I could have said Rasputin, you'd still know who i was talking about right? Thanks for correcting me I am not good with names. I still mistake Schubert and Schumann all the time -_-
Sight reading can be used in many ways and you have given a few good examples. It is not necessarily being able to pick up a piece and play it at mastery, but at the same time it is and you should be able to do this for particular pieces. One should also question what is stopping them from being able to sight read other works with mastery, you can certainly discover a lot studying the piano in terms of sight reading, sure puts a different spin on the approach to the study (Eg: reading hundreds of pieces a month opposed to polishing a few pieces to mastery).
So, out of all the many points that a person with strength of conviction could have responded directly to (including those where I outlined the methodology that you had heckled me for not providing and demanded to know about), your response is to take a small passage that pertains entirely to the topic of sight reading and call it a "tangent"?
....I'll leave you to teach your students on the basis that quantity is the most important, the assumption that most people already know how to practise and the motto that lots of bad practise is better than none at all. (I sincerely wish those points were a ridiculous strawman of the kind you had created to argue against- rather than points you sincerely used to support your stance, in your last post)
Fixed that for you.
One of the things that can stop people being able to read a piece is not their sight reading abilities at all - it's simply not possible to read through a piece you are not actually able to play. So whilst I think that people would benefit by reading a greater amount of repertoire, I still think it's necessary to target pieces to bring up to scratch that will develop ones technical skills, and also provide the sort of depth of understanding that complements breadth.
I find improving technique with many pieces focusing on the same issue is better than perfecting a single piece that studies that action. Everyone is individual though in their musical approach though I would encourage people to choose to do many examples instead of trying to perfect a single one. You do have to have a technical confidence with a variation of many scales, chords, arpeggios and other patterns/progressions you commonly find at the piano. Learning a lot of repertoire will help to learn a lot of these and analysing music taking time to break it down, highlighting its patterns etc all are helpful steps for the developing reader. I find teaching students to read competently and then focusing on their technique is easier than the other way around. Good reading means being effective in finding the good fingering which can certainly aid good technique since fingering is technique as Liszt said.
I agree - with the slight caveat that some single pieces are better than others. The idea is to have a suite of general solutions, not whole warehouse-fulls of specific solutions, upon which to draw.
Topic: practicing sight reading 