I was just watching a trailer for a new movie called Embracing Dyslexia. A faltering piano tinkles in the background as the music track. I was half listening to it when… BLAM! Everything made sense. Dyslexia must affect the reading of music too!
A quick search took me to the British Dyslexia web page on the subject. I’m 50 something years old and I only just figured it out!

I loved music as a child – it was something deep inside me. I sang all the time and was thrilled the day I learned to whistle. I wanted to be just like the Beatles when I grew up. But I couldn’t make head or tail of written music. Oh, the frustration! Every time I tried to learn music they put those dots in front of me and every time those dots jangled about the page like a room full of bluebottles. Why wouldn’t they sit still on the stave? Actually the stave was a bit wobbly too, vibrating like guitar strings!

So it would be suggested that maybe I wasn’t quite ready to learn the guitar or piano or whatever. Singing in the choir was easy. I just sang what the person next to me was singing. I was so sensitive to the music I could pretty much guess what the notes were anyway, getting a bit cross when the composer put in a weird, unexpected modulation to make it more interesting.

I eventually learned to play the guitar when I discovered that they drew little pictures of the chords above the misc and even showed where to put your fingers. But lead guitar meant nothing to me. The scales didn’t either and they still don’t make sense. Semitones are the same as “i before e”. I know the rule and can recite it backwards, but I still spell cieling wrong! Ceiling just doesn’t look right.

And the black keys on the piano… why? I just don’t get them. When I watch proper musicians I’m amazed. They follow those notes and stick to a tempo: tick, tick, tick. It’s why I was never any good playing with other musicians. Music to me was a purely emotional art form. Tempo, like Space Time, was relative. The tempo of a song that I wrote depended entirely on how I felt that day, what my voice was like, and the emotional intensity of the song at that precise moment.

When I performed the songs I wrote. I started and finished. I couldn’t remember any of the bit in between because I’d been there, in the story, enveloped in the emotion, in the moment, performing.

Like the observer effect in particle physics, as soon as I turned the tape recorder on to play a proper performance, in time to a click track so I could layer harmonies and overdubs, it all fell to pieces. I could sing along quite happily in playback as an emotional response, but as soon as the record button went down I could see those notes bouncing up and down – marching ants crawling along the staves – swallows collecting up on telegraph wires – and ill all went to pieces – thinking about it too much.

Weird! But I feel liberated having finally understood. Maybe I was never really meant to be in a band after all!