When I started to re-learn piano and work out my practice regime, I decided not to bother with sight reading. I think the main reason for my decision was the title (sight reading). Particularly the ‘sight’ part. I have always associated sight reading with the traditional interpretation of playing a piece of music for the first time with nothing but the dots in front of you. Naturally, for some this is possibly an absolutely essential skill. If you take exams you need to do it, if you are an accompanist or help out with dance classes or music groups, then it’s very likely you will need to be able to do this on a regular basis. However, I’m doing none of these things and, therefore, my logic was why waste part of my already limited and very previous practice time by practicing a skill I didn’t need.
The normal learning process
As I practice a new piece, I tend to memorise it almost without thinking. I generally takes me quite a lot of repetition to get the technical aspects under control. Therefore, it’s not long before I’m not really looking at the score particularly frequently. I end up pretty much practicing and playing from memory most of the time.
What lead me to the realisation that this was a mistake was when I recorded a version of Silent Night to post on Facebook at Christmas. I first thought it would be a good idea on Christmas Eve. I started practicing it then with the intention to quickly record it on Christmas morning. There was a lovely arrangement by Montgomery in the Dec/Jan issue of Pianist Magazine which really wasn’t at all technically difficult. Nothing fast, no jumps, no ornaments, no big stretches … so really well within my grasp.
However, and this is where my problem came, because I didn’t have the time to do lots of repetition just to be able to get the notes into my fingers, I was having to rely on the music rather than my memory to be able to play … and, as I discovered … I wasn’t able to read sufficiently quickly to play even a piece that I had been practicing already.
Parallels with reading in general
The parallel with learning how to read in general then occurred to me. As a child, when we first learn to read it is a slow process. Learning how to convert a jumble of letters into a word that we generally are already able to say takes time. In our early school years we have to work hard at doing it and it takes a long time for our reading to catch up with our speaking. I was finding the same here with this version of silent night. When trying to read even these simple ‘words’, it felt like being an infant splitting it down into syllables each time I looked at the music. I wasn’t at all like just reading and the words coming immediately to the front of my mind. This of course results in hesitant and error prone playing.
So, reading music would seem very similar to reading in general. Mentally converting a group of letters into a meaningful word (which is what we do as we read) is no different than mentally converting a group of dots into a chord, a musical phrase, a scale or whatever. This is exactly what we do when we read music. Clearly, the possible combinations of dots is probably exponentially greater than the combinations of letters- so we can’t expect to learn to read easily or quickly. It might take a very long time before we can say the musical equivalent of ‘transmogrification’ boldly without having to look at it four or five times to work it out.
Let’s improve our reading
Thus, it occurred to me that I shouldn’t view the benefit of ‘sight reading’ a being limited to being able to play things ‘on sight’ but rather that it would make my general ‘reading’ much better. This means that it enables me to actually play from music rather than having to play from memory.
Take any of the great artists (from Rubinstein to Yuja Wang or whoever else you want), when you see them playing chamber music, they often aren’t doing it from memory. They will very rarely be actually ‘sight reading’ it either. Rubinstein was reported to have an almost photographic memory (he once apparently learned an entire piano concerto on a train without even access to a piano). Yet in a great documentary about him in which playing chamber music with friends at home (I’ve put a link below for you), he clearly has the music right in front of him and is reading from it.
So, my view is that sometimes it won’t be possible or practical to totally commit something to memory and, therefore, the value of being able to actually read those dots as if they were just words cannot be under-estimated. If you only did sight reading in your early grades, then the analogy might be that you can only comfortably read ‘early learning books’ … it won’t equip you to read ‘War and Peace’ …
Now I’ll practice sight reading daily
Starting 1st Jan this year, I started doing at least 10 minutes per day sight reading. All I’ve done is taken the back issues of Pianist Magazine to which I have a digital subscription and used their scores section. I’ve been sight reading the beginner, and more recently the intermediate, level pieces. These work very well – and ultimately for the more tricky intermediate pieces, I just play them slowly. The object of the exercise is to get the relationship between dots and hands and keys in a quicker way. An unexpected bonus was that, I found that I was getting to play some really beautiful music with in reality very little effort – what a way to start your day!!
I don’t propose to give a masterclass on sight reading … there are far better resources on this topic already than I could possibly create … Rather, I hope your takeaway from this post is that even if you’ll never need to be able to ‘sight’ read per se, if you want to become a proficient reader, then sight reading is what’s going to do it for you.
You’ll find plenty of great sight reading resources on Amazon:
[amazon_link asins=’0793552621′ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’tommyspianoco-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’c94beef5-ef97-4ff3-89ba-eecf7a6ab133′]
Let me know what you think.
