Do you know the result? I don’t read music, but that’s no barrier to reimagining great classics | classical music

II’m a harmonica and accordion player and one half of the classic folk duo Stevens and Pound. As a multi-instrumentalist, I am rooted in oral, aural, and community folk traditions. Music and songs are transmitted by ear, either through recordings or – which is more enjoyable – traditional music sessions. Here, instrumentalists and singers come together to share, exchange and play tunes, drawing from an ever-evolving repertoire. While groups of melodies Their scores certainly serve as a skeleton—providing the basic structure of pitch and rhythm but rarely providing clear instructions on how to play the music.

Delia Stevens and I are about to go out on tour to perform with Britten Sinfonia and Robert MacFarlane in a new work called The Silent Planet, a remake of Holst’s Planets suite. The culmination of 18 months of rehearsals and revisions, the result of this 60-minute work, organized by Ian Gardiner, totals 165 pages and includes Earth, an entirely new composition.

I co-wrote this piece, but never read the score; Actually, I don’t read music.

I’m hardly alone in this. The Unreader’s Tradition features a star-studded cast, including Paul McCartney, Hans Zimmer, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and Taylor Swift. No one can claim that these musicians were hampered by their inability to read music. Auditory mastery can be as powerful a force as visual knowledge.

For me, reading music was a skill that never took hold, exacerbated by the challenges I face with dyslexia. I spent years believing that this was a constant obstacle, preventing me from tackling complex pieces of music or longer pieces of music. After all, a classical work by a composer like Bach or Handel is seen as a comprehensive blueprint – the notation, often accompanied by Italian performance terminology, clearly tells the performer how to approach dynamics, rhythm, articulation and articulation. It is the complete instruction manual.

The challenge intensifies in large-scale collaborations. My early experience with the wonderful Sinfonia Cymru highlighted this. We were rehearsing a project involving my work The Reckoning and Stevens and Pounds’ arrangements of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which last year toured across Wales. I found myself adrift when the conductor used terms that were unfamiliar to me. I had to explain with the group that I was a beginner at the new language of tuttis and legatos, and they could help me by replacing or translating the classical terms. However, the gap in terminology works both ways. The folk world has its own detailed lexicon of terms: jigs, hornpipes, slide dancing, reels, slides and polka to name a few. These distinct tone types are differentiated primarily by their rhythm and time signature, correspond to various regional folk dances and ceilidh dances, and often possess subtle subclassifications necessary for a deeper understanding of the repertoire.

I like to think of Stevens and Pound, the duo that classical percussionist Delia Stevens and I formed in late 2022, As a multilingual in spirit. Since then, we’ve been on a mission to rethink the great classics. Our goal is not to simply play cover versions, or make up for my lack of reading, but to focus on the dynamism and freedom that playing by ear brings. Taking The Planets, The Lark Ascending, and other pieces in the subgenre we’ve created recreates them in unexpected ways. We intentionally reimagine familiar works, whether they’re cult classics or from other genres, because they give audiences an instant point of connection before taking them on an entirely new, transformative musical journey.

Lark Ascending was our first foray into this area. Its meditative and improvisational nature made it a relatively safe starting point, and here we developed our system for re-engaging with the original compositions, based on audio feedback recordings from Delia that I learn by ear.

Perhaps out of a false sense of security, we decided to follow this up with Holst’s monumental masterpiece. This has been the biggest test yet for our system and my mind. The technical requirements were so great that I had an extensive collection of custom harmonicas designed by Seydel, Suzuki and other harmonica companies, so rather than simply playing the work on a chromatic harmonica, I acquired different timbres, techniques and sounds to bring the pieces to life.

The same applies to my accordion: I had to develop new techniques and learn different scales and chord progressions that could not normally be played on an instrument. Even more difficult than the technical obstacles was the psychological obstacle of processing such a complex score without being able to read it.

However, learning by ear and resisting explicit instructions for a piece has become my greatest strength: it forces me to approach the music laterally, and to bring my own soundworld and unique personal voice to the work – a voice that is not limited to dots on a page.

This is not a question of right or wrong: I have always challenged the idea that classical players can’t play popular music, or that popular musicians can’t play classical music. Whether you call our tour dates concerts or concerts, the two genres are much more interconnected than we thought.

The first half of our program features two great composers who recognized and embraced these connections: Percy Grainger and Benjamin Britten. Despite their mutual admiration – Britten dedicated his suite of English folk tunes to Grainger – the pair met only once: at Cecil Sharp House in London, the headquarters of the English Folk Song and Dance Society. That says something in itself.