My younger daughter has just come back from her first theory/aural lesson. At the local music school, alongside their instrumental lessons, all the pupils have two years of a compulsory singing class and then they start theory/aural lessons. It is in these lessons, not the instrumental lessons, that the pupils are supposed to learn to read music.

When my elder daughter went through the system they started with the treble clef which wasn't a great deal of use as she was learning to play the cello. My younger daughter learns the piano so I (foolishly) thought things would be easier for her. However, they have changed the system and instead of learning a particular clef they are starting with "relative note reading." This means that you just say, for example, that the first line is an A and then you read all the other notes relative to this one. The whole idea leaves me completely perplexed and I can't see how it helps a child in the early stages of learning to read music AND play an instrument at the same time. My daughter is still not secure at reading all the notes in the treble and bass clef and I can't see how this is going to make it any easier for her.

I find it hard to understand how reading music can be separated from playing the instrument. I suppose it depends on what we mean by 'reading music'. 'Reading', to me, doesn't simply mean recognising what note is in front of me on the page; it means transferring it to the instrument and producing the sound as I read. In theory, a child learning to 'read' music could be said, under this system, to be able to 'read' without being able to play. Obviously one can read printed words without saying them out loud, as the purpose is for the reader to get the meaning, whether or not it's turned into sound, but surely music is about sound? Reading by interval is all very well when used to assist in speedy sightreading, but when the instrument isn't present, then what is the point? As for messing around with clefs at this stage - I can't imagine that this would do anything other than confuse; surely teachers should be simplifying concepts rather than complicating them?

I also think it is one of the reasons why hardly any of the pupils at the music school are any good at sight-reading - they see "reading the notes" and playing the instrument as different things


I'm not sure that you can call it reading by interval since there are no accidentals so it isn't even any help in "hearing" an interval.


Given a choice my daughter will play by ear and is a natural memoriser. I have been trying to convince her that it is not enough to be able to find (for example) an "A" on the piano; that each "A" is written in a different place and that it is vital to be able to make the link between the written note and which key you press. I can tell that she is now going to write this off as another one of her mother's "strange ideas."

I can imagine that it is a difficult and probably confusing way to learn to read music, especially if your playing is going to be pretty much all classical, but I wish I could read music like that!

Playing transposing instruments and quite often getting music in the wrong key, especially when working with singers (...and one in particular who insisted it had to be in Gb, not G or F, but Gb) it would be a real benefit. I can usually manage transposing from concert to Bb, but concert/Eb or Bb/Eb transpositions I find much trickier - and the more random ones pretty much impossible except for very simple tunes.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say I can see real benefits of learning to read music like this - I suspect it's one of those things that would be much slower to start with, but once you'd got it you'd really understand it, rather than just memorising a set of rules.

Something like this method was how notation started. Initially, one of the lines was labelled with a C; later, to enlarge the range, sets of lines without a C among them had one labelled with a G or an F. The letters were decorated more and more elaborately until they became the clef signs, still performing the same function. You can still find the C sign on lines 1, 2, 3 and 4 of a five-line stave, giving soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto and tenor clef, the first and second mostly in 19th C editions of older music. C on the top line is rare, baritone clef having had an F sign on the third line since the days of four-line staves. The G appears only on lines 1 and 2, giving French violin clef and treble, respectively.

When this system was being developed, nearly all music was diatonic and variation of the pitches was largely confined to the note B, which had two versions. In German speaking countries the ambiguity was resolved by labelling it with a "b" for the lower version and "h" for the higher one. Once again, these letters were elaborated until the "b" became the flat sign and the "h" both sharp and natural.

I imagine that this idea comes from its parallel of tonic sol-fa, in which everything is relative to an arbitrarily chosen tonic. Certainly, if you're playing by ear, or improvising, thinking in degrees of the scale (rather than specifically named notes) is a very good place from which to be starting, so I can see the logic of approaching the early stages of reading this way. I guess that it mightn't be ideal to be introducing staff notation like this at the same time as having to learn specific pitches for specific instruments ... perhaps, though, if there were an integrated approach to this, with agreement between the theorists and the instrumental teachers about when and how these concepts were introduced, it might work. Interesting.

When I start to transfer solfa to the stave with children, they are taught initially without a clef, so that they (for one thing) understand the FUNCTION of a clef (ie it fixes the pitch - no clef means you can sing any pitch for the starting note) and also learn intervallically - ie if 'so' is on a line then 'mi' is on the line underneath and so on.

This also does away with the need to worry about sharps and flats at this stage (although of course when clefs are used we also use absolute pitch names and get into key sigs etc.).

Children can sight-sing and do dictation work quite easily in this way. Many of the children I teach do not play an instrument but quite a few do. I've never found that it 'confuses' them, rather that it enhances their understanding of how the stave and pitch notation works - but I do think it's strange that your daughter's class is doing it this way AFTER they have worked with a treble clef stave!

I can see that it would be useful when used in the way that Cyrilla describes, with the starting note not having a particular letter name, with regard to getting used to seeing, hearing and singing intervals without letter names, but to use letter names that are other than what the child is already used to for, say, the bottom line, is a bit different. If a child is in the process of learning - or has only just learnt - GBDFA, for instance, surely this is bound to confuse?

This does sound perfectly sensible when applied to singing and when using a different system to name the notes. What I find hard to understand is why introduce it when the pupil is still in the process of sorting out treble clef AND bass clef in her mind and when she is supposed to be reading music to play the piano.

She had her first piano lesson after her theory lesson and I asked her piano teacher if she knew what the children were doing in theory and she threw up her hands in horror.

I've been thinking about this a little more, prompted by the poll about which clef people find easiest to read.

I read treble and bass clefs equally fluently when playing the piano. Occasionally I have sight-read a bassoon part or a (bass clef) trombone part on the oboe and I have found this quite hard; the problem is not reading the notes per se but there seems to be a sort of automatic link between the place of the dot on the page and the fingers which automatically go down/lift up on the oboe and which does not involve naming the note. I found that I needed consciously to tell myself what the first few notes were when reading from the "wrong" clef and that once I had done this I could play reasonably accurately (but not very fast) until there was a repeat (or da capo or something else which involved a large visual movement) at which point I would automatically revert to treble clef. I suppose this means I am reading by interval but that I need to see both notes at the same time to "work out" the interval. Whatever the mental activity is which enables me to do it, it is certainly a lot less efficent than reading from the clef associated with the instrument. It really does seem to be a problem of associating a particular clef with an instrument as I can switch from descant to treble fingerings without problem but do find it hard to play a bass part on a treble recorder and vice versa.

Also, to go back to the piano, my daughter had some tuba/trombone duets with the bass clef part on the top line and the treble clef part on the second line. (The treble clef part was also in Bb and needed transposing but I can usually do this without a problem). I found that the only way I could play this was to play with my arms crossed (my brain refused to accept that the top line was instructions for the left hand despite being written in the bass clef). I'm not sure what this says about reading music and playing an instrument apart from the fact that it is more complicated than simply being able to name the notes.