My teacher never gave me a sheet of music. For a long time I thought this was a limitation of the tradition rather than a feature of it.

What the page cannot hold

Notation can tell you a note lasts a quarter beat. It cannot tell you that the note before it is leaned on slightly, that the ornament is a shape rather than a fixed sequence, or that this particular phrase is always played a little behind the beat because that is what it means. All of that is transmitted by imitation, and there is no shorthand for it.

The method

• Listen to a phrase many more times than feels necessary before touching the instrument.
• Sing it. If you cannot sing it, you do not know it yet, whatever your fingers can do.
• Copy one player exactly, for a while. Style comes from having absorbed something specific, not from avoiding influence.

It is slower than reading. It also produces musicians who can play with each other without a page, adjust to a singer in the moment, and hear a modulation coming. Those abilities are the point of the tradition, and they are not on the page to begin with.