The Tyranny of the Dots

In the Billy Joel documentary And So It Goes, Billy talks about "reading the dots." He didn't want—or need—to "read the dots," meaning the music notes on the page. He had developed his own rock 'n' roll piano style and, after a few years of classical training, he left the dots behind.

I didn't want to read the dots, either, once upon a time. As a little kid, I had a good ear and could quickly figure out just about any tune on the piano. But in first grade, I finally started piano lessons, thus beginning my life with the dots.

The Wall of Dots Between Me and Music

I hated the dots! I wanted to learn them, sure, but it was so hard. If my teacher played what was written, I could play it right back for him. But if he asked me to play it from the dots, I felt like I would pop a blood vessel in my brain. It was so frustrating for my six-year-old self to have the code to a simple tune sitting silently before my eyes and not be able to crack it and bring the music to life.

Through hard work and much gnashing of teeth, I eventually learned to read the dots ... mostly. Specifically, I could name the notes fine, but I struggled with key signatures, note values, dynamics markings, and the rest. My piano teacher from third to eighth grade was an all-dots teacher. I would beg her to re-play a piece for me so I could get it back into my ears, but she would refuse, knowing I would simply parrot it back by ear, using the written score as a guide.

At some point in middle school, I found a recording of something I was learning—probably Für Elise or some other popular classical tune. I showed up at my next lesson and played it through. My teacher was so excited! I'd made such progress in only a week! But then she asked me to re-play a short passage from the score, and I couldn't. That's when she knew I'd listened to a recording. I remember how angry she got with me for having "cheated."

And here's the lesson I got from that and similar experiences: Playing by ear, while a neat trick that some of us could do, was inferior to playing by the dots.

So ... I just never told people, even my teachers in high school and college, how poor my music-reading skills were. (Though I'm sure they weren't fooled.) By my sophomore year of high school, I'd reached a level where most pieces I learned were available as recordings, so I could just listen to those and follow along with the written music to learn things that way. But my inability to read music well was my dirty little secret. I could read the notes, but I depended on recordings for note values, dynamics guidance, and everything else. If that made me "less than," then so be it. No one needed to know.

Tired of Feeling "Less Than"

Because I thought playing by ear was "less than," I focused on the dots and rarely tried to learn things by ear. If I heard a song I wanted to learn, I just bought the sheet music. I would listen to the song, follow along in the sheet music, and work it all out. I depended equally on the dots and the recording. It almost never occurred to me to try to fully learn something by ear, without the dots, to develop my own arrangement and have that be good enough.

Unhappy with my low musical literacy in my 30s, I finally decided to truly learn to read the dots. I had just returned to piano after 10+ years away, and I found a music theory teacher through the local university. Friends, I took private music theory lessons for almost two years. The result? I developed a passion for music theory, and I got really good at reading the dots.

The Tyranny of the Dots

To this day, I love the fact that I can learn piano piece I want, just from reading the dots. Yet I titled this post "The Tyranny of the Dots." Why?

Here's why: I've spent my life reproducing things that other people wrote, all using the dots to some degree, and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the disappointment of missing this note or forgetting that memorized passage or flubbing the prescribed dynamics in a phrase.

I'm also tired of being able to play things without truly understanding them. Sure, I can easily name the chords and even their functions within the harmonic structure (and I'm thankful for that ability), but I'm still just playing what's written on the page.

I want to redevelop my ear. I love playing Scott Joplin and Jonny May rags, but I want to play my own rags, whether they're my formal compositions or just improvising to a simple tune.

Moving On

I've been working on Liszt's Liebesträume for almost a year (give or take a few months of not working on it at all). I love it and it sounds fine—not great, but not terrible. I still can't play it all the way through perfectly and probably never will. But I think this is going to be my last true "dot piece." I am ready to slough off the tyranny of the dots. I am ready to set aside the bucket-list classical pieces and all their challenges and move fully to the challenges of truly learning music—not the dot version, but the raw version, with no wall of dots in between.

I've been working toward this point for a while, pretty much ever since I picked up piano again a year and a half ago. But I was never quite able to let go of the dots, mainly because of the Bucket List. But I'm okay with letting go now.

I'm not going to abandon the pieces I love and worked so hard to learn. And I'm not saying I'll never work on another classical piece again. But for this next phase of my piano life, I'm setting the dots aside.

It feels a little like setting off on a hike with no map, but I do have a map. I have Piano With Jonny and now IROCKU. I have the PWJ community. I have my naturally good ear for music, neglected and underdeveloped as it may be. I have my piano, and I have the fact that I love music. I think that will be enough.