Imogen Holst: An ABC of Music (1963)

Abstract A young friend of mine has been playing the guitar for several years now.1 He has a real aptitude for it: a feeling for the sound of the instrument, a considerable gift for technique, and patience to work hard. But he cannot read music and knows nothing of how music is made, and, what is more, he simply refuses to learn. ‘Too dull and too much trouble’, he says, ‘and anyhow not worth it’. It is true, of course, that a lot of his time is spent in playing dance music, when sight-reading is perhaps not so essential, but he has a considerable interest in straight music, and the lute parts of Dowland have a real fascination for him. When this book is published I want to send him a copy, because he will see that learning to read music, and learning its grammar, need not be dull or too much trouble. He will also discover when he can sight-read that it is really ‘worth it’. Maybe you can pick up tunes and approximate block harmonies without being able to read, but I challenge anyone with that (rather over-rated) gift of playing or singing ‘by ear’ to pick up easily and quickly a Dowland accompaniment exactly as he wrote it (and the ‘exactly’ matters), or the Stravinsky dance-rhythms, or the inner part of a complicated madrigal or partsong-as most of us with experience of amateur choral singing can testify.No, it won’t be only to this guitar boy that I shall send copies of this book, but to many of my friends who sing or play the recorder in amateur groups, and who spend frequent and distressing moments ‘getting lost’.