It’s an interesting thing, sheet music is. On the one hand, it’s just stray marks on paper, odd scratches on the page, that wind up looking a bit like chicken scratch. Puzzling really if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
If you look at sheet music the right way though, it sort of comes to life. The trills and the triplets, the key signatures and the quarter notes all sort of have their own visual rhythm. It’s almost like sound itself jumping off the page at you.
I love the visual repetition of sheet music. I love how faster music sort of looks “darker,” like it has more notes, while slow music looks more legato, and has more ties and smooth runs. I love the jumbled patterns, the odd shapes, the punch of the notes breaking up the white space on the paper. It’s probably an odd thing to stare at sheet music-it’s meant to be played really, not looked at, yet I find something about it so visually appealing…like you could take the most bland picture, put some sheet music behind it and it would suddenly come to life.
It’s an odd thing to look at sheet music, really it is, but I do it anyway.
Until next time…
