Sight Reading

A hauntingly beautiful passage (calm and hypnotic despite the appearance on the page) from the Passacaglia from Sorabji's 5 hour long Opus Clavicembalisticum. 

Sight Reading

Sight reading is a subject that strikes a chord for me personally, because I am very good at it. I state this as a simple fact, based on experience seeing other people reading and their opinions of my reading. I'm not proud of this skill because it was not hard-won for me. Mark Twain said in his autobiography that he wasn't proud of being an excellent speller because he did not work hard to become so; it just came naturally. I feel the same way, though I know that the skill did not come naturally; it was a product of how I learned to play the piano and is a reflection of my poor practice habits as a student growing up.

Someone asked me once what it was like before I learned to read music. I puzzled over the question for a minute trying to dredge up something from distant memories but couldn't find anything. I assume it's the same as trying to remember what it was like before you learned to read words. I don't remember ever not knowing. 

I do remember that the first piece of music that involved sharps was something involving dragons... from a little book that only exists in memories now. Soon after, I started working through the Bastien books, levels 1 through 4. Then I started reading into easier pieces of the Anna Magdalena Notebook, and tried very hard with some Chopin. Eventually, I found enough facility that I could proceed on my own without the assistance of my mother. I distinctly remember getting over my fear of difficult key signatures when I was reading through Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, that passage in C-sharp major (7 sharps in the signature). For some reason, that passage crystallized my understanding of reading signatures. 

For all my years up to college, I had no teacher after my mother and thus felt no need to practice. All I did was read. I played through all the books I could get a-hold of and played through them again and again. Playing piano was much like watching TV; just planting myself on the bench, seeing what's on, and just watching the music go by. After a few years of this...

I get a kick out of these internet memes because I'm an amazingly mature person.

... I got to college and continued this habit, fostering an interest in the repertoire by reading through it, and neglecting my studies by not concentrating on a single piece for more than 20 minutes. 

That's basically how I got here. It's an addiction that I am still fighting, though it's helped me get acquainted with a good deal of organ literature. 

How is it done?

Sight reading music is much like reading words on the page. One starts by recognizing individual notes and matching where they are on the staff to where they belong on the keyboard. After doing this enough, one doesn't think about the names of the notes anymore, but simply recognizes them as locations on the keyboard. 

The next step is to start seeing larger structures in the music. An easy example are chords, stacks of notes. If you step back from the individual notes, you can see that each chord has its own shape. Some shapes come up very often and once you recognize how to play one of them, it's not a far stretch to play all of the chords of that shape. 

After chords, you start to see lines of notes. Realizing that written musical notation is really a graph of pitch over time, you see where notes line up in time, and how these lines appear on the keyboard. Basically, we start to see larger structures up to a point where we can take in all the notes faster than is needed to play them. Now we can sight read instead of practice. And if the notes get to be too many, we just fake it a little till we get to a more manageable spot!

Obviously this is a very flawed attitude towards music and will actually stunt your growth as a musician. Reading becomes a type-writer process, a process that requires no comprehension of the structure of the music or indeed the very sound of it. Sight-reading with headphones on becomes simple if you can just keep time. 

~ ~ ~

Nowadays I read a bit differently. I try to do it intelligently, listening carefully to what I play. It's a more productive use of time but is still a distraction from real work. So, I'm still trying to cut back. It makes for a good stress-reliever, however.

Sight reading is a part of each AGO Examination and ranges from reading from two staves in the Service Playing Test, to four staves in C clefs in the Fellowship Test. My current regimen consists of 15 minutes of sight reading Bach harmonized chorales each morning. I try to do it rigorously by taking thirty seconds to scan the music and mentally play through sections, looking for possible problem points. Then I carefully play it through a little slower than I would in performance, as correctly as I can. 

Later I will practice reading 4 stave vocal scores in G and F clefs in preparation for the Associate Exam. After that, I will practice reading the Art of Fugue in 4 parts in C clefs (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass clefs) in preparation for the Fellowship Exam.

I've just about finished creating my weekly practice schedule, incorporating all of the subjects found on the exams. As usual, I'm still trying to find the ideal method for practicing the Improvisation subject. Hopefully I can share what I've come up with on my next post.