Sight-Reading - how do you teach it?

[green]

When I teach sight reading, I have a basic schemata in mind, a kind of order of importance, pulse, or a sense of pulse, is for me the underlying foundation of music, everything is built up from that, then notes, the material or substance of music, rhythm, which is subdivisions of the pulse, so without a strong sense of pulse to start with, how do we know how to subdivide? This is the material substratum from which we can then add dynamics, which creates spatial awareness (what is loud is in the foreground, what is quiet is in the background, I often use a picture which may be hanging near the piano as an example), and last but not least, articulation, which can really add the 'spice' to the music.

That is the order I present the skills involved in sight reading:

• Pulse
  Notes
  Rhythm
  dynamics
  articulation

Generally students start, and have learned to start, but going straight for the notes to the exclusion of all else, playing the notes without any sense of pulse, of course no rhythm, and dynamics and articulation are straight out the window.

So I allow students to take as much preparation time as required, to find the ACTUAL pulse of the piece, then to tap through the rhythm at that tempo, following the general contour of the notes so that they can get a feel for the piece. Then I have them as quickly as possible trace through the notes on the keyboard without making any sound, no rhythm, just moving from one note or chord to the next, Hands Separate. I usually use the ABRSM sight reading specimens so they are quite short and this doesn't take much time. Then I have them tap the rhythm HS and/or HT.  If it is grade 3 or above, then we would observe the dynamics, and tap through the piece, feeling the dynamics and making louder taps when the music crescendos or gets quieter. And last if there is articulation to deal with, we once again tap through the piece observing that. Feeling, or hearing internally, short or legato playing.

It is assumed that over time the separate skills will begin to merge, or gel together, and the amount of prep time will decrease, and become internalized. And with growing maturity, it generally does. I do many variations on this general outline, but I would say that I see the ordering of the skills in this way.

However, I wonder how others teach sight reading, and I would like to expand and elaborate or perhaps change ways in which I approach sight reading. What is your method?

[quantum]

In general I would agree on how you are placing an order of importance with elements of the music.  However, IMO would switch some items around:

1. Pulse
2. Rhythm
3. Pitch
4. Text (if the music includes a vocal part)
5. Articulation
6. Dynamics

I like to include text in the equation, as often the pianist forms a collaborative partner with vocalists.  Too many accompanists ignore the text and the need for proper breath placement when interacting with singers.  It is also within this collaborative work where a pianist will do a lot of sight reading, so this is relevant to the current topic.

Several of my teachers stressed the importance of "knowing where you are going."  If you know where you want to end up, you can get there.  Previewing the entire piece or sight reading exercise will help with that.  One needs to review the selection for specific items, specially those that may trip oneself up during sigh treading: accidentals, modulations, key changes, time changes, etc.  It is not really necessary to read over easy parts of the score that can be resolved in playing. 

Reading ahead is important for fluid sight reading.  Where your eyes are reading at a point far ahead in the score, from where your fingers are playing and your ears are hearing. 


Personally, I learned much more skills from playing actual music than working out sight reading exercise books: accompanying singers, playing in ensembles, orchestra, and choir.  Ensemble playing is an excellent way to learn to sight read.  It also reinforces the skill you listed as #1 - pulse.  It gives a real world scenario as to why one needs to prioritize the items in the above list.  It also puts emphasis on the music as a whole, rather than the individual musicians personal struggle with the technicalities of sight reading. 

For beginners or intermediate students, duets can be a good source of ensemble work. 

[thesuineg]

Thats sad that people have brang pigeon-holing to this level. Cmon just admit it guys sight reading is all based around experience, technique, and mostly talent.

You can improve sightreading by doing it more often.
Not much more to that

[keypeg]

It's a skill, and skills are taught.  Talent allows a skill to be learned faster, and sometime along unique angles.  Btw, is "sight reading" (as in prima vista) meant, or "reading"?

[nyiregyhazi]

I don't necessarily disagree with what has been said about pulse, in the end product. However, I do personally feel that it's common mistake not to differentiate between the wide range of valuable learning experiences and what you ultimately have to be capable of doing in the final product under pressure.

For me, one of the most valuable learning exercises is eliminating guesswork COMPLETELY! That means eliminating rhythm completely from the exercise, but instead focussing on vividly perceived physical and mental connections between successive notes. I get the student to stop on every key and tap whichever fingers are to play next and only play them if they feel literally 100% certain that they are prepared to get it spot on. This is part of what builds your foundation stones- so you later have the capacity to process sufficient information and turn it into the physical means required for execution, without losing rhythm. Being pressured into getting somewhere in time can send things haywire and the constant approximations can limit the capacity to make deep associations between visual instructions and the means to actually execute them. In my opinion, too much guesswork goes on in the name of rhythm, which hinders the long-term ability to make concrete associations between visual representations of notes and the execution. At least some of the practise should be founded on settling for nothing less than certainty.

I balance that with an exercise where random notes are exchanged for what is written in pitch, but which must be played in absolutely strict rhythm. These kinds of shifts of focus provide invaluable scope for developing skills that can be limited if it becomes an out an out rule that certain elements must always take priority. In exercises for developing sightreading, I don't believe that there should be any unbreakable "rules" about what should come first- only when you're in that final pressure situation where you cannot afford to lose beats.

"Generally students start, and have learned to start, but going straight for the notes to the exclusion of all else"

For me, it's a poor compromise that satisfies neither notes nor rhythm that is the biggest evil. Students generally lose both notes sometimes and rhythm sometimes. My view is that you should deliberately sacrifice one altogether in some of the practise- but settle for nothing less than absolute perfection in the other element. What I dislike is the half-way house approach that doesn't truly satisfy from either point of view.

[green]

Another very important skill is learning NOT to look at your hands when reading and sight reading.

First of all because looking at your hands undermines the whole process of developing the tactile and aural connection to the keyboard that is necessary to build the skill of relational sense-awareness at the keyboard.

If students need to pause, rather than look down, then I say pause! But looking down undermines the touch/aural relational awareness that is crucial to developing as a good sight reader.

Confidence can come quickly from the realization that maintaining an ordered pulse, is more important than hitting all the right notes, so long as the over all character is maintained. If not, then the specimen is probably to difficult, or is being played to fast to pick up all of the detail in the music.

Not fearing hitting a wrong note in favor of the right physical gesture, which connects smoothly to the next note, can be very liberating as students do tend to get hung up at the note level. And more probably become stagnant at the note reading level simply because they are not aware of the skills sets which accompany 'note reading' in itself. As discussed above.

One tool I have tried with some students was using an apron, tied around their neck, draping over their hands and wedged in behind the music thingy. Worked wonders! But has to be used with the right student, I have only tried it with students who had very extroverted personalities and could also get a good laugh out of it. They have enjoyed using it, for a few weeks, bring it back if there is a relapse.

[j_menz]

Btw, is "sight reading" (as in prima vista) meant, or "reading"?

An important distinction that appears to be being largely ignored.

They are related, but by no means the same thing.

For all the various component parts and technical tricks being explored )and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them), they need to be applied in actual sight-reading (not just reading), and there is no substitute for doing lots of it.  Quantums suggestion that it be done in a situation where you have to "keep going regardless" is a good one. It can be done in private at an early stage and probably should not be attempted in public until  one is reasonably competent.  I have to say from my own experience, sight reading in public is a great teacher!

[nyiregyhazi]

An important distinction that appears to be being largely ignored.

They are related, but by no means the same thing.

For all the various component parts and technical tricks being explored )and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them), they need to be applied in actual sight-reading (not just reading), and there is no substitute for doing lots of it.  Quantums suggestion that it be done in a situation where you have to "keep going regardless" is a good one. It can be done in private at an early stage and probably should not be attempted in public until  one is reasonably competent.  I have to say from my own experience, sight reading in public is a great teacher!

While I agree with much of this, like with the idea that pulse should always come first, I think this is still missing something in terms of the big picture of how skills evolve. I know that you're among those posters who is adult enough not take an explanation of an alternative view personally, so I won't hold back from explaining why I feel this so.

Personally I would probably be regarded as a "good" sight-reader, but I know that I'm not in the upper echelons of people who can sight-reader things like Brahms and Beethoven sonata accompaniments to a decent enough standard to seem as if you must have practised it. When it comes to sightreading, my opinion is that such a level of attainment should always be a yardstick and something to strive towards- not something to be treated as a lofty ideal for geniuses only. It's not that I expect to reach such a level- but rather that I feel that if we just get better at winging it, we shut off avenues for progress.

Even if we look at willful faking, we have to ask quite how much information must be processed for a decent job of winging it in advanced repertoire. The other day I played through some Beethoven violin sonatas with a friend and survived- but that often involved a level of faking that could never be considered acceptable in a concert. What are ultra-advanced sightreaders doing? Do we suppose that they just give up on one hand when it's too much to handle? Did they get to process such difficulties by spending all their time under pressure? No way. Pressure encourages you to give up on things altogether and skip. That's a great skill, but do truly advanced sightreaders really do this that often? I don't believe so. Even to do good faking of something unfamiliar, you have to suppose that there is the ability to process a considerable amount of information and then decide on the fly what is most significant. Suppose there's a C major chord that has two chromatic notes. Do good sightreaders miss either chromatic note? Not a chance. A great sightreader will process and play every note as written. A good one may play a different layout of C major and zone in on the two chromatic notes to play them exactly. How can they do that? To do so, they must have processed what is and isn't C major. No note will have fallen off the radar- or they could scarcely have lucked their way to both isolating the two significant tones and realising that all others fit C major. The ability of process a considerable amount of information is the precursor to all of this. Pressure doesn't help that, unless you have a spectacular foundation. For some, being pressured into a keeping a tempo can be exactly what stops the deepest associations between the score and corresponding action from evolving- because they are only ever approximating rather than directly equating instructions with suitable movements.

When you consider the sheer level of information that must be accurately processed even for advanced fakery (rather than randomly choosing what to ignore when the going gets tough) it's hard to see it from any other point of view other than quite how much information is being processed. Only working under pressure doesn't build up reliability of such foundation skills. It simply gives you experience at making the most of your present level of ability under pressure. When it comes to deeper progress, I think you have to go back to basics. Doing it under pressure is a sink or swim situation. The things you fake in a big way cannot get easier to do straight off unless you get stronger foundations. I don't regard constant pressure situations as being inclined to improve the information processing abilities that make it possible to play progressively hard things with a sense of background security. They only make you better at faking what lies outside of your ability to do straight off with precision, in the present moment.

I don't disagree with the experience aspect. Personally, I wouldn't be horrified at having to accompany a student without preparation- but rhythm is something I have to focus quite consciously on still, to be 100% sure I won't double my tempo, say. It's rare that I would do such things if I had to go at once, but I like the certainty of a quick run through, rather than to become familiar under the pressure of having to perform well. While some things come easily, I have to admit that it's not unknown for me to carelessly start a simple piece in 2/4 instead of 3/4- unless i put myself into a very specific mindset. As I don't read under considerable pressure, I can get away with such things rather than force myself to completely eliminate the risks of that kind of thing. No doubt I'd get more consistent at doing these things right every time, if I had a stronger incentive to take care at absolutely all times. However, as someone who has done loads of reading for years, the most significant increases to the baselines of my abilities came not from working on the fly but from thoughtful and deliberate work on transfering things from sight to the hands with precision. There are things that I can do now that I wouldn't have had a hope in hell of doing a few years back. I'd always done a lot of casual carefree faking, but it was the slower and more considered work that has enabled me to read significantly more difficult things and succeed- not additional practise at constant forgery and guesswork (which is what virtually all of my life's sightreading had been based on). I think it's very important to distinguish between what builds your basic skill set and what trains you to get through inevitable emergency situations. A balance is needed, for a rounded sightreader.

[j_menz]

I think it's very important to distinguish between what builds your basic skill set and what trains you to get through inevitable emergency situations. A balance is needed, for a rounded sightreader.

Agreed.  There is certainly a basic skill set needed before attempting to sight-read under pressure and I think most of the sight-reading one does should be in private.  Thus, I suggested that initially, that "pressure" should be minimal, such as playing along with a teacher.

One of the things that one needs to be able to do to sight-read to a reasonable level, though, is to be able to keep in time and keep going; sometimes that is not possible, but one of the things that holds people back is constantly stopping and checking or correcting mistakes or floundering around rhythmically.  Pressure operformance highlights these and aids in developing ways of preventing them.  The sorts of high level reader skills you mention are part of that coping mechanism - necessity being the mother of invention in this regard. Without the occasional necessity, the capacity for invention will not develop.

It would certainly be wrong to have a student thrown in the deep end and set up to fail, and in public at that.

I think we should also recognise that there are any number of pieces in the advanced repertoire (at least) that are simply not amenable to a good sight read performance. That doesn't mean they can't be read, just not first go.  These would never be suitable for attempting under pressure.  Or maybe that says more about my own inadequacies than the pieces in question and that everyone has such a bar over which they cannot jump, just at different places for different people.

[nyiregyhazi]

One of the things that one needs to be able to do to sight-read to a reasonable level, though, is to be able to keep in time and keep going; sometimes that is not possible, but one of the things that holds people back is constantly stopping and checking or correcting mistakes or floundering around rhythmically.  Pressure operformance highlights these and aids in developing ways of preventing them.  The sorts of high level reader skills you mention are part of that coping mechanism - necessity being the mother of invention in this regard. Without the occasional necessity, the capacity for invention will not develop.

Absolutely. However, my feeling is two things- firstly that good sightreaders who already have these abilities get lost in only approaching it from the side of "coping" rather than developing their skill set further still with more careful and considered work, under no pressure at all. Secondly, I think that many students struggle to do the faking because they are not processing anywhere near enough information with precision in the first place, in order to make informed decisions about when to do a little faking. There's a big difference between someone who sees the big picture (which takes really advanced reading skill) and selectively omits something for a clear purpose and someone who has not processed enough to know what should reasonably be omitted.

I use the random notes exercise I mentioned earlier to free students up from the thought that everything must always be right when under pressure- however, I equally believe that most students struggle to see the big picture because they don't spend enough time processing detail with extreme care and thought. I think problems lie at both opposite ends of the spectrum and that only trying to force yourself not to stop is nowhere near enough- unless you read so effortlessly as to see huge chunks of information on a broad scale. I don't believe most weak sightreaders have this necessary background skill. From their point of view, it's as good as if you ask me to read through the densest Godowsky transcription on 4 staves (which wouldn't do my reading a jot of good, if I had to fake through it in a strict tempo)- because their reading is not up to seeing the global image of what notes they are to fake.

I think we should also recognise that there are any number of pieces in the advanced repertoire (at least) that are simply not amenable to a good sight read performance. That doesn't mean they can't be read, just not first go.  These would never be suitable for attempting under pressure.  Or maybe that says more about my own inadequacies than the pieces in question and that everyone has such a bar over which they cannot jump, just at different places for different people.

Realistically, for mortals, yes. But what about people like Richter? I think we have to keep such ideals in mind. I think most of us reach a level where we think it's all experience from now on and get on with the faking side of things. What if the means of improving the basic skill set (for a persona who already has the skills to fake) lie totally outside of that kind of stuff? After all, how you can you get better at executing information that you don't even have time to process- unless you concentrate not on training yourself to give up on bits and fake them but on expecting yourself to do them exactly as notated? If there's no precision, neither is their useful association between reading and then executing.

[j_menz]

Absolutely. However, my feeling is two things- firstly that good sightreaders who already have these abilities get lost in only approaching it from the side of "coping" rather than developing their skill set further still with more careful and considered work, under no pressure at all. Secondly, I think that many students struggle to do the faking because they are not processing anywhere near enough information with precision in the first place, in order to make informed decisions about when to do a little faking. There's a big difference between someone who sees the big picture (which takes really advanced reading skill) and selectively omits something for a clear purpose and someone who has not processed enough to know what should reasonably be omitted.

Agreed.

I use the random notes exercise I mentioned earlier to free students up from the thought that everything must always be right when under pressure- however, I equally believe that most students struggle to see the big picture because they don't spend enough time processing detail with extreme care and thought. I think problems lie at both opposite ends of the spectrum and that only trying to force yourself not to stop is nowhere near enough- unless you read so effortlessly as to see huge chunks of information on a broad scale. I don't believe most weak sightreaders have this necessary background skill. From their point of view, it's as good as if you ask me to read through the densest Godowsky transcription on 4 staves (which wouldn't do my reading a jot of good, if I had to fake through it in a strict tempo)- because their reading is not up to seeing the global image of what notes they are to fake.

I must confess, when number of staves goes over two, my sightreading fails me. No doubt lack of practice in seeing information in this way.

Realistically, for mortals, yes. But what about people like Richter? I think we have to keep such ideals in mind. I think most of us reach a level where we think it's all experience from now on and get on with the faking side of things. What if the means of improving the basic skill set (for a persona who already has the skills to fake) lie totally outside of that kind of stuff? After all, how you can you get better at executing information that you don't even have time to process- unless you concentrate not on training yourself to give up on bits and fake them but on expecting yourself to do them exactly as notated? If there's no precision, neither is their useful association between reading and then executing.

Faking is always a second rate choice. One should always strive to improve so as to minimise the need for it. In a "live" situation, though, it remains an essential gun on one's arsenal.

[nyiregyhazi]

I must confess, when number of staves goes over two, my sightreading fails me. No doubt lack of practice in seeing information in this way.

I'm not too bad at four staves- as it usually involves jumping from a long chord on one stave to shorter things on the other (eg the Rachmaninoff C sharp minor). However, I do find three (with a line to be divided between the hands) highly troublesome. One thing that I find strangely difficult is if the l.h. is written in the upper stave and the r.h. in the lower. I have no problem if the top stave goes into bass clef for the right and the lower into treble clef, but I have to make a real effort to reverse my hands while reading grand stave notation in the conventional way. Obviously something about my reading is very directly tied into the movement of a particular hand- rather than a case of just visualising pitches and then figuring out how to execute them.

Faking is always a second rate choice. One should always strive to improve so as to minimise the need for it. In a "live" situation, though, it remains an essential gun on one's arsenal.

Absolutely. I think that good way of summarising the necessary distinction. What is essential in the final product is not necessarily the same thing that makes the best practise method. It's perhaps not quite as different as if you compare the way you would repeatedly practise a learned piece compared to how you would perform it. However, for some reason people always tend to treat sight-reading as a singular thing- where the process of what you must aim for in a play-through is rarely segregated from a number of extremely useful (but spectacularly different) practise approaches that serve to contribute towards the ability to do that style of play-through.

Just we need various ways of preparing a piece (that are not the same as how we perform it) I think we need various ways of preparing sightreading skills in general (that are not necessarily the same as what we would do to aim for a "performance" of an unfamiliar piece at first sight).

[sucom]

Something that I tend to do with my poorer sight readers is to encourage them to keep going regardless.  To aid this, I might sight read the left hand while they sight read the right hand, and vice versa, forcing them to keep moving.   At the same time, I tell them that I don't care if every single note is wrong.  What I am trying to do is to give them a sense of time and pulse, and to aid them in looking forwards in the music as they play.

Then we try the same piece several times, each time pushing them along to keep with me and as I do so, the number of correct notes gradually increases.

I have found in general that sight reading really only has to be taught to those students who stick to only the music I give them for their lessons.  Those students who are interested enough in playing other music at home, in between lessons, tend to be much better sight readers.  In other words, the more music played for the sheer enjoyment, music a student really likes and is inspired to play, on top of prepared pieces for lessons, the better sight reading becomes.  The key is not to worry about wrong notes - keeping going is the most important thing, along with an encouragement to play music without looking down at the hands.  Keeping your eye on the music while also practising intervals and hand moves without looking really helps.

Sight reading has never been a problem for me and I think this is because my father used to bring home music all the time, all different styles, and stand at the side of the piano and push me along, wrong notes and all.  It really helped me to keep going regardless.  Sometimes I would put on a record of a piano piece and play along with it as best as I could.  This forced me to keep my eye on the music while the music moved forwards, adding whatever notes I could.

[nyiregyhazi]

I have found in general that sight reading really only has to be taught to those students who stick to only the music I give them for their lessons.  Those students who are interested enough in playing other music at home, in between lessons, tend to be much better sight readers.  In other words, the more music played for the sheer enjoyment, music a student really likes and is inspired to play, on top of prepared pieces for lessons, the better sight reading becomes.  

While this is broadly true, this is exactly where I came from- as someone who played loads of stuff and was a pretty good sightreader of slow chords and pieces with plenty of pedal. However, I had to go to the absolute opposite end of the spectrum (literally taking as long as I wish over every detail and refusing to allow myself to indulge in guesswork) before I could reach the point where things like Mozart sonatas can be reasonably read through at sight without either outrageously unforgivable recklessness or pauses.

There are things that working under the pressure of not being allowed to stop simply does not  provide and there are many other avenues that contribute to an all-round skillset (that later come back to the ability to play things without stops, even though they start with a totally different approach to that which says never to stop). If never allowing the pulse to break were my only practise tool, I'd never have acquired the eye for detail (or the ability to transfer what has been read to the corresponding movement) that I depend upon to do much of what has become possible later in life.

Virtually anyone has something left to learn about sightreading from adding ultra-thoughtful sightreading in free-rhythm to their range of practise methods.  Try it on a piece that you'd have thought is simply beyond being sight-read by you at all- and instead of faking see if you can play it flawlessly in totally free rhythm without time pressures. It can be a real eye-opener to how much unfamiliar information can be processed accurately- when you allow your brain the chance not to have to guess or pick and choose between what notes to play. In particular, as a teacher, I find that getting my brain to work so exactingly makes me much better as spotting what is going on in a piece that a student is playing. If I imagine sightreading it myself with fakery, I would miss details that I need to pick up on to understand the inner workings. I feel that I need to enter that more exacting mindset, where I look to process every individual detail while reading (without necessarily even playing any of it), rather than just whatever would stand out under a time constraint.

[j_menz]

One thing that I find strangely difficult is if the l.h. is written in the upper stave and the r.h. in the lower. I have no problem if the top stave goes into bass clef for the right and the lower into treble clef, but I have to make a real effort to reverse my hands while reading grand stave notation in the conventional way. Obviously something about my reading is very directly tied into the movement of a particular hand- rather than a case of just visualising pitches and then figuring out how to execute them.

I think there is a great deal of truth in this.

I find a certain "handedness" as well in my reading - figures which are more readable if they are in one hand than the other. Even such a simple one as a fast alberti bass is much easier in the left hand than the right to read (problem is not apparent once I've played it a few times, so it is purely a reading thing). Interestingly, once I cross hands, the situation is reversed. Our brains obviously deal with all this in more complicated ways than might at first seem the case.

[nyiregyhazi]

I think there is a great deal of truth in this.

I find a certain "handedness" as well in my reading - figures which are more readable if they are in one hand than the other. Even such a simple one as a fast alberti bass is much easier in the left hand than the right to read (problem is not apparent once I've played it a few times, so it is purely a reading thing). Interestingly, once I cross hands, the situation is reversed. Our brains obviously deal with all this in more complicated ways than might at first seem the case.

Yeah, the brain is certainly odd. One thing that I found unreadable was notes written in the bass clef with an octave higher symbol- rather than put in the treble clef. Sure it was in a Cziffra transcription, which really didn't help, but I still found it strange that the mere fact I'm not used to it in that clef (even though the obvious logic is not at all different to an octave higher symbol in the treble clef) made it extremely testing. It shows that even simple logical calculations are not instant. That which I read without effort must work so easily because it has been deeply imbued into a direct association. This is why I'm so big on looking at both extremes. Our habits are so heavily locked into notational details and that which is familiar to look at, that we cannot make strong enough associations between the look every notated pitch and the means of execution. I don't like the idea that our default would always be to "skim" and guess rather than strive for deeply thought out associations that can become absorbed into the subconscious abilities. For me, the guessing game would be better off kept to 10% or so (just as I'd keep performance run-throughs of a piece that I'm practising to being the exception rather than the rule).

[j_menz]

Our habits are so heavily locked into notational details and that which is familiar to look at, that we cannot make strong enough associations between the look every notated pitch and the means of execution.

That is indeed true. I'm currently learning Alkan's Symphony for Solo Piano. In the final movement, it modulates into C major (key signature change) and then from there into both Ab major and  G# major (both, obvioously, accidentals).  Actual notes - easy; reading them (for extended passages) alternatively in all double flats and then again in all double sharps tends to fry the little grey cells and makes what deep down I know to be easy something of a nightmare.

EDIT: Those aren't the right keys! My theory is failing me here  - major keys with four double sharps and four double flats respectively.

I don't like the idea that our default would always be to "skim" and guess rather than strive for deeply thought out associations that can become absorbed into the subconscious abilities. For me, the guessing game would be better off kept to 10% or so (just as I'd keep performance run-throughs of a piece that I'm practising to being the exception rather than the rule).

I think in practice (or perhaps rather, in private) the aim should be not to guess at all. That will not always be possible, of course, and I think the trick is to know what is just a bit of a fluff and what represents a gap in knowledge. It is, after all, important to perfect the skill of sight reading in such circumstances as much as to actually get through a piece.  When sight-reading in company, however, other considerations come into the equation; one can hardly stop a church service so one can iron out a reading flaw.

[thesuineg]

I think you are all being silly, first of all sight-reading is not important, second of all, it is a matter of focus experience and talent as i said before. Stop categorizing everything in life yall

[pianoman53]

While I don't completely disagree with N's ideas, I think they make sight reading into something it's not. He teaches a soccer player to tie his shoes really really fast, just in case it would fall off during an important moment. While it might be a nice (yet rather naive) idea, you won't use it in 99% of your life. By the time you might need it, you would probably have been able to learn in through other things.

While most people here say that guessing is wrong, I say its the most important part. The point that is ignored is to develop the sense of advanced guessing, and the ability to continue during pressure. Cause, let's face it, sight reading really isn't that big part of learning a piece. The only time we actually need it is when we're asked to accompany someone in short notice. And to then say "right now, I will only nail the rhythm" is nothing but stupid.

The exercise I like is to only play the beats, or maybe even only every first beat, of whatever you're practising (in tempo that is). In that way, you're forced to continue, even if you can't play a few notes, which is what we actually need while performing from first sight. 

The guessing part is also to not have to read everything. This is developed simply through focusing on one composer at the time. After a while, one will know the outlines of what the composer will write next. And later, one will be able to figure out even details.

My way has the disadvantage of playing a completely unknown composer. That will probably not work super well...
N's idea has the disadvantage of simply practice things you almost never need, and the fact that most of his exercises needs quite a lot of preparation. Since the preparation part is what we lack when we sight read, I would say its a useless way of practicing.
...
So Yeah, maybe I change my mine: I don't agree with what he says.

[nyiregyhazi]

While most people here say that guessing is wrong, I say its the most important part. The point that is ignored is to develop the sense of advanced guessing, and the ability to continue during pressure. Cause, let's face it, sight reading really isn't that big part of learning a piece. The only time we actually need it is when we're asked to accompany someone in short notice. And to then say "right now, I will only nail the rhythm" is nothing but stupid.

The exercise I like is to only play the beats, or maybe even only every first beat, of whatever you're practising (in tempo that is). In that way, you're forced to continue, even if you can't play a few notes, which is what we actually need while performing from first sight.  

Sure, that makes sense as an exercise. The one I detail trains a different aspect though. It trains you to play through anything and never to stop because of alarm bells in the back of the head. Sometimes it's more important to have a rhythmic motif that persists than to play notes precisely. Given what you said about guessing, I find it puzzling that you do not see that this is part and parcel of learning to make educated guesses on the fly. The random notes thing is to liberate students from fear. Once you have done that, they can take educated guesses at notes that will actually make sense without losing the sense of rhythm. When accompanying, you cannot simply stop dead in the middle of an important rhythm (that the person you are accompanying will be listening for as their cue) and wait for the next bar. That is not something that deeply accomplished sightreaders do, but an emergency thing to help avoid outright disaster after a screw-up. Even then, when accompanying a young kid for a grade exam, if you don't bother to include their cue there's no guarantee that they'll be counting through your moment of silence, ready for you to pull yourself together and come back in for the next bar. To do a half decent job you need to either process EXACTLY what you have been asked to do (if a very good sightreader) or make an educated guess at something that will make sense in good rhythm. Leaving out the rest of a bar altogether if you stumble doesn't cut it, if we're looking at high levels of accomplishment. Even a string of four semiquavers can be an essential cue for the person you are playing with.

If you can only see exercises as designed to achieve the precise thing they involve doing (with no possibility of training anything else) nothing is of value other than playing pieces the way you intend a performance. We'd have to eliminate slow practise and work by section etc. Exercises train a lot more than the specific things you do at the time.

Incidentally, I find it plain baffling that you speak only of one of the PAIR of exercises I gave (especially given that the other one is the one I described as being that which provides the key foundation skills for good sightreading). They are inseparable and I gave them as a pair for good reason. Playing random notes in rhythm is meaningless unless you view its role alongside the additional exercise that I gave of playing flawlessly accurate notes in completely free rhythm, with considerable thought and no time constraints. It's a simple act of balancing out the ability to work with full precision and thought about notes and movements with the ability to keep a rhythm at any cost.

[pianoman53]

Sure, that makes sense as an exercise. The one I detail trains a different aspect though. It trains you to play through anything and never to stop because of alarm bells in the back of the head. Sometimes it's more important to have a rhythmic motif that persists than to play notes precisely. Given what you said about guessing, I find it puzzling that you do not see that this is part and parcel of learning to make educated guesses on the fly. The random notes thing is to liberate students from fear. Once you have done that, they can take educated guesses at notes that will actually make sense without losing the sense of rhythm. When accompanying, you cannot simply stop dead in the middle of an important rhythm (that the person you are accompanying will be listening for as their cue) and wait for the next bar. That is not something that deeply accomplished sightreaders do, but an emergency thing to help avoid outright disaster after a screw-up. Even then, when accompanying a young kid for a grade exam, if you don't bother to include their cue there's no guarantee that they'll be counting through your moment of silence, ready for you to pull yourself together and come back in for the next bar. To do a half decent job you need to either process EXACTLY what you have been asked to do (if a very good sightreader) or make an educated guess at something that will make sense in good rhythm. Leaving out the rest of a bar altogether if you stumble doesn't cut it, if we're looking at high levels of accomplishment. Even a string of four semiquavers can be an essential cue for the person you are playing with.

If you can only see exercises as designed to achieve the precise thing they involve doing (with no possibility of training anything else) nothing is of value other than playing pieces the way you intend a performance. We'd have to eliminate slow practise and work by section etc. Exercises train a lot more than the specific things you do at the time.

Incidentally, I find it plain baffling that you speak only of one of the PAIR of exercises I gave. They are inseparable and I gave them as a pair for good reason. Playing random notes in rhythm is meaningless unless you view its role alongside the additional exercise that I gave of playing flawlessly accurate notes in completely free rhythm, with considerable thought and no time constraints. It's a simple act of balancing out the ability to work with full precision and thought about notes and movements with the ability to keep a rhythm at any cost.

You find wrong things in what I wrote, simply without reading what I wrote!
Even though my exercise is more useful than yours, in a actual scenario, I still call it an exercise, and never said that this should be done in a real concert. If you really have to play from first sight in a concert, you have already gone through all of this, and hopefully already a good sight reader.

I only commented on a few of your exercises, simply because you clearly didn't read everything I wrote.

[nyiregyhazi]

You find wrong things in what I wrote, simply without reading what I wrote!
Even though my exercise is more useful than yours, in a actual scenario, I still call it an exercise, and never said that this should be done in a real concert. If you really have to play from first sight in a concert, you have already gone through all of this, and hopefully already a good sight reader.

I only commented on a few of your exercises, simply because you clearly didn't read everything I wrote.

Then you have evidently missed the purpose of my exercise and suggested an alternative that fails to fulfil the very purpose that was set out.

the ability to sight read under pressure and to grasp the necessity of maintaining rhythm (without unforgivable omissions) its what it was set out for. it is to LEARN basic skills that permit high level performance on the fly (rather than merely hope to have learned them by an undisclosed means) Is that not a worthy purpose- or must we take the evolutionary approach of leaving it to what people chance on by blind luck?

[nyiregyhazi]

And neither exercise is "better". They train different things- which is why I use both. yours is "better" if it's always better to go silent whenever the going gets tough and wait to reenter- rather than take an educated risk that would preserve the musial outline. A reliable accompanist must know when he can afford to drop notes, but also when he has a necessary cue to provide. If it's the latter then he MUST either provide it as written, or at least approximate something to give the rhythmic cue- or he's not pulling his weight and doesn't deserve his fee.

There are many aspects to sight reading and it takes a range of skill sets (which are quickest developed by having a range of different exercises to build options) to do a proper job of it. it's not a cheap contest between two exercises but a question of whether you have enough diversity in your work to cover the necessary bases for all round development).

[pianoman53]

Again, comment on what I actually write. I wrote that the guessing develops, so that you don't really guess. You glaze through the score, and notice what's not in the normal pattern. In that way, the "guessing" is more a knowing than guessing. Many of the people I know, who are good sight readers, says exactly the same thing. So you can tell what you want from this, but I know what they said.

[nyiregyhazi]

Again, comment on what I actually write. I wrote that the guessing develops, so that you don't really guess. You glaze through the score, and notice what's not in the normal pattern. In that way, the "guessing" is more a knowing than guessing. Many of the people I know, who are good sight readers, says exactly the same thing. So you can tell what you want from this, but I know what they said.

Develops HOW? do you not understand that I am talking about HOW to inspire such ability? My interest in just hoping to have reached a position of being there is nil. I'm interested in what specifically generates better skills. Not in assuming that a person just does or doesn't pick them up.

The fact that great sight readers guess little is a point I have been emphasising since the first post. However the exercise I speak of makes the difference between whether a student has learned to be WILLING to guess while staying in rhythm. If they have not, they have yet to even begin to learn what a good sight reader needs. It should be.easy to play any old notes in a rhythm. The fact few students find it to be shows both inadequate rhythm skills and inability to take a risk in favour of something bigger. If the only tool is omission of notes, it will not go anywhere special until they can also learn to keep the rhythm going in guesses.

[pianoman53]

I WROTE: THEY DEVELOP IT BY PLAYING ONE COMPOSER DURING A SHORT PERIOD! Dammit, why do you try to discuss when you don't even read? Complete and utter waste of time.

[nyiregyhazi]

I WROTE: THEY DEVELOP IT BY PLAYING ONE COMPOSER DURING A SHORT PERIOD! Dammit, why do you try to discuss when you don't even read? Complete and utter waste of time.

Thanks. Very wise of you to use capital letters there. Quite right that such a spectacular pearl of wisdom be given a means of standing out from the crowd. Obviously the strategies that everyone else in this thread came up with are pointless. All we need to is to give a student a book of compositions that contains the work but a single composer (and ensure that they do this for every composer who's work they will ever have to sight-read through, such as all the obscure clarinet/saxophone/viola composers whose works crop up regularly in exam accompaniments)...

*palms face*

I think I ought to remind you that this is the teachers forum. Some of us have been making serious points about what we believe generates progress and exchanging opinions from different angles. Please put aside whatever personal issues you perceive and stick to the topical issues- in a way that involves a basic level of effort. It contributes nothing to a serious debate to just state that things develop- regardless of whether a student plays the same composer all day or different things. The only angle you have presented so far was about complete omission of notes. HOW does a pianist evolve to the point where they can do a good job of getting through notes that they are not up to executing flawlessly at first sight- if the only exercise they do involves complete omission of areas that they cannot squeeze in? Students need to learn how to be capable of letting go of note accuracy for a bigger purpose- and not merely in terms of outright omissions. Merely offering a single limited exercise (and deciding that it has won your personally ajudicated competition against other ones, that nobody else was interested in entering) in not going to move discussion in a useful direction. This is not a contest and I am not interested in entering what you perceive as a personal battle. I debate issues that interest me, not people.

This is not provoking any interesting thoughts or ideas (your single composer idea scarcely even makes sense on its own terms, never mind the fact that it offers nothing at all on what should govern the intentions and approach whilst reading through it) so I will leave it here unless other posters have something to contribute.

PS I've never once found a composition any more difficult or easy as a result of having played/not played countless works by the composer before. Compositions are just easy to sightread or not.

[pianoman53]

Lol, didn't read.

[sucom]

While this is broadly true, this is exactly where I came from- as someone who played loads of stuff and was a pretty good sightreader of slow chords and pieces with plenty of pedal. However, I had to go to the absolute opposite end of the spectrum (literally taking as long as I wish over every detail and refusing to allow myself to indulge in guesswork) before I could reach the point where things like Mozart sonatas can be reasonably read through at sight without either outrageously unforgivable recklessness or pauses.

I think that playing 'loads of stuff' is the key phrase here.  The more music you play, the better the key awareness, the better the scale passages, chord progressions, etc, etc. Sight reading is just one aspect of overall skill, developed as a result of practising as many aspects of piano playing as possible - sight reading, note accuracy, timing accuracy, scales, arpeggios, dynamics, phrasing ...........

There are things that working under the pressure of not being allowed to stop simply does not  provide and there are many other avenues that contribute to an all-round skillset (that later come back to the ability to play things without stops, even though they start with a totally different approach to that which says never to stop). If never allowing the pulse to break were my only practise tool, I'd never have acquired the eye for detail (or the ability to transfer what has been read to the corresponding movement) that I depend upon to do much of what has become possible later in life.

I agree but here I feel you are talking about general methodical practice (as I mentioned above) as much as sight reading practice.  I believe the two go hand in hand and cannot really be separated.

Virtually anyone has something left to learn about sightreading from adding ultra-thoughtful sightreading in free-rhythm to their range of practise methods.  Try it on a piece that you'd have thought is simply beyond being sight-read by you at all- and instead of faking see if you can play it flawlessly in totally free rhythm without time pressures. It can be a real eye-opener to how much unfamiliar information can be processed accurately- when you allow your brain the chance not to have to guess or pick and choose between what notes to play. In particular, as a teacher, I find that getting my brain to work so exactingly makes me much better as spotting what is going on in a piece that a student is playing. If I imagine sightreading it myself with fakery, I would miss details that I need to pick up on to understand the inner workings. I feel that I need to enter that more exacting mindset, where I look to process every individual detail while reading (without necessarily even playing any of it), rather than just whatever would stand out under a time constraint.

I would consider that 'faking' notes would only be applicable when sight reading while accompanying or when keeping going while keeping accurate time is required.  Otherwise there would be no need to 'fake' notes at all, you could simply miss them while continuing to count.  Is 'faking' notes actually possible?  Notes are either accurate or they're not!  Also, they are either missed out or not.  I don't know how to fake notes.  I play them with accuracy or I don't.  There is a time for pushing yourself to maintain a steady beat and also a time for taking care to ensure accuracy.  Both methods of practice are equally important if you wish to become good at sight reading. 

This brings me back to the idea of playing as much music as you can get your hands on.  Every single piece brings with it new chord progressions, new jumps, new keys, new everything!  And the more you practise all these things, the better you become at recognising them again in a different piece.  For me, it's as simple as that.  And as I previously mentioned, sight reading has never been a problem for me and I do literally put this down to a vast amount of playing of many different styles of music, pushed by the desire to recreate pieces which totally inspired me to express them myself and feel the flow and energy of the music, even at a time when I was technically unable to do so with total accuracy.  But the more music I played, the more accurate my sight reading became.  And as I have also found that those students who purchase and download their favourite music, in addition to any pieces they are studying with me, are more capable of sight reading than those who don't, I feel this speaks volumes about how to improve sight reading without any need for superfluous technical jargon. 

My view:  If you really want to become good at sight reading, go to the library, visit music shops, download from the internet - quite literally get playing as much music as possible! 

In this thread, there seem to be cross wires about 'teaching' the ability to sight read from an elementary view, and actually sight reading from an already highly skilled level.  How we teach youngsters to sight read elementary music and how a more skilled pianist reads through a volume of Mozart or Beethoven sonatas is not quite the same discussion, although both are based on similar points.  When I read through a book of Mozart or Beethoven sonatas, I am drawing on many different skills I have already acquired over the years.  My knowledge of keys, for example, is instant whereas my students' knowledge of keys is naturally limited.

[nyiregyhazi]

I think that playing 'loads of stuff' is the key phrase here.  The more music you play, the better the key awareness, the better the scale passages, chord progressions, etc, etc. Sight reading is just one aspect of overall skill, developed as a result of practising as many aspects of piano playing as possible - sight reading, note accuracy, timing accuracy, scales, arpeggios, dynamics, phrasing ...........

You missed my point completely. The "loads of stuff" made me able to sightread easy chordal pieces pretty well. Yet I couldn't sightread a Mozart sonata to save my life. Since then, I do much less sightreading overall. It was strengthening associations and acting slowly and with purpose that led to improvement in doing things at first sight- not sheer volume of sightreading. That had come earlier. It had got me to a certain point of being able to do ham-fisted fakery and survive, but it was something else altogether that has got me to the point where things like Mozart sonatas are a reasonable possibility of sounding half-decent and to some level performance-like, rather than guaranteed cacophony. Precision work expanded my limits as a reader of unfamiliar material- where years of repeatedly scraping through stuff had left sloppiness.

I agree but here I feel you are talking about general methodical practice (as I mentioned above) as much as sight reading practice.  I believe the two go hand in hand and cannot really be separated.

No. It would not be the same if I was learning a piece over time. It's essential to make these kind of expectations FIRST TIME ROUND, with UNFAMILIAR repertoire. The processes may be similar to those involved in trying to learn music properly, but it's important to do it with different things that there is no experience in. You really push your limits if you expect perfection in the notes of an unfamiliar piece and do not casually skip whatever you don't fancy your chances on. If you expect rhythm to be kept all the time, you push them past breaking point. If you expect only flawless execution of notes, some of the time, you have to perceive a lot more detail in different ways to when you fake everything. There is much learning to be had from this.

Is 'faking' notes actually possible?  Notes are either accurate or they're not!  Also, they are either missed out or not.  I don't know how to fake notes.  

Who said they are always accurate? If it's perfectly accurate then you're not faking.
 

This brings me back to the idea of playing as much music as you can get your hands on.  Every single piece brings with it new chord progressions, new jumps, new keys, new everything!  And the more you practise all these things, the better you become at recognising them again in a different piece.  

Sure, but only if you execute them. If you skip them then you learn little to expand your range. That's why I'm a firm believer in being willing to let the rhythm go some of the time, but to challenge yourself to take on the note-based challenges in a way that involves no compromise. Pushing the balance to one side or the other allows learning in ways that carry over when you go back into the more regular sightreading mode that would be expected from a good accompanist.

And as I have also found that those students who purchase and download their favourite music, in addition to any pieces they are studying with me, are more capable of sight reading than those who don't, I feel this speaks volumes about how to improve sight reading without any need for superfluous technical jargon.  

Student who practise their long-term pieces more tend to do better than those who don't. Does that mean we don't need to teach them anything about how to improve further? I don't follow your logic. Of course practise helps. That means those who practise require no teaching and could not do vastly better still, if led to bring in a range of new ways of thinking and working? This isn't a choice between either simply throwing yourself into it regularly or doing significantly less work via a system. Who's to say those who do lots of work wouldn't be vastly better still if they tried out a number of diverse formulas during their sightreading?  

This sums up the case with myself. I became a pretty good sightreader simply by doing it. I became a vastly better sightreader by being more systematic about various different ways of organising the time I spend sightreading and experimenting with a range of wildly different approaches. It's not a case of having to choose between time OR quality.

[sucom]

Quote:
Student who practise their long-term pieces more tend to do better than those who don't. Does that mean we don't need to teach them anything about how to improve further? I don't follow your logic. Of course practise helps. That means those who practise require no teaching and could not do vastly better still, if led to bring in a range of new ways of thinking and working? This isn't a choice between either simply throwing yourself into it regularly or doing significantly less work via a system. Who's to say those who do lots of work wouldn't be vastly better still if they tried out a number of diverse formulas during their sightreading?  End quote

No, I said, students who practice other music IN ADDITION to their regular music tend to do better than those who don't.  I'm not quite sure why you don't follow my logic.  It seems straight forward to me.  Everyone can do better than they are currently doing - that goes without saying.  In fact, I would say that anyone who believes they are the best limits themselves in their belief that they cannot learn further.  

What I have said here is that regular practice and sight reading skills go hand in hand.  Each helps the other.

[sucom]

I'm having to post separately because I'm having major problems with this site tonight.

Quote:
You missed my point completely. The "loads of stuff" made me able to sightread easy chordal pieces pretty well. Yet I couldn't sightread a Mozart sonata to save my life. Since then, I do much less sightreading overall. It was strengthening associations and acting slowly and with purpose that led to improvement in doing things at first sight- not sheer volume of sightreading. That had come earlier. It had got me to a certain point of being able to do ham-fisted fakery and survive, but it was something else altogether that has got me to the point where things like Mozart sonatas are a reasonable possibility of sounding half-decent and to some level performance-like, rather than guaranteed cacophony. Precision work expanded my limits as a reader of unfamiliar material- where years of repeatedly scraping through stuff had left sloppiness.  End quote

No, I haven't missed your point completely.  What I have done is read your point, and then continued to make a further point.  Acting slowly and with purpose is what I class as general practice, rather than sight reading practice.  The two go hand in hand.

I'm not sure what you mean by ham fisted fakery.  How can anyone 'fake' a note?  As I said, a note is either played with accuracy or is not.  A note is either missed, or is not.  How do you fake a note?

Precision work is general practice.  Sight reading practice is about keeping going and looking ahead in much the same way that a child first reads single words and then begins to make sense out of whole sentences.  In my view, sloppiness is corrected by general, careful practice, both in sight reading and other more general practice.

[nyiregyhazi]

No, I said, students who practice other music IN ADDITION to their regular music tend to do better than those who don't.  I'm not quite sure why you don't follow my logic.  It seems straight forward to me.  Everyone can do better than they are currently doing - that goes without saying.  In fact, I would say that anyone who believes they are the best limits themselves in their belief that they cannot learn further.  

I follow this entirely. My point is that it would be more remarkable were it NOT the case that such students sightread better. Of course practising something makes it easier. It's a given. That doesn't mean the big trick to sightreading is just to generically throw practise at something and assume that it makes for excellence. This is more a case of providing evidence that not practising something leaves you crap at it. However, it takes a lot more than doing something regularly to reach your full potential at it. The big issue is what makes one guy who spends the same time practising sight-reading as others significantly better at it than others who work as hard, or even harder. It only demonstrates the obvious when you point out that people who do a lot of reading get better at it, as a broad rule. As I say, I learned a certain amount from merely faking loads of music. However, I didn't learn to do anything other than fake very approximately and sloppily. More strategic and thoughtful work at what goes on beneath the surface of reading and executing has since allowed me to go considerably further than mere time expenditure and enthusiasm took me.

[nyiregyhazi]

No, I haven't missed your point completely.  What I have done is read your point, and then continued to make a further point.  Acting slowly and with purpose is what I class as general practice, rather than sight reading practice.  The two go hand in hand.

Did you read the paragraph after the one you replied to? They are totally different things. I practise playing UNFAMILIAR music with the expectation that it should be NOTE-PERFECT, FIRST TIME, in free rhythm. While general practise should aim for something very close to that, it is generally done in rhythm and few pianists do it with expectations of exactitude at all times. Doing this in a piece you've been learning for a while is a totally different experience. The key is expecting perfection at once in notes you have never seen before- by whatever means it takes.

This may be closer to how people traditionally approach repertoire to be learned than what people think of as sightreading technique. But it's doesn't matter. However you wish to view this, by definition it is reading by sight- as there is nothing else to go on, particularly not habit. The skills from this transfer very directly to when you do the conventional run straight through an unfamiliar piece with a stricter sense of pulse.

I'm not sure what you mean by ham fisted fakery.  How can anyone 'fake' a note?  As I said, a note is either played with accuracy or is not.  A note is either missed, or is not.  How do you fake a note?

notes. Who specified the singular?  Listen to Horowitz late in life if you don't get it.

[sucom]

I follow this entirely. My point is that it would be more remarkable were it NOT the case that such students don't sightread better. Of course practising something makes it easier. It's a given. That doesn't mean the big trick to sightreading is to generically throw practise at something and assume that it makes for excellence. It's more a case of providing evidence that not practising something leaves you crap at it. However, it takes a lot more than doing something regularly to reach your full potential at it. As I say, I learned a certain amount from merely faking loads of music. However, I didn't learn to do anything other than fake very approximately and sloppily. More strategic and thoughtful work at what goes on beneath the surface of reading and executing has since allowed me to go considerably further than mere time expenditure and enthusiasm took me.

If I had to sight read a piece in, say, D flat major, but had never played a piece in D flat major, would this make sight reading more difficult than if I had attempted 10 pieces in D flat major?  If I had to play in the key of F sharp minor, a piece which contained scale passages, or some similar pattern of chord progressions or whatever, would I find this easier to sight read if I had previously played the F sharp minor scale, chords 1, 2, 4, 5, the arpeggio, or several pieces in the same key.  In other words, the more pieces and scales you attempt or practice, the more you develop key awareness, chord progressions, scale patterns, etc.

I really don't follow why you say that you learnt a certain amount by faking loads of music.  That doesn't make sense to me at all.  How can 'faking' anything offer any useful practice?  And why would one do it?

[nyiregyhazi]

If I had to sight read a piece in, say, D flat major, but had never played a piece in D flat major, would this make sight reading more difficult than if I had attempted 10 pieces in D flat major?  If I had to play in the key of F sharp minor, a piece which contained scale passages, or some similar pattern of chord progressions or whatever, would I find this easier to sight read if I had previously played the F sharp minor scale, chords 1, 2, 4, 5, the arpeggio, or several pieces in the same key.  In other words, the more pieces and scales you attempt or practice, the more you develop key awareness, chord progressions, scale patterns, etc.

Of course. What have I said that would suggest otherwise? I agree completely so I don't follow what your point is. I've been learning pieces all my life. What I specified as being different recently is that the fact that I often expect full note-wise precision of myself WHEN PLAYING UNFAMILIAR MUSIC FOR THE FIRST TIME AND IN FREE RHYTHM. When I am generally learning a piece I am always relying on habits that have been forming- not doing something for the first time ever, except on the one occasion when it really is the first time I play it. I don't know how much more strongly I can really emphasise this extremely significant distinction. General practise is not sightreading. I am speaking of music that has NOT been in any way familiar.

I really don't follow why you say that you learnt a certain amount by faking loads of music.  That doesn't make sense to me at all.  How can 'faking' anything offer any useful practice?  And why would one do it?

This is precisely the point I am making. I don't think you're following me. It doesn't provide long-term progress. It provides the ability to get away with something in the short term that is often vastly preferable to either stopping the rhythmic flow or completely giving up on a chain of signficant notes altogether and leaving them out. Instead, you focus on getting some done properly and guess at others in between. What is so strange about this? This is one of the most standard concepts in sightreading. My point is that it's an essential skill to have in the short term but that it doesn't boost the limits of what difficulties you can execute to an extremely high-standard at the very first view. It only gets you better at faking within your present standard. This is what happened when I was younger- which shows that throwing time at reading things is not good enough. I faked a lot of music by doing a lot of reading without precision but in a way that tries to conjure up a sense of performance. Have you honestly never heard anyone use this terminology before? Rubinstein and Horowitz were massive fakers.

[sucom]

I'm sorry but the forum pages are loading so slowly that I can't keep up with your posts - it's driving me crazy here waiting for the pages to load so I will come back tomorrow when hopefully the pages will load in time to respond in a more timely manner to your posts.  Too much lag, by far!

[nyiregyhazi]

Something that I tend to do with my poorer sight readers is to encourage them to keep going regardless.  To aid this, I might sight read the left hand while they sight read the right hand, and vice versa, forcing them to keep moving.   At the same time, I tell them that I don't care if every single note is wrong.  What I am trying to do is to give them a sense of time and pulse, and to aid them in looking forwards in the music as they play.

Could you clarify your stance? Coming back to what you had said before in the above quote, I'm not clear why you don't understand what I mean by faking. Faking is accepting that there will be imperfection in accuracy/selecting only some of the notes to play and keeping it going in terms of pulse. Isn't that much self-explanatory? The point I am making is that if this is the exclusive approach to sightreading, the student only gets used to giving up on half of the notes that are written and either having a wild stab in the dark or leaving out taxing things altogether. This will do little to prepare a student for becoming increasingly capable of actually executing unfamiliar demands of equivalent difficulty to what they currently don't even attempt. To get better at things you have to process them and figure out how to do them.

I see your point about how learning pieces in general contributes to the sightreading ability- however the point is that when we are learning pieces we are not giving flawless executions of unfamiliar material (unless we get it note perfect on the FIRST occasion of reading). If such processes are not being done on the absolute first reading, you are not training yourself to process new information to a reliable standard of understanding at high speeds.

Incidentally, I read through a movement of a Mozart sonata earlier today, not the famous D major but a less familiar one. What I found was that I was able to play most of it note perfect, not actually in free rhythm but mostly in time. However, there is a "feel" that I have developed from doing totally free time reading of unfamiliar material. I can tell if I feel prepared for the next note or not. My free time reading of notes has given me the eye for detail and the sense of preparation that allows me to do most of it with a strong sense of confidence.

In places where I didn't feel that same level of confidence and certainty, I had two options. I could either slow down however much my brain needed, in order to maintain confident expectation of precise detail. Or I could go into "sod it" mode and ignore those details that I did not have time to process enough to be confident about exactly what it said and go into faking mode for a beat or too (which could either mean a few educated guesses or leaving out a note or two). I think it's that inner feeling of options that is so important and working at different things from both angles. You don't get to be a more confident reader by only ever cheating when the going gets tough (without even processing the notes that you give up on). Forcing yourself to take the time to process everything and be certain of executing the notes as written can be an really powerful challenge when you are someone who typically poops out at this point. I think a truly good sightreader gets their by having the OPTION either to fake or to ease up enough to give their brain the practise of literally processing all of the fine details of the notes, on the very first occasion that it has ever been presented with them.

The more you do this, the less you actually need to start slowing down anymore, in order to process the full detail with enough certainty to execute it without cheating.

[sucom]

To be honest, I do believe we have a similar viewpoint but are wording it slightly differently.  For instance, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what you meant by ‘faking’ notes but I understand more clearly now what you mean by this.  Using this terminology, I would say I would consider myself to have been a real ‘faker’ in my early years of piano playing.  And possibly even now, although less so because perhaps it’s not quite so necessary after many thousands of hours practising.

My stance on all of this is that you can’t really state whether sight reading should be a case of like this or like that.  I don’t believe there is any choice at all about how we learn to sight read. I believe instead in a very well rounded musical education and very well rounded overall practice methods.

For example, I believe that every instrumentalist benefits from playing as much music as they can.  I can’t emphasise this strongly enough, and even then some. The more music we play, the more patterns we learn, the more we develop key awareness, the more technically able we become. That’s very straightforward and there is just no getting round it.  And I have found this, not only with my only ability to sight read but also in my students’ ability to sight read.   The ability to develop technique improves and increases with every new piece played, even if some of the notes are fluffed, or faked as you put it.

Pushing forwards at a steady, even tempo in sight reading allows something very important forward.  I could liken this to driving a car at 30mph down a straight road.  It feels so slow.  However, if you also drive at 30mph around a 90 degree corner, suddenly 30mph is very fast and requires much focus to keep on track.   It is the same with piano playing – if you keep that steady, even tempo then focus and concentration becomes more acute when a tricky passage is met.  

In addition, pushing forwards while at the same time missing notes and/or allowing inaccuracy allows the player to ‘feel’ the spirit of the piece.  It allows the person to feel the flow, to feel the energy of the piece and more importantly, it allows the player to feel inspired by the piece he is playing.  And the more pieces that are attempted, even with so many inaccuracies or ‘faking’ (using your terminology) the more inspired becomes the player.  In this sense, I would say that I used to fake a tremendous amount when I was younger!   It made me inspired to learn more; it revitalised me!  It made me want to put that music on my music stand and really LEARN it, carefully and methodically so that I was able to fill in all those missing notes.  So yes, the more you play, the better you become.

But………as well as this, in addition to this, careful, methodical practice of ALL aspects of piano playing is a must.  If this means scales, arpeggios, studies, lots of pieces, theory, etc, etc, etc, then so be it.  It is ALL important.  You can’t expect someone to be a good sight reader if they don’t develop their technique by playing many different pieces of many different styles.  It’s just not going to happen.

So for me, sight reading is all about playing or attempting just about everything in sight and within reach; it is about offering the opportunity to feel truly inspired and feel the flow of the music, allowing it to wash over you; it is about backing up the sight reading practice slowly AND in tempo, playing familiar music, half familiar music and totally unfamiliar music such as different composers, hymns, carols, pop songs, Broadway, boogie woogie, George Gershwin, Fats Waller, anything that rocks your boat and inspires you; it is about music theory and learning chords and chord progressions, octaves, big jumps around the keyboard, using keys and time signatures, etc.
I would never limit any aspect of piano playing to one method.  If a person truly enjoys playing, and truly enjoys creating music as a whole, then anything that allows the energy of music to flow through them in a creative way is worth the effort.  This is the driving force behind my own playing and is what I attempt to inspire my students to do.

[lostinidlewonder]

I wonder how others teach sight reading, and I would like to expand and elaborate or perhaps change ways in which I approach sight reading. What is your method?

Of course one could write an entire book about how to teach sight reading, there really is a huge amount to write about it regarding each of the different levels of sight reading. We can only reveal the tip of the iceberg in an online discussion. I think the issues you mentioned are very important especially a sense of pulse (beat) and how to use and observe it in sheet music when dealing with coordination, rhythmic reading, phrasing etc.

One issue I think is of key important is Fingering. Most people have problems sight reading because they cannot fluently use the correct fingers to play a passage. If people use the correct fingers all the time the reading becomes much easier. I place a special importance in understanding fingering, how to solve it in many different pieces and discussing why certain fingering might be better than others for a given passage.

To know what pieces to study with the student I need to clearly understand what is easy, normal and difficult for the student to read. Understanding what separates and lies in between these categorizations helps me understand what material to use to improve the students reading ability. It is of course important that we teach many scales, chords and progressions, arpeggio and their patterns, general coordination for playing such as Support (Chord, arpeggio, scale, part playing) vs Melody etc.

Sight reading naturally improves the more pieces a student masters. This is because they become familiar with the general procedures you come across in music, many patterns and co-ordinations of the hands are well known with many pieces re-enforcing what it feels like in the hand. Then when they investigate more closely what it looks like in sheet music they can make more immediate reaction to their hands to produce it. Effective sight reading uses a great deal of memory and past experience of many pieces.

No one can read something well that uses technique that they have little or no experience playing before. This is a big problem that faces teaching sight reading to early beginners of piano. Of course we can teach the basics, how to read notes, note values, how to solve rhythms, timing, key signature etc etc, the basics you can teach any beginner but getting them to sightread chords, arpeggios, scales in pieces and coordinating many two hand playing procedures etc, without having experience with it in pieces they have learned can overwhelm them. It certainly makes understanding the fingering and technique to produce it elusive and you might find spoon feeding them all the correct fingering information makes the sight reading exercise useless. It can be overwhelming asking a students to read actions that they have little experience with, so a caring teacher should ensure that what they teach in reading reflects what the student has at least some experience with.

For beginners I do encourage them learning many small hand position pieces (with very few hand positions) and learning via fingering number combinations. This way we can train many chords, scales and co-ordination patterns then get them to start reading these patterns in music once they have a few pieces under their belt. This way they start to read larger amounts of the score immediately rather than focusing on one dot at a time. However a beginner should learn to count up and down the staff and cycle through the letters backwards and forwards (in different intervals as well). Understanding how to read patterns in chords for instance is very helpful for beginners. Chorals are excellent for this although can be overwhelming if a student is weak at playing chord positions. However understanding chord patterns such as CEG - CFA noticing that the lowest note remains the same but the top two have gone up, noticing this pattern in the keyboard and then in the sheet and making this connection. Observing patterns this way is very helpful.

Knowing what is easy, normal and difficult for a student to read usually opens up a large amount of music for us to focus study on. I tend to find that Bach's WTC is extremely important for more experienced sight readers. Understanding the fingering and appreciating the contours to the piano caused by the key signatures, understanding how to phrase his part writing effectively etc, this is all very helpful for good sight readers. One of the most helpful aspects of studying the WTC especially the fugues is that one can practice it with many different slow tempos without losing cohesion musically something that other composers tend to do.

[pianoman53]

Everything sort of comes down to what you want to do with it. I learn most pieces by heart after a week or so, so I rarely need sight reading. When I need it, it's usually to accompany singers. Therefore, it's more important to me to simply know the different ways different composers writes. Also, the few times I can't learn by heart is when I don't know the composer well enough. So, for me, it's most useful to, again, get to know them. That's why my way of teaching it might look like something some guy with a dutch brownie came up with.

So Yeah, maybe N's way is actually better if you really need it. Though, I don't, nor does most of the students in the school where I study.

[sucom]

I think a lot of useful points have come up in this thread, all worthy of consideration.  Reading through, it does become obvious that we all have our own needs and requirements which must be met individually. For instance, I agree that if a piece can be learnt quickly and easily, then in many situations, the need for sight reading doesn't particularly arise.

As much as I understand this though, this wouldn't meet my own personal need, because I really do like to play through as much as I can, simply for the enjoyment it gives me.  In this way, playing the piano serves me well because I can match my own mood at any time I choose by picking up any piece on the spur of the moment.  This has always helped my sight reading which has been useful on many occasions.  I do recall walking down a corridor at university one day, (quite a few years ago now)  when a door suddenly opened and a tutor grabbed me and said, Ah, just the person we need!  Someone was auditioning and needed an accompanist so he grabbed me as I unwittingly walked past the door.  In a situation like this, her performance was very important to her so strong sight reading skills were required to allow this girl to perform at her best. I do remember it not being a particularly easy piece, tricky actually, but after all those times of 'faking' while playing along to a record (now I'm showing my age!) I luckily had the necessary skills to follow her own choice of tempo and expression and perhaps even help her along a little.

Something else which has been said is having the ability to sight read through students' pieces in an effort to recognise various technical difficulties and so on, which will aid choosing or teaching a piece to a student.  There are lots of different reasons for having an ability to sight read although many people get by perfectly well without this ability, depending on their own needs and requirements and what they are trying to achieve through their piano playing.  

From my own point of view, anything which releases any limitation on enjoyment is worthwhile.  I don't like limitations or restrictions so will go the extra mile if necessary to remove them.  But I certainly accept this is not the case for all. All I know is that it works for me.

[sucom]

I am just wondering if this is a smaller world than we might believe.  I studied at the Birmingham Conservatoire with Joseph Weingarten.  I believe someone on this thread may also have studied there some years later.  If so, hello, nice to meet you!

[nyiregyhazi]

Everything sort of comes down to what you want to do with it. I learn most pieces by heart after a week or so, so I rarely need sight reading. When I need it, it's usually to accompany singers. Therefore, it's more important to me to simply know the different ways different composers writes. Also, the few times I can't learn by heart is when I don't know the composer well enough. So, for me, it's most useful to, again, get to know them. That's why my way of teaching it might look like something some guy with a dutch brownie came up with.

So Yeah, maybe N's way is actually better if you really need it. Though, I don't, nor does most of the students in the school where I study.

Is it about "need" though? You could say that I don't "need" to be able to play through completely unfamiliar movements of Beethoven violin sonatas. Last weekend I did (with a violinist), which would not have been realistically possible a few years back. Sure they were far from acceptable by concert standards, but the combination of being able to process large amounts of information on the fly and the ability to ignore some of the notes and keep going allowed me to do so.

Would anyone "need" to sightread difficult Rachmaninoff compositions by sight? Obviously not. But would you WANT to be able to? We should not just assume that our present level of ability is whatever is right for us and that anything more is unnecessary- simply because it's most convenient to carry on as we are rather than explore whether we might have a way to get a hell of a lot closer to that. We should keep considering how much better we can get, if we try something outside of our norm.

In particular, for a teacher's thread, the ability to improve sightreading is fundamental to teaching unfamiliar music. Personally, I rarely worry too much about seeing something new, as I can read well enough to get a good grasp of it. I want to to keep improving my reading skills for the sake of teaching- so I'm not simply having to guess at stuff but hopefully picking up a good enough impression of what demands the student faces to help them out (rather than merely resort to vague advice,  to cover up for lack of acquaintance with the music).

I share sucom's views about the joys of sightreading, but I believe in a combination of just learning it by doing it and formulating very specific strategies for continuing to get better and better at it. Whatever a person's level, it's worth taking a completely unfamiliar piece that you think you could not sightread in a million years and going so thoughtfully as to seriously attempt note-perfection first time around. It's incredible what difference you can make to your basic information processing skills when you give yourself such a challenge- rather than only play through things in faking mode for fun. Interesting to hear that you studied at Birmingham, by the way. I've heard the name Joseph Weingarten from the scholarship that they still run.

[keypeg]

I've written about this before.  Some four years ago when I got a piano again which I had played self-taught decades before, I confronted the fact that back then I didn't know notes and had been "reading" by approximation.  I wanted to learn to read piano music.  Reading is defined as seeing notes on the page, and that turning into playing on the piano.

The first thing I ran into were discussions on "sight reading" with the usual advice on using pieces that are below your level, playing at tempo, not stopping to fix mistakes etc.  I figured out eventually that two things were being mixed up or the distinction had not been made so it was fuzzy: learning to read music, and the very specialized skill of sight reading (prima vista) which an accompanist has to be able to do.   A less specialized skill is to be able to explore new music by slowly playing through it to see what it's about, instead of relying on a recording.

I still thought that this was about "reading" and decided to reject that advice.  To be able to READ music, we have to get some accurate knowledge and skills.  This is where I was at.  (I had actually "winged it" as my first step all those years.)  You have to be able to see D in the score and have your fingers seeking out the key between the two black keys --- plus which of those D's.  If you only have a vague idea, this will trip you up.  You have to have an idea of going up a third, or recognizing an octave and feeling that span in your hand.  You also have to understand the timing in your music so that the sixteenth notes don't become "really fast stuff coming up".  If you understand key signatures, modulation, common forms of music, all of this will help you in the accuracy department.

These are the things that I chased because of what I did and didn't have.  At this stage, when you don't know your notes, intervals etc., if you try to "sight read" doing the things needed for sight reading, I'm not sure that you will ever get this feel for "D is the key between the two black keys".  You will stay approximate and vague.

I'm sure a lot of people will say "d'uh!" and that it's a given.  But it is likely that many people are jumping straight at the prima vista part without having the other part, or may have fallen into a vague kind of reading and ending up having holes in the areas that I have outlined.

[nyiregyhazi]

These are the things that I chased because of what I did and didn't have.  At this stage, when you don't know your notes, intervals etc., if you try to "sight read" doing the things needed for sight reading, I'm not sure that you will ever get this feel for "D is the key between the two black keys".  You will stay approximate and vague.

Absolutely agreed. My own stance is that even at extremely advanced levels these issues remain important- otherwise abilities hit a wall and stop going notably further. Does an advanced sightreader simply fake and guess better, or are they also considerably more advanced at seeing a series of thick chords and literally being 100% certain of every individual note that they are comprised of (and I mean EVERY note- not just getting a broad sense of C major, say, and playing some kind of approximate layout of the right harmony)? People make the mistake of thinking "now I'm advanced" and simply concentrating on the faking side- when it's actually care and attention that leads you to get increasingly adept at processing information with genuine certainty.

[keypeg]

I suspect that it will be true of many people that when they are advanced there will be holes in some basic areas, because teaching and learning is rarely perfect.  When you get at those things, then stuff on the advanced side suddenly fall in place.  Or - Pavarotti said at the end of his life "I am a student."