First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not and expert on this topic but rather I am an experienced music teacher that has an opinion.
Dysmusia was first coined in the early 2000’s and the experts are still as yet undecided as to whether it is real or not.
I do not understand that it has taken more than twenty years to figure it out, mean while dyslexia and dyscalculia are both well acknowledged. After all, the three are very similar except dyslexia is all about the difficulties with the written word and dyscalculia is about difficulty working with numbers and mathematical equations. Dysmusia is considered a difficulty with reading traditional music notation.
I believe that dysmusia is indeed real and eventually the experts are going to come to the same conclusion. This means that there are people who have a great deal of trouble learning to read music. It’s not because they are not trying or putting in the effort – if people can have trouble reading can have consideration and people with dyscalculia have consideration , then why not dysmusia?
Dyslexia and dyscalculia are recognized difficulties and there are established strategies to help an individual. Both dyslexia and dyscalulia are not considered as curable, however, it is also not considered to prevent a person from reading letters or numbers accurately. Surely it follows that while it would make it difficult to learn to read music, potentially having dysmusia would mean that great difficulty with reading music is experienced, however, this wouldn’t mean that learning to read music for a person with dysmusia is impossible. Let me repeat myself: I think it is entirely possible for a person that has dysmusia could learn to read music, but it would not be easy at all.
Fortunately if people had dysmusia, then they could still choose whether they could learn to read music or not. I would think that most would probably prefer to not learn to read music and instead learn to play the piano by ear or they could learn a chordal method, where only the chords were written above the lyrics, with numbers and letters.
As I have stated earlier, dysmusia has not been confirmaed by the experts, but I personally think it is just a matter of time. However, just because someone finds it challenging to read music, does not mean they could have dysmusia. Everyone takes some time to learn to read music – it is never an instant thing at all. On top of this, piano music, harp and organ music have right hand parts as well as left hand parts that reading them both at the same time is a challenge for anyone.
So if you are having trouble learning to read music, then I would like to encourage you to keep trying – learning to read music is never an easy task, regardless of whether you believe to have dysmusia or not.