Not quite. My second paragraph was to demonstrate that the first and last positions do in fact have a special role. The paragraph in the article serves a different purpose. It shows that there are times when it doesn't work. That in some instances, the word remains ambiguous, and the words chosen by them are actually carefully chosen to demonstrate this. A random paragraph converted to this rule will in most cases be legible.Now, I did not use this as an example of what happens when we sight read. I used it as an example of where the way we actually process information is not as straightforward as might appear at first glance. In cognitive sciences, the oddities - things that fail (such as optical illusions) and things which surprisingly work (such as the word example) are often useful tools in understanding what's going on under the hood.Applying that latter point to sight reading might prove a useful starting point. The things we cannot read, or the points where we make reading errors may prove a useful insight into the underlying mechanism. And, being a complex task, the underlying mechanism may work differently at different stages of its development and possibly differently in different people anyway.In my experience - subjective entirely, here - there are things I can read easily, where I am completely oblivious to what's going on, and then a range of various elements that, when introduced, increasingly make the task more complex, slower and more conscious.It also seems to me that part of the sight reading process also involves the brain in forming an auditory expectation, and a mechanical strategy for execution. I suspect that the better the sight reader, the more intertwined all of that is, and that also serves to complicate the picture.
I referred to the end of the article not the end of your paragraph. It shows the supposed formula is wrong.
Sorry, but it's complex isn't good enough against probabilities.
My second paragraph, quoted above addresses that. It appears you missed it.I'm missing entirely your continued reference to probabilities. My "it's complex" is a response to your "it's this and only this".I am aware you are talking about the unconscious level of processing. So am I.We both, I think, agree that good sight readers reliably and consistently get notes right, and that it is a reliable and fast way of processing the information off the page that allows them to do that. Not a "luckier then most" approach, but one that consistently works.I would also suggest that for even the best sight readers, there are occasional errors. I would also suggest that errors are informative.Indeed, sometimes it would be an error to play as written as the score itself is in error. I would suggest that successful corrections of these may also be informative. Further, hypercorrections would provide an additional level of insight.I am happy to pursue a discussion on any of these avenues, but frankly am not interested in doing so if you propose to wilfully misunderstand what I say and to merely restate your "I think this therefore it must be true" line.
j_menz,I'd be interested to know if you think this recent experience is relevant. I apologize in advance for the length, which regrettably may approach one of n's shorter posts. I don't sightread well on piano because normally one can only sightread a couple levels below what you can play, and my playing level isn't high enough! <smiley>I play trombone in several community level ensembles, and I am consistently one of the better sightreaders. I also sing in a church choir. We hire a couple of section leaders, music majors from the local university, and they have much better voices than I but I always out read them. I mention this because these experiences are the basis for my theories, and I freely admit my lesser ability at piano means they may not apply 100%. At any rate, one of my strategies for improvement has been to note where I make an error or struggle, and work specifically on that. On trombone, it was big band rhythmic figures, something not as common in most of the music we play. Heavy syncopation, rapid tempos, swung eights, conventions for notating. So I spent time daily working out of a syncopation book until I could play them correctly by feel, rather than counting. And this improvement transferred immediately to ensemble. Until this week, when I sightread a jazz piece in rehearsal. The band had worked on it before but I had not seen it. The arranger knew what he wanted to hear but not how to write it. (For example, by convention an eighth note is legato and a quarter staccato in most patterns; he wrote a quarter note anywhere he wanted a note long, and an eighth note eighth rest everywhere he wanted a note short. Think of the difference between seeing 4 quarters in a measure or 4 eighth note eighth rests where and this is key you don't expect it.)
I should add that, although the situation you describe wouldn't throw me at all, the notation used by singers (where notes are often beamed separately rather than together, in a way that would have clarified which notes fall on a beat) confuses the hell out of me.
You simply need to think in beat locations and picture every beat in the bar before starting it.
No. In this type of music, before ending it.
I teach handbells, and the notation does not include all the rests. There will be a stacked column of notes of different values. In every new piece there are a few places where my ringers do not understand whether the note is on the beat or somewhere else. I tell them what to play and they scribble it onto the music.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but the overview of beats should be instantly visible with or without rests,
Believe me, it is not. It is often the case that my ringers can't tell what is intended and sometimes I have to puzzle over it a bit myself. You'd have to look at some handbell music to see why. It's a compromise system, designed for people who are only playing their two notes out of a dense cluster of notes and for the most part are not fluent readers. It is not uncommon to have a dotted half, 4 quarter notes, and a couple of eighth notes stacked on one beat, with some of them offset if the note heads are adjacent, and then the following notes may be beamed to show the melody line, and it's a real hash.
For example if the bar ends in two quavers then you should instantly know that the first of them is the fourth beat.
In jazz, the second quaver is effectively the 1st beat of the next measure.
j_menz,I'd be interested to know if you think this recent experience is relevant.
I think its a bit simplistic to talk about processing the notes when sightreading without specifying what sort of processing you are talking about, because it seems to me that there are several different types of processing going on.There is analysis of individual notes: i expect that this is generally relatively slow and will feel 'hard' even when it is reliable.But i think that for easy, familiar, styles there is also pattern recognition (based on memory) followed up by verification. This still involves processing every note, but verifying a patterm is as expected will be much faster than a full analysis.In between, the (fast) verification process will quickly show up which notes are surprising (in that they don't match the patter). These notes can then (slowly) be analysed in full. In this way memory and pattern recognition can resolve many notes quickly and then act as a guide for where we need to perform a detailed, slow, analysis.At least, this is how it feels like to me, and it offers an explanation of why familiar patterns of music can be sightread more easily than unfamiliar ones: its the number of relevant patterns that we have available to match against that matters for fluid reading because we want to minimise the amount of analysis we need to do.But you do need to deal with every note, just not delaing with them in the same way.
@ nyiregyhaziNot to argue with you (I think I lack the skills for that ), but since you mentioned Bach's fugues, I'd like to mention that after practising (and transposing to all possible keys!) Cortot's preparatory exercises for polyphonic technique from his "Rational Principles" in all keys, reading Bach became a lot easier to process (that is: sightread and execute right away). I hope this makes sense, but I have a feeling that good sightreading pianists don't sightread with their eyes alone.
Having learned more than half of the first volume of the wtc, unfamiliar fugues continue to be what I would be least confident at sightreading. It's nothing to do with familiarity.
The idea that memory is the big issue in reading difficult repertoire is just a load of old guff.
I have no problem with any style, but only with levels of difficulty.
Memory of other pieces doesn't make works of great difficulty any easier in anything but a slender handful of respects....
Becoming more adept at figuring out what the score asks for (and more adept at executing whatever you can visualise at once, no matter how hard) are what makes sightreading easier.
A good sightreader simply decodes scores better and sends intentions to their hands better.
Put an expert in Bach into a totally different style they will most likely fall flat on their face. Try to sight read some Kasputin or perhaps with other rhythmic music which Bach does not explore. It will be terribly difficult. But put a stride pianist in front of some Kasputin and much of what is read might be easily understood because of their experience base.
So anyone who has played enough kapustin should be sightreading anything else by him?
"I don't think its much to do about having played enough, its about recognising patterns. If you don't understand the style of the composer enough to recognise their characteristic patterns, then you will have to analyse every note, rather than recognize the pattern and verify that the notes do indeed match the pattern. "But you're starting on the assumption that these are mutually exclusive acts- ie using circular logic.
Where is the circular logic? i don't see it.You can acquire patterns through slow learning of pieces (ie not sight reading), and then use those patterns for quick verifications during sight reading. During sight reading, the known patterns will help process many notes quickly leaving a few to analyse slowly. The experience of learning pieces slowly or sight-reading may lead you to add extra patterns to your repetoire. I did not say that you didn't need to process every note.I said that you don't need to analyse every note, because you can verify that the note fits a pattern much faster.
timing both to happen at the next beat, which happens the next time you look at the sheet music.
What are you proposing you look at in the interim?
your hands! if need be thank you, jmenz
If you don't understand the style of the composer enough to recognise their characteristic patterns, then you will have to analyse every note, rather than recognize the pattern and verify that the notes do indeed match the pattern.
LNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLNLN
(L)I play all 48 preludes and fugues and they became easier and easier to sight read the more of them I learned and the more of Bachs music that I played as a whole. Put a new fugue in front of me and I can play all the notes with good fingerings no problems, if it is a rapid tempo then of course you can't rattle it off at speed instantly but that is irrelevant because from slow and controlled playing comes any speed.
(L) You can sight read first go it with the correct fingerings perhaps at half tempo no worries.
(L) You are misunderstanding how sight reading is used. We don't just read it 1 time and expect to play it at tempo perfectly. But I can sight read it 100 times in a day and get it solved, rather than a memoriser who has to spend weeks analyzing their fingerings, notes etc etc. Sight reading, do you really know what is used for
(L) If you actually did read through a lot of music you would realize that it helps you to read the generali procedures there is in musical writing. There is no magical "right kind of way" you are trying to say again with ZERO clarification as to what this right kind of way is lol. You will simply be able to read better and faster and more accurate the more you read. There are of course structured ways to improve your sight reading, but simply reading a lot of music will help AUTOMATICALLY.
(L)If everyone who practices does so in a wrong fashion then of course they are not going to get better. But the reality is that most people who practice will see improvement, there is only a small portion of people who practice completely wrong and this can be easily remedied with a good teacher. No practice is worse than bad practice.
(L) Yes, but someone who plays a lot of Kasputin would play a lot of other styles which are similar from other composers.
(L) Maybe not on your first read but what about those that follow? How fast does it improve?
(L) A style can be difficult because of its style....
(L) Learning thousands of pieces does nothing at all? You think there could be even a chance that it does nothing? AHAHAHAHAHAH
(L) If there is no memory in the reading then how do you see a group of notes and react to it immediately without having seen it before? You must remember the pattern, at first the memory is raw conscious observation, later it becomes an instant muscular reaction in the fingers to what the eyes see.
(L) AHHAHAHAHAAHAH... wait? HAHAHA... please. If you cant explain yourself don't throw boooks at me.
Part of becoming a good sight reader is to reduce the need to look at your hands. Ideally, eliminate it entirely, but in the interim reduce the occasions where it is needed and reduce the time it takes to do so.Two reasons for this: first it gives you more time with the score to take in and analyse information, secondly, it stops you losing your place and repeating or missing whole bits.
Looking at your hands shouldn't throw you off from your place in the score, if you completely synchronized where you are in your left hand part and where you are in your right hand part, and where your hands are on the piano and everything else that is going on with the score and t he performance.
There isn't always a prelude or fugue to be read. There are crazy contemporary pieces where notes aren't practical skips or mostly by step/close together. And yes you would practice those impractical skips to be reliable without looking, but what if you are reading on the spot?
No note is ever more than 87 from the last one, and the piano mostly stays still.There are, I should point out, crazy contemporary preludes and fugues that employ large distances between notes too, but I wasn't limiting myself to that genre anyway.If you're reading on the spot, you need to be able to manage those larger gaps with minimal looking. None if you can.You appear to be confounding reading (off the sheet a piece you know) with sight-reading (a piece you've never played or heard before). In the former, losing your place is less likely, but in the latter it's entirely possible - especially where bars look alike.
Options are a positive, not a negative.
If it's an option, it's fine. For most struggling sightreaders, it's a necessity to look at the hands, rather than an option. And that necessity will hinder them.
Sure. But so will only looking at the score. They should practise instant memorisation of bars and deliberately play from visualisation of what they read, rather than allow themself to work note by note, based on small quantities of decontextualised information. I can't think of any safer way to break the habit of reading small, rather than big chunks.
So you're suggesting that instead of reading (once) of the page, they read of the page, memorise it, and then read off the memorised image? And that's better?
No, you look at it once, memorize it (in a way that works for sight reading), play it. If you are proficient enough in piano, in general, you don't need to look at your hands while you READ music, anyways. It works great in sight reading, but that's how I learn music, in the end, too...
attempting to always be one bar ahead
Why pick an arbitrary amount like a bar? Not all bars are equal, and the amount of information in one an be vastly (vastly!) greater than another. If you aim for "a bar ahead", for any level of processing ability bar the heroic sometimes it's trivial and sometimes it's impossible.
Once wasn't enough? BTW, it's Kapustin, not Kasputin.
....there may be different purposes for which we may be sight reading a piece, and I think that's an important point.Not the sight-reading vs just reading thing, but what we are reading for. For example, if one is reading to accompany a choir or other instrumentalists, the approach needs to be one of maintaining tempo and reasonable accuracy, missing what's not doable. If you're reading as a sort of private performance - this is what it goes like - then something like that works too, but maybe a bit more flexible. If you're reading to get a feel for a piece, the tempo can be a bit more fluid and off the pace, you can afford more mistakes (not a lot) and so forth. If you're reading to see what you would need to do to learn the piece, even slower, less steady and mistake ridden is possible. Horses for courses - so long as it works for what you're hoping to achieve with the exercise.
The madness begins!continues!