When I was a teenager, I wanted to become a musician. I didn’t practice enough to get good at anything, but in the process, I saw tons of musicians perform, and musicians of all kinds of genres of music, from rock to jazz to classical.
Other than at classical music performances, I never saw a musician look at sheet music, regardless of how complex the music being performed was. Indeed, in my mind, sheet music was something that was only used in the realm of classical music.
I played in a band in college, and we never looked at sheet music (or even scribbled notes of the chords of a song), but of course we were just playing simple 3-4 chord rock songs (and if you forgot them, you just looked over at another musician to see what he was playing). And we could play 2-3 hours-worth of songs like that from memory.
I also remember enjoying watching a local jazz fusion band, Kilimanjaro, and not only would those guys not look at any sheet music, they wouldn’t even look at their instruments!! They would just look out at the crowd with big smiles on their faces and groove through really complex compositions.
Then in the late 1980s, I went to Taiwan, and for the first time in my life, I saw pop music performances where the musicians had sheet music in front of them.
At first, I explained this away by thinking “Ok, these musicians must have been hired for this specific gig, and they are not a regular band who performs with this artist, so they are not familiar with the songs,” although in the back of my head there was still a voice saying “But they’re still just playing 3-minute 4-chord pop songs. . .”
Over the years, I have continued to see this, and to even see musicians perform pop songs that they wrote themselves in this way. When I see this, I get totally turned off. I think to myself, “Dude! This is not a sonata in C# minor that you’re playing. It’s a 4-chord pop song, and YOU WROTE IT!!! You can’t take your eyes off of the sheet music and make the performance more natural and spontaneous?!!”
To be fair, in recent years I’ve seen aging baby boomers perform with the chords written on big sheets of paper on the floor, however, 1) their memory has been damaged by decades of recreational drug and alcohol (ab)use, and 2) they at least pretend to not be looking at the chords that their fried brains can no longer recall so that the audience can have the illusion that they are watching a natural, live performance.
But back in the day, I can remember going to Grateful Dead concerts where Jerry Garcia, who’s brain was surely under the influence of multiple substances, would only mess up maybe one line in a 4-hour concert (and the crowd would love it and go nuts).
Also to be fair, I’ve seen dangdut bands in Indonesia and rock bands from Malaysia play for hours with no musical scores in sight, and if you look, for instance, at the stuff that the Vietnamese band Unlimited used to play, it’s very complex and they didn’t look at sheet music.
However, I still keep seeing musicians sitting behind sheet music in settings where there is no need for there to be any sheet music (like in small venues where nothing is being filmed or televised). . .
What is up with that? What is its history? Clearly it is a sign of “Western influence” from some point in time. What is the logic? What sustains it? Does this only happen in certain countries? Am I the only person in the world who gets turned off by it?
I am 100% with you on this one, professor; and for essentially the same reasons. I suspect that in many cases, the sheet music is meant to convey the message that the musicians are serious, trained, reading musicians- which is quite frankly asinine.
I was unfamiliar with UnlimiteD until just now, and they obviously have well-developed chops. I’m betting the keyboard player is also the musical director; in the performance I watched, that’s what it looked like anyway. I’m not a big fan of pop-prog-metal in general, though. Perhaps I am simply easily bored, or have become excessively cynical in my old age, but I prefer to listen to music which has not had every last vestige of regional flavour and individual artistic nuance systematically crushed out of it until it becomes the ultimate international generic popular music, sounding exactly the same all over the world aside from having the lyrics in different languages…
Thank you, Liam!! I’ve very happy to see that you agree.
As for Unlimited, I get your point, however, in their case, some of the songs that they sang were “covers” of old songs that they transformed significantly to make them into hard rock ballads. So, one could argue that in those cases, being “international generic” was actually something creative and in the spirit of rock.
Sure, absolutely. And that is most definitely both difficult and creative- I tried for years, back in the day, to come up with a sort of punk rock arrangement of Mireille Mathieu’s ‘Celui Que J’aime’, and it was incredibly hard; much harder than I expected! I never had any trouble with arranging more standard rock songs (jazz standards were harder!), but I never did get that one done. Given the distance between even 20th century Vietnamese popular song styles and the idiom in which they are playing, that is certainly an accomplishment. I mean, I’m not trying to be unfair- another relevant point, given their youth, is that no-one has learned to play the way we did for a very long time. What I mean is, now they largely learn to play guitar (or bass, or drums, etc.) in genre-specific pedagogical modalities (i.e. “Learn To Play Metal Guitar”, “Learn To Play Country Guitar”, “Learn To Play Modern Pop Guitar”, etc.). It is certainly a far cry from the Mel Bay chord book, but I feel as though some level of appreciation of the universality of music has been lost along the way…
Incidentally, you’ve heard Phương Tâm’s ‘Magical Nights – Saigon Surf, Twist & Soul (1964 – 1966)’, haven’t you? I can’t remember if we discussed it before. The song ‘Phut Say Mo (In My Dream)’ with that Duke Ellington sort of arrangement just kills me, every time…