Comment by chongli

11 years ago

How many people could fully experience Beethoven's 5th by reading the sheet music, assuming they've never heard it before?

For musically gifted people who read sheet music every day, I have heard that they start to hear scores in their head while reading them, and that it's not so different than reading words. So in the case of classical music, the comparison to text is quite applicable. Shakespeare is almost unintelligible to me until I see it performed. I see no difference between this and a textually encoded symphony.