On musical dyslexia
Bassoon player Alison Wormell takes us on the road to discovering their musical dyslexia and the impact its discovery has had on their playing
Last week, I played second bassoon in Mozart Requiem for the third time this year and probably the sixth or seventh time in my life. There's a particular passage in the ‘Offertorium: Domine Jesu’ where the bassoon doubles the strings in an unpredictable string of semi quavers for twelve bars. It was the first time I have performed the Requiem and really felt confident in that section.
Was it practise? Maybe a little, but not really. The key here was finding out in January 2022, after playing music for twenty years that I am musically dyslexic. I struggle to properly read music. The inexplicable and surprising silly mistakes I would make in lessons, rehearsals, and performances weren't because I hadn't prepared adequately. They weren't because I was nervous, although that never helps focus. It was because I couldn't consistently read music... and often I would read something I had played many times, wrong.
When I look at a page of music, it gently swims. The staves are not really.. there. If I really look, I can identify the notes and rhythms but anything fast always needs to be memorised. Key signatures don't really exist, I naturally don't see them and have spent a lot of time kicking myself for "forgetting" to check them. Looking at the conductor in orchestra is somewhat dangerous if the music has any repetition (even just rhythmic) because I will look back at the page and have honestly no idea where we might be.
I wish someone had told me that reading music shouldn't be this difficult. I never had particular trouble reading words except for large slabs on a screen. I'd just highlight lines on the computer as I read so I didn't lose my place. No one had any idea that I might be dyslexic, even though I'm an extremely visual-spatial thinker (a quality that is common in dyslexic folk).
This January, I was preparing for an audition, and there was a tricky Mozart excerpt for bassoon that I just couldn't perceive on the page, even though it was harmonically simple. No matter how much I practised it, if I had the music in front of me I'd get tripped up and confused. If I tried it from memory, it was too difficult to remember it and focus on all the elements of playing.
I remembered a friend from school and one from college who would put a blue or green filter over their schoolwork/music. So I put a blue colour filter on my iPad.
Suddenly, clarity. The staves lined up. I could see the notes, black against the blue page. The amount of attention required to comprehend the music was more than halved. I didn't believe it, so I turned the filter off. Chaos on the screen again. It was only intelligible because of all of the mechanisms I'd developed over the past twenty years, but at a high cost of focus.
An example of music without and with the blue filter
I rang my mum, and cried on the phone to her. It just explained so much. Why I struggled to teach kids to read music, making mistakes as I taught them. Why I found sight reading baffling even though I knew I should be capable of it. Why I would write note names above notes and at the end of lines as I struggled to read them whilst playing. Why I could make reading mistakes on pieces I had played for the last five years (once I play a piece for longer it's functionally memorised anyhow).
If someone had picked up that I didn't read music properly from when I was much younger, I think my experience as a musician would have been very different. I'd love to have known that although I can read words very well, it doesn’t preclude me from musical dyslexia. But no one even mentioned the concept to me until over three years after my undergrad. Even then I had no idea that what I was experiencing was musical dyslexia.
So, if you're having trouble with a student reading or making incomprehensible mistakes, maybe try putting a blue or green filter over their music. It might make no difference to them. Or it might switch the lights on in their brain - and they'll have so much more concentration to give to the actual storytelling of music making.
Alison Wormell (they/them)
Alison Wormell (they/them) is a British-Australian bassoonist, living in London and nipaluna/Hobart. They have just completed a four month Tutti Bassoon contract with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and spent the first quarter of 2022 in the Arctic Circle as Acting Principal Bassoon of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra.
Alison recently launched Play Outdoors Productions, a film production house and community for underrepresented voices in the outdoors. Their mission is to amplify marginalised voices, explore new forms of storytelling, champion new compositions by emerging composers, and increase the accessibility of art music.
Other ways to describe the fullness of Alison
good hugger, too empathetic to watch tv, cyclist who rides for the pleasure of feeling like they’re flying, outdoors obsessive, zucchini enthusiast, hormonally disabled but learning how to manage it, softly and loudly spoken all at once, someone whose gender is contained in their work boots and akubra hat, mud connoisseur, embroidery elf.
