I am a saxophone player.
If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?
I still don't know how to read music.
When I was a teeny little girl, I was in dancing school, and I sang. We had to put a dance to a song, so I went to the 10-cent store one day and looked at all the sheet music. It was all laid out, and I picked 'Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries.'
I kept listening to albums where I'd hear this very joyful sound - and it was always the glockenspiel. Then I ordered one online, and I figured out how to play it.
I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.
I'd been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera.
I always try to get back to the original source of the song. It's not always there in the sheet music, which is sometimes just a sketchy blueprint of what the song is about.
I collect musical theatre anthologies. I have a whole library of them.
If I could read it, I could play it.
I do like a song that can look good on a page without even being sung. I edit and edit and edit.
I had to go to an audition for a rather large West End musical set on a Greek island. I didn't realise that you had to go with sheet music to give to the pianist. I took a Mark Bolan CD, a small ghetto blaster and then sang along. It was absolutely appalling.
I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.
At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.
I would love to do an album of standards!
I never took sheet music seriously. I could do better myself just by listening to other people and using my own intuition.
I can read a chord chart, but I couldn't read a note chart.
The first time I ever played the trumpet in public, I played the Marine Hymn. I sounded terrible.
Never mind, put any book on the piano, and someone can turn from time to time, so I need not look as though I played by heart.
I used to love 'Jeeves And Wooster.' That theme tune was great. I remember writing to them when I was little to get the music so I could learn it on the piano, and they sent me the sheet music.
We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote 'Let the Rest of the World Go By.'
I always wanted to learn how to play the guitar.
If you look at an old piece of sheet music, there's all kinds of text on it, there are ads, there are proclamations of the greatest songs' success, there's artwork. So there is a tactile, physical experience of learning the song and the way it's notated.
We see ourselves as the world's digital library. That can be a lot more than books. We do want to expand to other types of content: sheet music, magazines, user-generated content.
