Tips on reading open score

[nolan]

Hello,
I would like to start practicing reading open scores (SATB) and I was wondering if anyone had any tips. This seems to be something every accompanist should know how to do and I think it would be helpful with sight-reading.

Thanks,
Nolan

[pianiststrongbad]

I too am interested in this.  I have a friend at school that can read six staves fluently and I think my max is three.  Whenever I read SATB it just slows down considerably.  I accompany the choir at school and it is extremely frustrating trying to sightread open score.

[steve jones]

Might seem obvious, but practice makes perfect! The more you read of this, the more familiar it will become, and the better you will be able to interpret it.

I mean, consider this - Im from a guitar background, so at first piano music was insane to me. I had never had to read two clefs before, let alone one in bass! But after a short time, I had gotten used to this type of presentation, and now its more familiar to me than any other.

I recently started analysing some of the Mozart symphonies, and at first, the open score was hard to read. But again, after reading quite a few, Im beginning to get used to it. Obviously, the difficulty here is that the voices can be distributed in unintuitive ways so it is work reducing it to a short open score.

But I guess what Im saying is, the more you read this stuff the easier it will become until eventually you wont even have to think about it.

I really got familiar with this when working through Fux's counterpoint book. So maybe this would be work looking into? If nothing else it should bring your voiceleading upto scratch 

SJ

[mariocast]

We teach open choral score reading in our group piano classes for music majors and also in our keyboard skills class for keyboard majors.

Our approach is to start students off with 2 parts at first especially for instrumentalists or singers who are usually used to reading only one staff at a time. 

Textbooks like Alfred's Group Piano for Adults Book 2 by E.L. Lancaster and Kenon Renfrow and Piano for the Developing Musician by Martha Hilley and Lynn Freeman Olsen present score reading examples in this progressive fashion of starting with a couple staves and moving on to SATB.

I have the students practice one part per hand at first, but once they feel comfortable with that, then they start playing two parts in one hand (of course the parts that are within that type of range).

I also have students in class play the choral parts together as a duet or other type of ensemble in these early stages, where one student might play bass and tenor and another student plays soprano and alto.  This acts as a motivator of improving because you don't want to let your partner down.  Also it forces students to feel like they have to keep going no matter what.  Even if they drop a note here and there, at least they build a sense of rhythmic continuity which they might not obtain if practicing it on their own. 

So if you can, try to find a friend who will read along with you.  Also the textbooks I mentioned above also have MIDI files of the score reading examples, so if you don't have a partner, you can play along with the MIDI file.  You can slow the tempo down to what is comfortable and even turn off the parts that you're playing.

If you don't own these books already, it's probably not worth buying if all that you're interested in is exclusively score reading.  But if you want to develop other essential keyboard skills, these are highly recommended.

Finally, I also tell students to WRITE WRITE WRITE on your score.  Plug in fingering cues.  Circle groups of repeated notes (usually in the tenor!) so that it trains your eye to read horizontally as well as vertically.  For students who are solid with theory and harmony, writing chord symbols over the top part in a lead sheet style can also be helpful.

Hope these tips help.

[whynot]

Those are great tips.  I would add two things.  One:  that reading the tenor part slows accompanists down initially, because it's notated an otave higher than sung.  So an exercise would be to read the tenor part, then pair tenor + sop, tenor + alto etc., then the bottom (or top) three parts, then all four.  When you play for a choir, you can quickly discern which section is struggling the most and stay firmly on that part, adding whatever else you can.  Two:  in rehearsal the singers need to hear their parts (or some of their parts) but, if there's an accompaniment, they need to hear that too!  So another exercise is to play one or two voice parts with your RH and play the LH of the accompaniment at the same time.  That's not the whole picture, but if you get started with that, you'll see the other needs and possibilities based on the piece.  Good luck!