Tradition and Resistance to Change

Unfortunately, and in spite of all the attempts to solve the challenges of reading music, they have been overwhelmed by the barrier of TRADITION.

My personal experience.  Bucking tradition is a huge challenge.  Explaining WYSIWYP to friends and family who can already read music has resulted in responses like “What a crazy idea.  Why would you want to do that?”  I admit that promoting any system outside the mainstream is going to be met with resistance just because it is out of the mainstream.  But as a beginning adult student of the piano, I was ready to give up playing because of the sheet music.  But rather than do that, I invented my own that I can actually read without stress.  I have found on the internet that I am not alone in struggling with Traditional Notation.  And after struggling for a while and not enjoying the learning experience music, many do give up.  This is my main target audience.  I have to often remind folks I’m not trying to replace traditional notation, just provide an alternative.

One day, one of my musician friends looked at my notation and commented “oh that is just tablature”.  At first, I took that to be dismissive (because it was), but later I actually embraced it because that is exactly what I want.  I want a notation that is intuitive to read and also maps to the keyboard while still retaining all the functionality of Traditional Notation.  On the other hand, a young high school student I know (who has played the piano for some years) was intrigued by my idea.  After a brief explanation, he tried it out and was playing advanced pieces (e.g., a Goldberg variation that he did not already play) in WYSIWYP notation in about 30 minutes. While this is the exceptional case, it does demonstrate that the notation can be quickly learned.

Other alternative notations.  My alternative notation is far from the only one that has been proposed over the centuries.  The fact that only one has gotten any traction at all (Klavarskribo) demonstrates the challenge of bucking tradition.  And nothing better than a YouTube video named “Notation Must Die!” illustrates this.  It has over a million views.  In the video, the author examines a handful of alternative notations and then picks them apart.  I agree with much of what he says on these particular ones but I believe there are others that have merit and are worth pursuing (although they may not be fully developed now).  And of course he did not review WYSIWYP (yet!).

But most revealing of the challenge of bucking tradition are the comments to the video.  The bulk of them exclaims that people who can’t learn to read music are either lazy or stupid or both.  Often in these words.  But sprinkled in between those rants are individuals giving testimony to their own struggle to learn to read it.  Some admit to giving up.  In other words, my target audience is out there waiting for a viable alternative.

And in his concluding remarks alternative notations, the video author states “we need to move to a completely digital format. A format which, unlike PDF, retains and understands musical data. When that happens, musicians can choose whatever format they want.”  I agree with that 100% because that is my approach.  The musical data format already exists and it is called MusicXML.  Apps can be written to convert it for display as virtual sheet music in any notational format.   WYSIWYP has such an app (currently at a “beta” level but sufficient for a beginner).  Other apps for alternative notations can be written though.  And that would support my view that musicians should and can have choices.  And I hope to one day make WYSIWYP one of them.