Tom Warren asks:

>I'm curious to know how a person who can't read music can write it.  How
>does he/she know what key to write it in, what meter to give to the piece,
>proper notation etc.  etc.  Does the person just write out a melody and
>leave the harmony to someone else? What's the story?

Technology, my boy, technology.  You can play into a MIDI sequencing
program and have a computer program produce a respectable-looking score.
A friend of mine had the job of "arranging" a local jazz man's "concerto."
I put in the quotes not to sneer, but to alert you to the fact that his
arrangement involved a substantial recomposition - my friend turned a
10-minute piece into a 25-minute piece - and that the jazz man played
something on the piano with no indication as to what was solo and what was
tutti.  The jazz player entered the composition into a MIDI keyboard, and
my friend, after cleaning up the rhythmic slop (the pianist couldn't play
to a click track), went to work.  As I understand it, McCartney played a
keyboard into a notational computer program, handed the results to his
orchestrators, and they took it from there.

I happen to think such sequencing/notation software will change the way
composition is taught over the years.

The animus against McCartney because he can't read music - and there
are degrees of musical illiteracy - simply betrays the presumptions of
an eye culture toward an ear culture.  In the Renaissance, you learned
counterpoint not by filling up pieces of paper, but by improvising a part
to what your teacher sang to you.  We know of all sorts of contrapuntal
miracles brought off by jazz people who couldn't read a note.  We forget
that musical notation is a tool, not the sine qua non of music, even of
complex music.

Steve Schwartz