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On Teaching

January 2, 2015
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Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. During the 2014–2015 concert season he will be presenting a series of five recitals at the Center offering a survey of great keyboard repertoire from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Details about this and other activities can be found at www.gavinblack-baroque.com. Gavin can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

Several of my columns in the latter half of 2014 had their subject matter determined by things that had happened recently involving my own students and their lessons. This set of (two) columns also falls into that category. Over the last few months, three different new students have told me in our initial discussions that they needed to learn sight-reading or that they wanted to become better at it. The progress of those conversations and then the work that each of those students and I have done together—some of it focused on sight-reading—have caused me to think about that subject and to marshal some of my ideas about it in a column. This is another one of those areas that I have not addressed systematically before, though it is a central enough part of what people think about while working on playing that it has come up indirectly from time to time.

Some of the questions that I want to think about are: 1) What is sight-reading and what do people—students in particular—think that it is? 2) What are its uses and to what apparent uses should it (usually) not be put? 3) What is the role of sight-reading in learning pieces? and, finally, 4) What are some of the ways that sight-reading can be practiced systematically? I should first mention—or really confess—that I think I have always undervalued sight-reading. Or, at least, I have always focused too much on the ways in which the practice has been abused or overused and not enough on the ways in which it can be useful or can form a part of artistic development. And I will further confess that the reason for this is probably that I was, in the early to middle stages of my life as a musician, a really bad sight-reader. In my very early years of organ study—my mid-teens—I was such a bad sight-reader that I went through life feeling chronically mortified by that fact, and would (to avoid discovery) never venture upon sight-reading anything, however simple, if anyone could hear what I was doing. I needed the solitude of the empty church late at night. I was so nervous about sight-reading that I couldn’t approach it in anything like a fruitful state of mind. Since that time, I have become a fairly good sight-reader. It’s not one of my particular strengths, but I am at least average for a professional keyboard player: significantly better than average with music that belongs to a style or genre with which I am very familiar, a bit less than average, probably, with types of repertoire with which I am generally less engaged as a performer. This contrast is quite normal, and I will discuss it more later on. My own improvement as a sight-reader has come on my own watch, since it happened when I was already an adult and a professional performer. (It is also ongoing: I am a better sight-reader now than I was a year or two ago.) That means that I have a pretty good idea of what I was able to do to make that improvement happen, and that informs the way I organize my efforts to help students with sight-reading.

It was of great interest to me that each of the students who recently asked me about sight-reading actually meant something different by it. At one end of the spectrum was the use of the term to mean just being able to learn pieces from notation at all. That is, “reading” and feeling comfortable with the process of moving from a slow and perhaps halting first reading to secure performance. At the other end was what I would call real or hard-core sight-reading: putting on the music desk the score of a piece that you have actually never seen, played, or heard before and playing it without needing to stop. (There is one nuance to this that is worth commenting on: that the purest form of sight-reading is indeed of something that you haven’t even heard. If you have heard a piece then, to some extent, small or large, playing by ear will come to the assistance of the actual reading at sight. Though a departure from what might be called “theoretically pure” sight-reading, this is something that helps with a lot of real-life sight-reading when the player is in fact familiar with the piece by ear, as often happens.)

In a sense these distinctions are just semantic. We can use the word “sight-reading” to mean only what I am calling the “hard-core” thing and then use other words to refer to other aspects of playing music from notes. This more or less doesn’t matter, as long as it is clear what is meant in any context. However, with one of the students referred to above, I did waste a bit of time talking about approaches to what I meant by sight-reading, when what he wanted was various hints about how to read more efficiently as part of the process of learning a piece. It is important to know what you are aiming to practice—or asking a student to practice. If the goal is to practice real sight-reading, then, strictly speaking, a passage can only be used once for that practice. After that it is no longer sight-reading in the strict sense. It is important to get this straight with students. I have seen students (and myself, long ago) think that they were practicing sight-reading when they were really just practicing a piece—or perhaps not really practicing effectively at all. 

Sight-reading of some sort is a usual part of the learning process. That is, when you first undertake a new piece, you have to get your awareness of what the notes are supposed to be from something, and that something is usually the printed page. There will be a time when you read through some components of what you are trying to learn for the first time. This is a sort of sight-reading. (This is not the case for people who play by ear—which is rare in “classical” music—or who memorize pieces at the desk before sitting down to play: also rare.) One difference between this kind of reading (initially at sight) to begin learning a piece and sight-reading as such is that it is not cheating—and is in fact better, with the possible exceptions that I discuss below—for the former to be prepared reading. Ideally before starting to play a piece to learn it, a student should look it over, perhaps subject it to some sort of analysis, perhaps think about fingering and pedaling issues even before coming to the instrument—although that has to be rather abstract and held onto lightly. Then the first actual reading of the piece at the instrument should often be in component parts: separate hands, pedals alone—maybe even separate feet—short passages. Those component parts should be repeated a lot, right off the bat, taking the student farther and farther from sight-reading the passage. 

The role of hard-core sight-reading is real but quite circumscribed when the project is to work carefully on learning a piece. It could be described as fleetingly sight-reading some components of the piece, not as sight-reading the piece. I think that it is a bit of confusion about this that leads some students to feel some or all of the following: 1) I am not a good sight-reader, so I can’t learn pieces well; or even 2) I can’t become a good player at all; or 3) I didn’t succeed in sight-reading this piece well first thing, so I can’t learn it, or at least it will be disproportionately hard. None of these actually follow from anything about a student’s sight-reading of a particular piece or that student’s sight-reading in general. 

What about the role of sight-reading in the learning process for someone who is a good, advanced sight-reader? This is where opportunities and dangers come in. It also requires some clarification about what a good sight-reader is, or at least how that concept ties in with learning pieces. It seems to me that there is a continuum for each person as to how “sight-readable” something is and as to how the sight-readability relates to the learning process. Every person who can read music has some keyboard pieces that he or she can sight-read. For example, just to start at one extreme, see Example 1.

This “piece” could be sight-read by anyone. Of course this is, in a sense, absurd, but it is a jumping-off point. As pieces get more complicated—more real—the universe of people who could sight-read them accurately and comfortably gets smaller. If a student or any player can honestly sight-read a given piece accurately, securely, and comfortably, then that person can consider starting the process of learning that piece by sight-reading it and then continuing to read through it. This can involve skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart, and that can be all right. The important thing is the honesty—honesty with one’s self. 

This example may be officially twice as complicated as the above, but almost no one who has ever played a keyboard instrument would need to practice it with separate hands (see Example 2). 

Some people would need to separate the hands, at least briefly, for this “piece” (see Example 3)—and so on. 

As I said, if you are working on a piece that is well within the range in which you can sight-read it easily, then you can consider skipping some of the process of taking the piece apart. Someone who is an advanced sight-reader will have that option with a greater proportion of the repertoire—maybe most of it. This is a great time-saver, and for that reason it is useful and enviable. It also creates a temptation to perform pieces that the player simply doesn’t know very well—that is, doesn’t know very well interpretively, analytically, rhetorically. Is this a problem? Sometimes so, sometimes not, most likely. This is another area where there is no substitute for self-honesty, though for a performer who is tempted to play pieces for listeners on an essentially sight-read basis, it might be important to get feedback from trusted listeners about the artistic results, so that the self-honesty can be well-informed. 

I have two anecdotes about this aspect of the subject. 1) I once decided to play a piece in recital without having practiced it at all. It was one of the Frescobaldi hymn settings from the Second Book of Toccatas and Partitas. I did this as an experiment, after looking the piece over—away from the keyboard—just enough to feel certain that I could manage the notes that way. The goal of the experiment was to see whether the result could feel and sound more like an improvisation, and the experiment was inconclusive. The notes were no problem: I had guessed right about that. I noticed neither more nor less freshness and spontaneity—which is what I had been looking for—than I would normally expect out of my playing. This is music that is squarely in the middle of what I know best and perform most effectively, and it came out fine, but nothing special. However, I did sort of betray some at least subconscious concern on my own part because I had the thought afterward that if I ever had occasion to record that piece, I’d better get to know it better! 2) Someone I know who was present for a certain major recording project reported to me that the virtuoso harpsichordist making the recordings had played approximately one-third of the pieces by sight-reading them during the recording sessions. This was, of course, an all-time all-star sight-reader: the repertoire was not simple. My informant maintained that he could tell listening to the finished product which pieces were sight-read and which had been prepared. The latter, he felt, were categorically more convincing, the former accurate but kind of stiff. Of course this is not a blind or controlled study: there’s no way to confirm it or refute it.

Probably a really advanced sight-reader, or anyone dealing with a piece that is very well below his or her threshold for comfortable sight-reading, should feel free to start the learning process by sight-reading the whole texture of a piece, but slowly—distinctly slower than the fastest tempo that won’t fall apart, with the kind of focus that characterizes good sight-reading (which I will talk about next month) and with a willingness to go back to taking things apart if it starts to seem like a good idea. Anyone who is a very advanced, comfortable, reliable sight-reader has to be especially conscientious about studying a piece thoroughly alongside the process of simply reading the notes (with an ease that is enviable to the rest of us). This can include paper analysis, careful listening while playing—perhaps sometimes focusing on specific things, say the inner part of the texture, or the left hand, or the slower notes—and an optional taking apart of the texture, for example playing separate voices in contrapuntal music or playing hands separately not to learn notes, but to listen. 

To be continued next month.

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