Learning to read music is essential to communicating with other musicians.
It would be foolish to expect that someone could talk with a Spanish speaker without knowledge of the language, why then would we expect to be able to talk with one another without the basics of this language?
Ensembles, bands, choirs, opera, jazz all operate on the written notes first. Since man began to sing, he has invented ways to teach the next generation his songs with some sort of written music.
Before improvisation was the written note.
It all comes down to if you cannot read; you cannot be with a group that reads. This leaves you as a performer left out of a large portion of musical performance venues.
It is impossible to understand anything but the most rudimentary knowledge of music theory without the written note. The theory of music is by necessity based on the written note. I know you say well, this is boring, but someday you will be so glad you started now.
You can learn music by only reading it like you would a book. You will not have to replay the tape or cd a million times or learn from someone else. If you can read music you can learn a song without ever hearing it first. If you can read music you can go straight to the book and get all of the basic information on your own. Have you ever learned a song from someone else and not known if you got it right or got all of the information you need? This greatly speeds up the learning curve. You cannot learn from a book the particular way a band performs the song, but you can get the basis of the song and go from there.
Know the way the author of those songs meant for them to sound. This is a very compelling aspect of reading music. If you learn the music from the written page straight from the authors’ mouth, as it were, you know how he meant it to sound. He may have phrased it differently or wrote it on a different instrument or in a different key. In “Georgia On My Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael, for example, no ones plays the intro. Even if you have known a song all of your life you may not know the entire version or the way it was meant to sound. Think about how you would feel if you were a songwriter and no one ever performed the song the way you wrote it all the way through.
Find new music you would never know otherwise. Imagine if you were in a library full of books and you could not read. How sad that would be. Learn to read music today and discover new worlds.
If you can read, you can discover new music. It may seem a little hard at first, but so was riding a bicycle as I recall. In fact the first time my father let go from holding me on a bicycle I ran into a post and knocked it over! I rarely do that these days now that I have learned how. In fact there are days when I don’t knock anything over.
You may be suprised how much better you become when you can read music. Learn to read music and you can discover music you would never hear otherwise, be able to speak with authority
about the intent of the author and you will have more fun, I guarantee it.