There’s a moral to this story somewhere.

When I was at school, I had some keyboard lessons.  You know the kind – where you are excused from class to sit in a tiny room for ten minutes trying to speed learn how to play a tune from an “easy” book. 

It was in one of these lessons I got into a discussion (argument) with my teacher about how “Rock Around the Clock” should be played. 

You see, I wasn’t playing what was written on the page. 

“Those notes are all crotchets!”  She would point out with exasperation.  “They are all the same length.”

“But the song doesn’t sound like that!”  I thought that if I was going to play Rock around the Clock, it should sound like the record did.  But this was a simplified version for doing keyboard grades – and the teacher pointed out that if I played it like it sounded instead of how it was written in the book, I wouldn’t pass the exam.

Who made up that rule?  To me, it seemed the ultimate silliness that you should fail at playing music by playing it to sound better. 

As it was, I never took the exam.  But whenever I played Rock Around the Clock, people didn’t seem to mind that not all those notes were crotchets.