Reading the Notes

Just glanced at the blog and realized that there's no way I can keep that monk photo from the previous entry at the top for any longer, so I decided to write about, what else, singing.

I'm learning a song in Spanish called El Majo Discreto. After all this time of my Spanish knowledge interfering with my Italian, now that I'm singing something in Spanish I find that the Italian is interfering! Go figure.

My teacher suggested that I figure out how to play it on the piano, so I sat down and actually did the "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge" and "FACE" thing to work out the notes and hand write them in on top of the staff. I even remembered the sharps... which I also had to figure out with the fudgeface saying. Then I sat at the piano and plunked it out. It definitely does help me to learn the melody faster than I would if I just listened to it. I actually like playing it on the piano. If I get myself into a certain state of relaxed awareness I can play along by looking at the music. Oh is that reading the music? I guess? But I have to concentrate and get to this place where my fingers just find the right notes on the keys. Normally I don't have enough time to myself to do that for long periods of time. And it's just the melody, not the chords or anything like that. But somehow my brain sees the jumps on the staff and can translate that to jumps in the keys with my fingers. I guess I can do it with my voice too. Wow... Am I actually learning to read music? I still have to count the staff to know the letter of the note, although I know where they all are on the piano without having to count from any specific location. Perhaps I just need more practice identifying the notes on the staff so I can do it at a glance. So maybe I've just suggested to myself that I learn to read music. Fascinating. Maybe I'll study up on that a bit. My problem is that I'll want to know all the fancy complicated stuff all at once, when I should go little by little. Then I'll get impatient, then frustrated with myself. Then I'll get over it, and then I'll learn it for real. Wish me luck.