I have heard and read, particularly on social media that reading music is hard if not impossible. Clearly it is not actually impossible otherwise literally no one would ever be able to read it and interpret it. I’ve heard the opinion that it is really hard to read music from people who have never actually tried to learn. While it is an opinion, I don’t think it is a valid opinion. If a person has genuinely tried to learn to read music and never managed to learn, then that is valid. I genuinely do not know anyone who has tried and failed to learn to read music.
Music is written on a staff or stave and it consists of 5 lines and four spaces. Piano music is written on two staves joined together and if you look at it, you can see the two staves are joined together by a bracket at the front and lines joining the two staves together. The top one is for the right hand and the bottom one is for the left hand. This is because the right hand is playing the higher notes and the left hand is playing the lower notes, so it makes sense that the higher notes are written above the lower notes. This is straight forward.
What is also logical is the individual notes. The higher notes sit either on the lines or between in the spaces of the stave. The higher the note, the higher it is written on the staves and the lower the note, the lower it is situated on the stave. Even if you had two notes side by side on the piano, the one that is higher in pitch is written slightly higher on the stave. The order of the notes is always a note on a line is next to a note in the adjoining space and then the next note is on the next line. This pattern of the notes going line, space, line, space just keeps on going in both directions. You can see there is a definite logical pattern happening.
As far as the length of notes go, there is a logical pattern that occurs. The longest single written note is worth 4 beats and it is really just a circle. If you added a stem to that initial circle (and it doesn’t matter if the stem goes up or down from the circle part), then it is now worth 2 beats. If you now ‘color in’ the circle and make it black, it is now worth one beat. If you take this note and either add a tail to it or you join it with a beam going across to another note then it is worth half a beat. Taking this even further, if you added a second tail to the note, or added a second beam to the note, it would now be worth a quarter of a beat. The pattern is that the shorter the note, the more things you need to add to the basic note that is just a circle.
Bar lines are the lines that appear vertically throughout the music and not surprisingly the bar lines divide the music up into bars, which will have a defined number of beats in each of these bars that is indicated by numbers at the beginning of the music. The bars help divide the music into small sections so that a particular rhythm or flow to the music, which is then repeated in each bar. The bar lines show you where that ‘flow’ actually starts again.
While I may have oversimplified how to read music, my point is that learning to read music is not that hard because there are many symbols that are like a logical code and all you need to to become familiar with the code and practice using the code. If you can take the time to do this, you will end up finding that reading music can become easy to read and understand.