by Holly Champion
Developing the skill of sight-reading is often one of the biggest struggles for piano students –or indeed students of any instrument, but keyboard instruments and the harp are arguably the hardest, due to the sheer number of notes you have to read.
It can seem totally overwhelming, especially when you are truly sight-reading—that is, you have never seen nor heard the piece before. It can be far easier to ‘sight-read’ a piece that you are familiar with from hearing it before, as your aural and memory skills are working to support your sight-reading skills. I often recommend to my students who “hate sight-reading” or “are hopeless at sight-reading” that they try playing through easy arrangements of famous classical pieces, Christmas carols or pop or rock songs that they know well. Aside from being easier, it can also be more fun to play pieces that you and your family or friends recognise! And of course, the more you practise sight-reading, the faster and smoother and better at it you will get. And as you get better at it, you’ll enjoy it more and more. Try to do at least 3-5 minutes of sight-reading in every practice session.
Apart from browbeating you with the the old adage “practice, practice, practice,” I would suggest that the next most important things to do when sight-reading are to “prioritise, prioritise, prioritise” and “predict, predict, predict.” Prediction in sight-reading is based on the recognition of common musical patterns, such as common keys, cadences and harmonic structures, time signatures (meter), chords and intervals, and common rhythmic or melodic motifs. Especially when grounded in an understanding of the stylistic background of the piece, prediction is a huge aid when sight-reading. Advanced sight-readers do not literally read every note. Instead, they read shapes and patterns, and infer a lot, based on the ones they recognise.
However, if you are a novice sight-reader on a particular instrument, you are– not always, but usually– also a novice musician and a novice music theory student, so how can you quickly and accurately recognise and predict patterns that you have only just begun to learn about? Well, some of this is just a case of accepting that it will take time, and practice, and plenty of work on your scales and theory, and plenty of playing and analysing pieces in various styles, before you develop and integrate these complex skills. A good teacher can do a great deal to assist you of course. But prioritisation also really helps. By this I mean that if you are a novice sight-reader (or an intermediate sight-reader playing something advanced) you have to accept that you just won’t be able to play everything that is written. You won’t be able to either read, recognise or predict it or get your fingers to the right places fast enough. It’s OK. You can still make a passable impression of the piece, as long as you have your musical priorities in order. So what are these priorities? Our top ones are tempo, beat, form and key.
As I have argued in another blog post about practising and sight-reading here, duration is the most fundamental element of music (or musical concept). It is the most important aspect of sight-reading and the main element to prioritise, particularly when it comes to tempo, meter and pulse, or beat. If you can’t keep up with the tempo, the meter and the beat, you won’t be able to sight-read with other musicians playing along; the whole rehearsal or performance will just fall apart. The details of the rhythm can often be a bit more flexible, as long as you fit your improvised or incorrect rhythm into the framework of the established tempo, meter and beat, and keep up with your colleagues.
Secondly, it is of course important to prioritise structure, or form. If everyone else you’ve been playing the B section with has just gone back to repeat the A section and you have incorrectly moved on to the C section, then Houston, we have a problem. But while scanning the whole piece before you start and getting an idea of the structure should prevent this from happening in the first place, this mistake is also usually fixable while you are playing. If you have a strong sense of the beat, meter and tempo and a good ear (by which I mean well-developed aural musicianship skills), you should be able to work out where your colleagues are and catch up with them again. It’s even easier if you are working from the full score, as do many pianists who are accompanying or playing in a chamber ensemble. With the lovely full score laid out in front of you, you can actually see where your colleagues are. (This is one of the reasons pianists often need page-turners; with full scores we just have to get through so very many pages, and we need both our hands nearly all the time! One of my pet peeves is when singers stand there singing to your accompaniment and looking over your shoulder at the full score, yet don’t turn the pages… but I digress.)
Thirdly, it is important to prioritise issues of pitch: key signature(s) and key are fundamental to understanding the harmonic structure of tonal music, which comprises most of the music learned in the classical tradition and much of the music in other traditions as well. If you know what key the piece is ‘in’, or what its tonal centre is, a basic understanding of tonal harmony will enable you to predict a lot of things about the piece: for example, it is likely to start and end in that key; it is likely to feature that key significantly throughout; it may modulate in the middle to a related key such as the relative or parallel minor/major, or the dominant. As an adjunct to your regular sight-reading practice, it is a good idea to practice quickly recognising key signatures (there are hundreds of apps to help you with this, which mostly amounts to rote learning), recognising the key of pieces, and recognising the notated shapes of various common chords in root position and their inversions.
Many of the most important elements of a new score can be quickly scanned and noted before you start playing. When sight-reading in examinations, you will be given a certain short amount of time to scan the score. Most (non-psychopathic) singer/instrumentalist colleagues/clients and conductors will give you a moment too. If they don’t, do not be ashamed to stop them and ask for it. In these precious seconds, remember to check the important aspects of the score, such as tempo, time signature, key signature and key, form, oft-repeated motifs, and harmonic structure. Look ahead in the score. What are the trickiest parts? If you really can’t play them, can you improvise something similar or something stylistically appropriate? Can you simplify them? Can you reduce them to their most important elements? The question of what the most important elements are, of course, is complex and cannot be fully answered here, but I have given you a few ideas above (priorities!) and here are a couple more.
In most tonal music, the harmonic structure is generally founded on the bass line. As a pianist, if you can’t read the full notated chord or harmony quickly enough to play it in tempo, often you can get away with just playing the melody and the bass line. Sometimes the melody is not so important however, especially if a musician colleague is already playing it, such as when you are accompanying them. In this case, prioritise the bass and the harmony, even if you can’t play every single note. Prioritise the main cadences: that is, the harmonies creating the structural “commas” and “full stops” of the piece. (Cadences are another great thing to scan for before playing.) It is a good idea while practising sight-reading by yourself to set yourself an overall tempo that is based partly on the notated tempo and partly on how fast you can play the most difficult part of the piece. When playing with others, this may or may not be possible. But please, whatever you do, resist the urge to stop once you’ve started playing. Don’t dwell on or correct your mistakes. Just try to stay in the moment and read slightly ahead. Keep calm and carry on.
Sight-reading is a wonderful skill to develop. It opens up a whole world of amazing scores that you can play, and therefore hear and explore. If you can develop the related skills of theoretical understanding of harmony, stylistic comprehension, aural musicianship, and improvisation as well, you will be able to not only play fully notated scores but also chord charts, lead sheets, tablature (for some instruments), fake books, figured bass, or simply play by ear. Good sight-reading skills will mean you will be able to bluff your way impressively through anything that your friends might set in front of you at a party (“play this, play this!”), or that your accompaniment client has set in front of you, or that your band master has given out to the band. Instead of the nasty feeling of inadequacy and fear when faced with brand new music, you will feel confident and enjoy playing it, despite any mistakes, omissions, simplifications or improvisations… or even because of them–because you’ve kind of aced them!
Happy sight-reading!
