Score-reading on guitar : A study of what strategies and methods guitarists at the Swedish aestethics program use in a specific score-reading task

Abstract

This paper aims (i) to investigate what strategies and methods guitar students at the Swedish aestethic programme use when they play notes after a specific score , and (ii) to find out what they think is easy or hard about reading music. The method of this paper is an experiment combined with an interview with 5 students. The purpose of the interview is to find out what the students think they use for methods and strategies when they play guitar after a score.The purpose of the experiment is to see how they solve the task to play after a notepaper and to compare what they think they do to what they actually are doing. The theory I am using in this paper is Donald Schöns and Bengt Molanders theory about “knowledge in action”. The results show that the many students use different strategies and methods to solve the notebound task. The strategies and methods they use are: a) playing within a so called “box”, b) the use of octaves to find the right tones, c) the usage of open strings, and d) memorizing techniques. They also find it easier to read notes that are close to each other and therefore they think it is harder to read notes that are further away from each other. They also find it harder to read notes that are not in the scale