I recently got a comment from someone who was refuting my claim that anyone could learn to read music. He mentioned that despite something like 8 teachers over 10 years couldn’t get him learning to read music. First of all, that is some serious dedication and effort and clearly the issue was not an incompetent teacher or that the teacher didn’t teach in a way that was most suitable to him because he tried several different teachers.
This gentleman that submitted the comment gave me the impression that he was very intelligent. Maybe because he could communicate his thoughts in such a clear and precise way, that clearly he has enough intelligence to theoretically be able to learn to read music. It just never happened.
He finished off by stating that he had been playing the piano for over 50 years. I must admit that this did put a smile on my face that this man had found a way to play the piano despite years of formal lessons that really didn’t get him very far. Clearly this gentleman has been playing the piano by ear.
I have a theory and it is just a theory which could possibly be proven wrong. The theory is that people who find playing the piano is simple and straight forward often won’t read music simply because they don’t need to. They can play very successfully without the aid of notation, so why even bother?
I will always encourage someone to learn to read music whether they play by ear or not as I genuinely believe that there are benefits to being able to read music. However, if a person can play by ear and either absolutely cannot read music after trying for years or they just simply believe it is too hard and has never attempted to learn, then it is still valid to play the piano by ear.
Ultimately the goal of learning to play the piano is to be able to play the piano. The end goal is not to learn to read music. Learning to read musical notation is a means to an end. I would argue, a very useful means to an end, but still only a means to an end.
So if you can play the piano by ear, even just a little bit then I would encourage you to keep going and just remember that there are traditional piano players who cannot imagine how they could ever learn to play by ear.