My revelation yesterday, that there is such a thing as musical dyslexia, has got me thinking.

Speech music and image making are innate, primal urges. Watch any young child and they love talking and singing along with nursery rhymes, bashing along with a tambourine and scribbling away with crayons. They can get lost in these activities for hours. Their naivety allows them to experiment without the worry of “what people will think.”

These activities soon become formalised in reading and writing, musical scales and Art. Each with it’s prescribed systems of notation and accepted styles and each with it’s barriers to entry designed over the years to keep the professions secure in their income.

Although it seems there will be some learning of poetry by wrote in the new curriculum, the oral tradition has pretty much disappeared, replaced by an obsession with spelling and grammar. No one’s brains are wired up the same way. Dyslexics not only have to battle with making the words stay still on the page or having letters appear facing in a different direction to everyone else, they have then to worry first about the spelling and where the commas go. That is how their literacy skills are judged and approved of.

If you can’t make head or tail of scales or musical notation, there is no place for you in the approved world of music. If the notes leap about and the staves vibrate on the page, you are not going to fit into the world of music. We rarely hear live amateur performances these days. Mostly we hear auto-tuned, note perfect music, timed to atomic clock perfection. That is how we judge ourselves and how we judge an amateur performance. What about all those no-hopers on The X Factor, that are such fun to laugh at, who are honestly crestfallen when they are told they are no good? Once upon a time they would have been the best of their communities, loved and encouraged, providing the only entertainment available.

And the day eventually comes when a child is told to draw properly and stop scribbling. That is the end of experimentation and learning how the materials work. They have been judged to be scribblers. There is no point picking up a pencil if you are not going to make an acceptable work of art. And now we are so bombarded by images of perfection. Most are tweaked to withing an inch of thier life onphotoshop,