Here's a quick post because the article frustrated me and I need an excuse to get off my feet for a few minutes.
For the record, I know that New Worship Conference Seminar: How To Talk To Note Readers is humor, and it did make me laugh. But it perpetuates an unfair and inaccurate stereotype that pains me. (Unless it's my over-worked legs and back.)
A note reader is someone with formal musical training who can look at a page covered with lines and dots, and actually sing it or play it. Note readers aren’t normal humans. Unlike me, they actually studied music in high school and college, whereas I didn’t have time to learn things like scales and signatures; I was too busy smoking weed and listening to Revolution #9 on the Beatles White Album....
First, the kind of "note reader" he's talking about can't just look at a note and hit the right pitch. Okay, the instrumentalists can, but the human voice is a different kind of instrument and rare is the person with the ear to look at a note on the page and sing the correct pitch.
As for what I think he means—that is, being able to look at the patterns of notes in a song written in standard musical notation and know when to go up, when to go down, and whether to do so by a little step or a big leap—I learned that, plus a lot more, in elementary school, back in the 60's. Ordinary, small-town, public elementary school, not high school, not college. So if time signatures, notes, keys, and dynamic markings are foreign concepts in our culture, the first thing I'd ask about is what is going on in our schools.
You may have note readers on your worship team. You can recognize them because they usually have pocket protectors....
I know, I know. It's humor. But it reminds me of jokes about women drivers, or [insert ethnic group of your choice], which we have rightly come to recognize as in poor taste, at least.
(H/T Jon—thanks, my feet are feeling better now.)
Agreed: it's unfunny humor. It's one single conceit - that Italian musical phrases are vaguely silly because they are also used in cooking - stretched to make an entire article. I guess the guy is afraid of people who read music, or speak Italian, or both. If not, he sure writes like it.
And I, too, learned to read notes in elementary school. Too bad this one's another one in the "evangelicals don't do education" column.
