The allure of musical notation

I've always felt the allure of musical notation, and been enchanted by the elegant patterns it creates on the page, hinting at mysteries of movement and texture, yet so entirely distant from actual musical sounds. Notes on the page are silent and static, entirely unlike the shifting kaleidoscope of sound flowing on the current of time; yet somehow musical sounds are encapsulated there on the page, waiting for human intervention to reconstitute them into vibrations radiating through the air, finding fulfillment in human ears.

Yet alongside my wonder at this mystery, there's been a concurrent frustration, that although human interventions is the magical ingredient to transform notes on the staff into music in the air, I myself as a human being am not adequate to the task. With great effort, I can render simple notation into sounds resembling music, but my skills are frustratingly rudimentary. Most music I can only stare at and wonder what it might sound like.

But I have an image that motivates me, one of spending a rainy afternoon with a not-overly-complicated book of music, and being able to take some previously unfamiliar tunes and turn them into recognizable music. It would be OK with me if it took me a few attempts to make things sound right: I just want to be able to effect that magical transformation from tadpoles dancing on the staff into molecules dancing in the air.

OK, so that's about all the formal English I can spew this evening. Some thoughts seem to demand that kind of writing to do them justice, while others would just sound silly phrased that way. I'm getting to the practical part now, and that demands more pragmatic language.

So how can I improve my music reading?

I've invested in a variety of sight reading books, and am working my way through them at a rate of 4-6 pages a day (well, 2 a day when I had the flu last week, but that's better than nothing). That's probably not as much time as I should be spending per day, but I'm somewhat limited in my attention span because of the medications I'm stuck with (very frustrating! I used to have awesome concentration...). Actually, I should time myself and see just how much time I am spending. I might need to adjust my page quota a bit.

The frustrating thing is that I've only been playing piano again for a few months, and only had a year or two of lessons (if that) as a child, so my repertoire level is pretty low, and thus my sight-reading level is even lower. On the bright side, I can sight-read pretty fluently if there's only one note happening at a time; it's the multitasking between two notes read from 2 different staves and played with both hands simultaneously that kills me. So I suppose I've graduated from the beginner-most level of sight-reading only one note at a time -- hey, it's kind of gratifying to look at it that way! Progress has been made!

One peculiar thing I've noticed though is that my flu seems to have killed off some useful brain cells. Before I got sick, I was getting better at doing intervalic reading, which was a new concept to me, but quite useful. But right around the time I started convalescing I seemed to become much stupider all of a sudden, and my new-found intervalic reading skills evaporated. I wonder what happened...