Piano Forum
Piano Board => Teaching => Topic started by: green on December 02, 2014, 09:30:59 PM
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When sight read I usually need to get it in my ears first by reading through the music once. And then I can pick it up fairly quickly. Hearing the score at sight would seem to be an important skill of learning to become a good sight reader. And yet I never learned this in lessons. I don't have perfect pitch, and generally am not a good sight singer either.
Do any folks here address this issue in lessons? Teaching solfege, kodaly, hand gestures to learn how to hear what they are seeing? ABRSM requires sight singing in their exams for piano, but at a fairly low level, and without making explicit connections to training which leads to more effect piano sight reading.
Thanks
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Scale-degree based ear training/solfege is probably the best way to go in combination with theory analysis biased toward a more horizontal understanding of the music rather than vertical (Schenker/Westergaard/Laitz/Aldwell over Piston/Payne).
Quick hint, the positioning of the half step relations are usually the most important in grounding your sense of tonal relations (and later modulations and recognition of different modalities).
Ti->Do
Fa->Mi
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Singing is an extremely important resource in this regard, especially solfege. When one sings, one internalizes note relationships, and one makes cognitive connections between producing pitch, hearing pitch, the relationship to score reading, and the theoretical connection.
What you can do is practice singing at the keyboard. Play short phrases at the piano, look at the keys as you play and notice their space relationships, then sing back the phrase. Practice singing common phrases (such as cadences) in major/minor modalities. Practice singing common tunes. You could also practice creating a phrase with your voice, then picking out the tune on the piano.
Some books with tunes you can practice:
https://www.amazon.com/Approach-Sight-Singing-Fourth-Edition/dp/B000L3K71I
https://www.amazon.com/Music-Sight-Singing-7th-Edition/dp/0131872346
If you have a hymn book around, they are also great for singing practice. Don't just stick to the tune, practice singing all 4 parts.
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Thanks for those suggestions, will look into those!
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This would also tie into improvisation and ear training, I'm wondering how I might structure a program which would teach students to hear and anticipate harmonic progression while improvising a melody. Students are often not even aware that there are choices about how to move through harmonic sequences. Perhaps taking a famous piece and recomposing it. Fur Elise, for example.
One very gifted student I taught did this naturally, he was always rearranging pieces or hearing new progressions and relations to other pieces. He would add his own coda's, and change the key to minor and so on. He had a riot doing this adding his Elvis ending to a piece of Beethoven, or improvise Chopin in the style of the Bee Gees, very inventive kid. A lot of it was just silly playing around, but my point is that he did in fact hear alternative ways to do things, and it would seem that it is always this process of 'hearing' which takes us deeper into a piece, or an improvisation, or issues to do with technique and theory for example.
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A lot of it was just silly playing around
The value of which should never be underestimated.