Reading

Yes, you have to practice reading. Reading is a complex process to describe because our brains don’t all operate the same. All you have to do is think about your early years in elementary school and recall how reading came easy to some while others seemed to struggle. We now know that people’s differences in brain physiology, the “wiring” causes different learning styles. It has nothing to do with intelligence. However, most primary educators are aware that they must be able to accommodate those different ways that children perceive the world, or else we will return to the dismal past when only a small percentage of children ever learned to read well at all. Regardless of how you learned to read, you have to practice it to get any better.

Notice that on the practice chart I included reading on days one and five. That means a portion of the practice session specifically devoted to working on reading skills twice a week. But a certain amount of reading is required for all of the other practice activities. You can read your warmup, you have to read to learn new literature and rework previous material, you read to learn new technique, you read in order to transpose, and you can read while improvising. So you are really working on your reading skills every day that you practice. But we often do not read carefully- we read what we’re going to play and then stare at the instrument hoping that those bars or the heads are going to tell us what to play. What is even more alarming is staring at the page and still playing the incorrect notes and rhythms.

There is a lot of emphasis placed on sight-reading, and not nearly enough on the importance of just reading. Sight-reading is indeed an indispensable skill, and there are several musicians who stake their careers on an unusually high degree of skill at reading something well enough to be recorded within minutes of seeing the score for the first time. Being able to sight-read well also means that a musician can learn considerably more literature in less time. However, some of the finest musicians might not be nearly as proficient at sight-reading as their counterparts, and indeed, some world-class musicians barely read at all, let alone sight-read.

Most of the “sight-reading” I have to do involves at least a little bit of time to learn the music between receiving the part and playing it in a rehearsal or even a performance. I only sight-read it once. The rest of the time I’m practicing something I’ve already read before, so it’s not sight-reading anymore. But I continue to read the music as I learn it. I rarely memorize ensemble music, and even when I do, I don’t trust myself to have anything totally memorized in the space of a couple of hours.

…barely read at all, let alone sight-read. Bears repeating. You can’t sight-read well before you can just read.

Let’s start by practicing general reading skills.

Choose music you already know. Find a book of scales and arpeggios for example. The idea is to keep your eyes on the page as much as possible. I won’t go so far as to say “never look down,” but that is something you could choose to do. Some people put the music stand as close to the instrument as they can, even lower than the playing surface. I put the stand at eye level where it is easier for me to see. That also helps me to maintain a working posture. Another factor that helps is to make sure than when you must look at the instrument, move your eyes only and not your head. Your eyes have a much better chance of returning to the right place on the page if you keep your head still. You can try to keep your sticks low too, especially if your ideo-kinesthetic skills are new to you. A word of caution though: your dynamic range will be relatively narrow. That is, if you’ve understood my other articles about tone production. And oh, by the way, is the metronome on? Remember. the purpose is to have something playable by a deadline. So you might have to practice this piece until you have it at tempo.

Notice what your eyes take in: do you read one note at a time or in groups of three or four? Do you read a whole measure at once? Can you read the measure that follows what you’re actually playing? Does your peripheral vision take in the instrument? Studies have shown that most proficient readers allow their eyes to move freely around the page including previously played material, not just the measures that finish out the line. You can obviously train yourself to do many things, but the first thing to do is discover what you actually do.

Other music you can practice reading with includes any piece you normally play from memory. All the etudes and solo pieces you’ve learned for lessons or recitals are great to practice reading. You already know how they go, your hands already know where the notes are, the rhythms are familiar, the stickings have already been worked out. But what have your eyes been doing? Now is the time to give them a new chore: looking at the page. You might also start becoming aware of your inner eye- the sense of what the instrument looks like while your physical eyes are busy. Here is another pair of unexpected benefits: I’ve often discovered that I memorized a few errors! And it’s now easier for me to pretend to be looking at the conductor.

The point is that you are not having to learn a difficult piece of music from scratch. You’re only practicing to keep your eyes on the page- one skill in isolation, or as I said in another article, a bite-able chunk. The next time you have new music to learn, try putting off the memorization for later, maybe not at all. Keeping track of what your eyes see and consequentially, how your brain processes that information, and then learning to gain control over this skill will make sight-reading less overwhelming.

Sight Reading

If I feel that my sight-reading needs more work, I might just turn the page in whatever material I’ve chosen and read something else brand new. However, I usually choose to practice general reading and sight-reading as a combined activity. The two skills are mutually beneficial. Also, I am not often put into a situation where I have to record or rehearse something before having the chance to look at the score first. My challenge is usually being able to play whatever my students have brought to a lesson. Those who work in recording studios have other challenges.

The materials I use include a hymnal for reading block chords, and an etude book that has plenty of “black,” as in: lots of notes on the page. I prefer woodwind etudes because of the wide range of these instruments, and their emphasis on technical facility: clarinet music for treble clef, bassoon music for bass clef. Other clefs? Not enough hours in the day today. I also like to read lead sheets from fakebooks- usually the melody, and sometimes just the chord changes. Many of those etude books require a degree of musicality as well. I also use method books that rely on repeated or sequenced patterns of notes. My favorite is Arban's Complete Conservatory Method for Trumpet.

Choose music to read that you will have a predictable chance of playing accurately. It can take a while to find out what your proficiency is. I look for music that I think I can play with at least 80% accuracy the first time through. Sometimes that requires playing at a slower tempo than what is indicated.

Here is an important factor: set a time limit. If you have to play this piece for a rehearsal or a performance, it will start whether you are ready or not. If I’m just practicing my reading, I set an arbitrary deadline of twenty minutes to learn something well enough to perform it. If I can’t meet that time limit, then I’ve chosen something that is either too difficult or too lengthy to learn as a sight-reading exercise. I sometimes use that twenty-minute time frame when I am learning a new piece. Twenty minutes is just about all the stamina I have for learning new music before taking a break from reading and instead, practice in another way. But if I am going to confine the exercise to sight-reading, that time limit is going to be more like a “number of times” limit. What, once? Or twice? If I hit my 80% mark, then I turn the page and go on. If I don’t hit that 80%, I give myself another chance. Sometimes whatever went wrong fixes itself. I hate leaving an exercise with nothing other than, “gee, I really suck at this.” I’m more inclined to sight-read the etude once and then spend the rest of the twenty minutes practicing the piece.

Here are a few things to check out before playing:

Time signature.

Key signature.

Are there time signature or key signature changes anywhere in the piece?

Look for repeat signs, D.S., D.C., etc.

Look through the piece to find other anomalies such as accidentals or rhythmic groupings like triplets.

Notice dynamics, phrases and articulation.

Might as well look for the hard licks. What to do about them is another story.

Turn on the metronome, if for no other reason than to see if you bit off more than you can chew. The other reason? You need something to remind you to keep playing and in tempo, wrong notes and all.

Whether you are playing something familiar to you or you are learning new music, there are a few methods that give you a reasonable chance at success. First, play slowly enough to play accurately. It takes an extra measure of discipline to play familiar music slowly enough to read when you know you can play it faster from memory. One important skill that you can address is to make sure your eyes can parse the page even if your hands cannot keep up. We are often asked to read along with other players whose reading skill is better than our own. Someone counts off the tempo at a speed we can’t possibly play and within one measure we’re already lost. The idea is to keep up even if you can’t play all the notes- you should be able to know where everybody else is and play at least some of the notes. The following drill is a way to practice playing as many of the notes as you focus your eyes on.

Granted, the first line is what you are going to actually see. No one is going to conveniently gray-out the other notes for you. Now that you know the exercise, try all the permutations while looking at the first line. OK, so you’re no longer sight-reading, but you are reading. Try the same thing with similar exercises.

There is another skill that comes into play and it involves that “80%.” You have to know when you’ve played the notes correctly. If your ears are not turned on, you might just be fooling yourself as to whether you were accurate. For the most part, I choose music to sight-read that I can also hear. Sure, I have to be able to read music my ears will have to learn as well as my hands, but for the purposes of sight-reading the best mechanism for checking accuracy are my ears. I often claim that my ears are as much an integral part of reading as my eyes are. That might be an exaggeration, but not much. These days, with all the computer software available, I often suggest that my students use notation or sequencing software for playback that they can play in unison with. There are quite a few software programs specifically engineered for practicing sight-reading. You have to look at this method as being an aid and not a crutch, just like the metronome.

Reading duets was the first activity I really dived into to strengthen my reading ability. If nothing else, it is fun. Well, it can be. Another thing you can do with a partner is to have one person use an index card to cover the notes or measures that you are playing so that you will have to learn to read ahead. Start conservatively with this as you might find it terribly distracting. Many people commonly assume that reading ahead is the goal to shoot for, while there are ample studies to show that is not necessarily what the best readers do all the time.

Copyright © 2008 Tyler-Rounds Productions