Transposing Tradition

In a letter to the Austin Chronicle dated July 17, 2008 and titled The Question: How Good are the Musicians?, author Tom Bowman asks

Who wants to go down to Red River and get their ears assaulted by band after band of “musicians” who know about 10 chords, write insipid lyrics, and can’t even transpose their own songs from one key to another? If the level of talent were higher, the established clubs wouldn’t have to bring in so many touring acts.

How fascinating that Mr. Bowman equates the ability to “transpose songs from one key to another” with the bands’ “level of talent”! This is by no means an isolated example, however; the ability to transpose is often equated with musical skill and/or talent. A Google search for the keywords +transpose +sight +key +talent turns up almost 3,000 hits.

Yet the difficulty of transposition has no relevance whatsoever to musical knowledge, skill, or talent. It is merely an artifact of the pitch-focused design of traditional musical instruments and notation. At most, it is an artificial barrier placed in the path of aspiring musicians.

Using the ThumMusic System, transposition is a complete non-issue.

I am reminded of upper-class English schoolchildren, who were compelled to learn Latin as recently as the 1980’s. Why? Because Latin was the universal language of scholarly discourse…200 years previously. To be recognized as being One of Us, one had to speak the upper class' secret language, for purely exclusionary reasons. Anyone who could not afford to waste time and money learning an utterly useless secret language was excluded from the upper-class club.

I don’t think that Americas' taxpayers can afford to waste their time and money attempting – with a low success rate – to teach its children the secret language of music’s upper classes. By using the ThumMusic System, students can concentrate on learning about music.

Which is the point, really, isn’t it?