Oh, dear. You got me. I have strong feelings about this, largely because, being lazy, I have never learned to play immediately by ear. But, having made my living sight-reading for 25 (now 50?) years, I find no barrier between me and music just because the dots are, well, lines and dots.
The important things, however, that the non-dot players mention, ARE terribly important - that is
- watching the dancers
- listening to the other musicians
- playing "musically" (by which I mean, knowing how to phrase, that is, figuring out where the music is coming from, and where it's going to)
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listening to great players in order to learn "style"- that is, figuring out the character of each tune, and being able to vary that character if wanted or needed
That said, the dots don't have to get in the way. An orchestra player, for instance, MUST watch the conductor while playing, and a symphony violinist MUST listen to all the other violinists and play exactly with them, and MUST listen to the whole orchestra and understand the character of the piece. That's totally like watching the dancers, listening to other musicians and learning to play with style.
The problem comes when you first learn to play. If it's done right, you have a good, musical model to follow (sounds like playing by ear, doesn't it?) instead just playing one note after another, with no shape. The Suzuki method's brilliance, IMHO, was in providing the children with recordings of people playing Twinkle Twinkle (and all the other tunes) and getting their parents to play those recordings over and over for their kids even before they started learning to hold a violin. Then, when the kids start reading music (late in the process) they automatically played what they had heard (i.e., real music), and were able to figure out pretty quickly that those "dots" are not just little lego pieces, but large sculptures of something beautiful.
There's more, of course - improvisation, understanding harmonic progression, etc. - and whether you read music or not influences those things, too, in different ways, some useful, some not-so-useful.
And there's playing with others - if you give me your dots, we can start playing together right away, but if I have to memorize your repertoire first, we may have to wait a while.
Don't get me wrong. I totally admire people who can learn immediately by ear, and if I had it to do over, would have learned how when I started playing for dances, but please don't blame boring playing on reading music. Instead, figure out how to play interestingly, no matter how you do it, with or without dots.
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