Using the Score While Performing

[escort]

Hello all,

I've left 'sight-reading' out of the topic title as I'm not really looking for information on improving sight-reading, more for feedback on some general ideas of reading music that may or may not already be learned.  I've searched around the forum, and found bits here and there, but not quite what I'm looking for. 

My thoughts came to light as I was recently working on the Brahms Clarinet Sonata No.2; as accompaniments generally go, it's a more challenging piece, and certainly requires some focus to perform both technically and most certainly musically.  I'm not a brilliant sight-reader, but I've never concerned myself with sight-reading or music reading in general much because I memorize fairly quickly.  When it comes to most accompaniments, they are usually easy enough to get under the fingers relatively quickly, and then my eyes are free to wander wherever they wish!  Because the Brahms is a bit more difficult, I found myself spending more time on it that I had expected before I had reached that point where I wasn't concerned with trying to follow the score. 

What I've noticed is that when playing some of my solo works up to tempo, the score becomes more of a hindrance to me than anything.  As an example, I performed the Liszt T.E. No.8 'Wilde Jagd' as part of my last credit recital at my university, and I remember memorizing chunks of it before my lessons so that I'd have something to work on without having to struggle trying to follow the score so much (I find this piece to be relatively easy to memorize, but very difficult to execute while reading from the score). 

I'm looking for ways to improve the speed of my learning, give myself more advantages in memorizing (specifically note-recall under performance anxieties), allow myself a little less stress in preparing for lessons, etc...  So to start, I have some general questions for you (and feel free to give comments outside of the questions that you think would be relevant)!

Are you able to follow the score of your more difficult repertoire at tempo (once learned)? 
Do you find playing with the score at tempo to be easier or a distraction? 
Do you feel that occasional practice of a memorized piece with the score could aid in note-recall?  How often do you look down when reading from the score (both for sight-reading, and for learned pieces)? 
Do you find it necessary to memorize difficult passages in music in order to look down so that you can play it (mostly for leaps, rather than fast/complex runs)?

For any answers, please elaborate all you like!  Also, I did some searching on Youtube with limited success; if anyone has some links to video of some exceptional sight-reading, I'd like to watch a bit and make some observations outside of what I've been observing at the university.

Best,
Brett

[lostinidlewonder]

Are you able to follow the score of your more difficult repertoire at tempo (once learned)?  
Do you find playing with the score at tempo to be easier or a distraction?  
Do you feel that occasional practice of a memorized piece with the score could aid in note-recall?  How often do you look down when reading from the score (both for sight-reading, and for learned pieces)?  
Do you find it necessary to memorize difficult passages in music in order to look down so that you can play it (mostly for leaps, rather than fast/complex runs)?

Generally I can play composed pieces in 3 ways, 100% memory, 100% sight reading or a of mixture sight reading/memory. 100% memory takes time, 100% sight reading is instantaneous, the mixture is a product of multiple sight reading routines. As a professional performer or accompanist doing many recitals it may be inefficient to 100% memorize everything you play, with good reading skills you can read most of the work and memorize the tougher parts, it saves you a lot of time and you produce the same results.

You should be able to play pieces you have memorized while watching the score. You do not have to watch your hands even for large leaps (although this insecurity is very difficult to break for most people), watching some blind pianists reveals how they make a mental measurement of the keyboard to achieve a sense of touch at the keyboard for large leaps. Once you really get to know the keyboard the eyes become more and more unnecessary to control your playing and you can sense the keyboard in its entirety. It is almost like a music space in front of you and you can align your position at the keyboard in your mental mind and physical movement. Then you may instead watch the score completely and pay attention to all the fingering and dynamics while practicing your music. Pure memorizers often do mistakes here and there and it then becomes bad habit, if you are always aware of the score you will not fall into this trap and waste time repairing them.

But to play with freedom from the score is when you really start feeling like you are making music. I love to simply close my eyes and play being an observer of the sound and forgetting about the physical and mental task to produce the notes. I use to do that all the time when I was younger, get into the realm of forgetting about the notes and just play the music, but then if I made a mistake when I was in this trance it was very difficult to snap back into conscious memory mode and sight read my way out of the trouble. The solution to this came with years of practice and it is a never ending improvement, no simple solution, the hybrid between memory and sight reading is the most effective method of learning your music. I use to be a pure memorizer and shunned sight reading but then I decided to take sight reading more serious and tried to balance the disparity between reading/memory within myself. I always thought that I was a pure memorizer and that I could never sight read but after forcing myself to improve at reading I found that it did not destroy my memorizing ability, in fact my memorizing attached itself to the sight reading (after years of research and study) and now as they act together I can learn pieces many times faster than when I was a pure memorizer. After reading thousands of pieces your hands generally start to understand the many "procedures" that one under goes at the piano, I am not going to list them but there are patterns that we can read that we have seen before, tools of composition, hand movements, expression, technique etc. When you learn a new piece you are not actually learning a new piece but it is a mixture of past pieces you have learnt before and your sound memory of this new piece is all you need, your conscious and muscular memory has experience from the past to accelerate the mastery.



Taking away the brute force method of memorizing pieces into muscular movements and allowing yourself to use conscious, muscular and sound memory to work together as a whole is much more efficient and you get through a lot more music this way.

[escort]

Awesome, thanks for the detailed insights! 

In relation to what you mentioned about 'being an observer to the sound', it seems that there tends to be a point in learning music where the work starts to become ingrained and attention more easily shifts from focusing on the score, to being aware of the music, and when that happens the eyes are able to wander a bit more.  Certainly, the process of memorizing the work is well on its way.
I notice that with most of the accompanists I watch in performances at the university, they certainly don't spend the whole time glued to the score; the pieces have been much rehearsed.  Watching the conservatory instructors play duets and accompaniments for their students can be a very different experience, however!  Many of these parts haven't been practiced nearly so much, if at all.

I also like what you say about using different sorts of memory as a whole.  It ties in with being able to make use of your different senses as a whole.  A poor sight-reader perhaps develops a strong sense of visual awareness for the keyboard and powerful kinesthetic awareness of the movements of the hands, but not in relation to the keyboard because of the reliance on visual awareness.  A proficient yet 'sloppy' sight-reader (and someone who appears to struggle with memory) may have a strong sense of kinesthetic awareness of the keyboard, but poor technical faculties and a lack of pitch perception to 'tie things together'.  Etc, Etc...
Developing everything properly, and then focusing on whatever most easily allows for the execution of the music as a whole in that particular scenario (for me when playing from memory, it's hearing the sound in my head), I think lends itself to a confident and successful performance. 
I'm realizing now, towards the end of a Bachelor's in piano performance, that some of the issues that I've experienced in piano seemingly completely unrelated to sight-reading, may very well have been directly related to the reasons my sight-reading/reading in general has been rather poor. 

I realize this is a tiny sliver of what is a much more broad topic, but thanks again for your response! 

Best,
Brett

[phillip21]

Re YouTube, you would probably be hard pressed to find good examples of genuine sightreading.  On my own channel I use scores, and  - of course - practise the pieces before videoing them.  It would be an insult to the viewers to do otherwise, but a lot of them do assume that everything played from score is sightread! 

[fleetfingers]

For me, when a piece is memorized, it is played better. I like to have a visual in my head of the notes on the page AND a visual of the way the song looks on the piano as I strike the keys. With this combination of memory, I feel like I am in control and can produce the sounds that I want.
Having said that, I don't find the score to be distracting even if the piece is memorized. In fact, I find it comforting sometimes, because I may need to look up to remember what part comes next. In that case, though, I'm not reading the notes - just recognizing the part.
How often do I look down when sighreading? I have a pretty good feel for the keyboard, so I CAN sightread without looking down much. But, I usually do quite a bit just to make sure I'm hitting the right notes - especially if there is a considerable jump. It is the same for new or learned pieces.
The note-recall question? I get out the sheet music of memorized pieces occasionally to brush up on the visual memory of the notes I mentioned earlier. And sometimes, I have completely forgotten some things and have to get out the music to memorize it again. It usually doesn't take long, though.
I don't find it necessary to memorize difficult passages, but I certainly have more accuracy (and confidence) if I do.

Good question!