What is the art of reading music?

I found a place on the internet that states

the art of reading music is the ability to read music fast

especially if you have never before seen the music you are reading.

To me, that sounds more like a race than "art."

                                                                         --Barbara A. Moir, M. Ed.

So here is a better definition:

The art of reading music is the ability to add musical expression to the decoding of music symbols to give the music holistic human expression, the same human expression we find in all the arts. Just as a painting, sculpture, writing, or dance can convey a mood or particular feeling--music can also convey meaning. Learning to read notation accurately is technique. But learning to read accurately and also play the notes with expression is art.

Traditionally in instrumental music, reading notation is a two-step process. First, we learn to recognize what is written on the music staff and transfer that information to a musical instrument. At that point, the sounds produced are usually awkward and not yet refined (at least that is the case for most beginning students). The neurological explanation for this is that neurons for reading symbols do not and can not carry expressive information while those neurons are being developed and lengthened.

However, if that’s all a person learns to do—decode, which means playing all the correct notes, on time, without stopping--the person may lose interest in reading music because (at that point) it is only a mechanical exercise with no particular meaning. We can compare it to learning to shoot basketball hoops, doing it perfectly, but never being on a team.  Once you can do anything over and over again perfectly, it loses it's appeal. You look for something more.

That's why learning the art of reading music is so important in the early stages of reading music. By learning to slightly modify the tones of the music being read, a person not only learns to make the music more interesting, but uniquely their own. They can choose to play music in different ways-- fast or slow, happy or sad, choppy or smooth. The performer can build the music up to surprise the audience with a special ending. Or perform the music notation in a way that captivates the audience.

Neurologically, I like to call the ability to play expressively the Linking Mode because the brain has some way of linking decoding skills from the long neurons for reading with neurons related to music intelligence (in another part of the brain). 

Learn more about neurons for music in the brain by reading The Neuroscience of Reading Music by Barbara A. Moir, M. Ed. (Available on Amazon)