by any musician who can do this.
By the way, if you’re interested in learning the basics of how to read music, I can recommend the site musictheory.net. I’ve found their lessons to be informative and their exercises (note identification, for example) very useful for drills. They also have some iPhone apps that will let you do those exercises offline. I don’t use an iPhone and the apps aren’t available for Android, so I can’t tell you how good the phone apps are.
I’m sure I won’t learn all of music theory from this one web site, but it’s given me a really good introduction in a short time–knowledge I can put to use immediately as I’m learning to play an instrument.