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Good point. I definitely agree here. This is what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I came here to see if I could get some insight on how I might be furthering bad habits with sight-reading.

Maybe I will think differently when I get a little further with my sight-reading, but a lot of the motivation for me to learn to sight read better is because I don't like any of the classical pieces at the reading level I'm at now There are scant few non-diluted pieces available to the (Thompson's) 2-3rd grade reader. Most easier classical pieces seem to come from the early intermediate ranks and beyond. I mean, Spinning Song is fun, but I'd like to do better than that for my reading repertoire.

To answer one of Gyro's points... I'm not happy with my current level of sight-reading because it is a major impediment to my learning new material. I also have a very limited repertoire of pieces that I can play well because I have to completely memorize them. I don't necessarily want to read Chopin's Waltzes... I know I'll probably have to memorize pieces of that level for a long time to come if I want to play them. But it would be nice to be able to play a piece like Traumerai, some of Beethoven's easier minuets, or even Clementi sonatas without having to memorize everything.

Just out of curiosity, Gyro, are you convinced that many players are absolutely confined to a certain level of technical proficiency because of ability or simply that most people don't have the consistent motivation to work hard enough to do it. My experience in guitar has been mirrored in piano - if you know how to practice technique, no one's really all that limited in what you can perform (C. C. Chang's Fundamentals of Piano Practice is instructive in this regard). Then again, my aspirations with guitar stopped at about triplets at 240bpm... (few people can tell much of a difference in speeds beyond that) for those that wanted to go to 500+, sure there are probably limitations... but who cares? I'll be happy with my piano technique when I can play Chopin's Black Key at speed. It's a reasonable goal, I think, for a non-professional player.

By the way, I read an article (I think it was Scientific American ) that described the acquisition of "virtuoso" quality expertise of almost any skill (chess was the example, but piano was talked of as well) with about 10 solid adult years of practice. Now, this isn't 30 mins a day, obviously... we're talking about dedicating every second of free time you have to it... but it was an interesting study.

I have a conjecture from my hours of sight-reading practice last night... I think I'm going "too fast" when I consistently make the same mistake repeatedly for a given passage. My guess is that the correct practice speed is one that gives you the opportunity to avoid mistakes, say, 90% of the time. Am I on the right track?

Thanks, Currawong, that sounds a lot like what I've been doing. I think I'm just anxious to get it right and move on to more interesting pieces

I didn't read all these posts, but I sight read very well, and a lot of it is just innate, I think. I don't know how you improve, but I'm sure some teachers would know that.

However, what struck me was the original idea that you think what sight reading is all about is that you can sight read at "near performance level." I've never heard of anyone doing that, that doesn't even make sense to me. Unless your idea of near performance is pretty limited, and the pieces you are talking about are a lot lower than you could play with practice. The point of sightreading to me is mainly to be able to play something through well enough to decide if it's a piece you want to work on and get up to a better level. Performance level isn't something that means a lot to me, as I'm an amateur and don't approach playing the piano that way -- as thinking the purpose of everything is to perform. But I am assuming you really mean to play something at the best level, which is polished, that you are capable. Even professionals practice, you know, to get pieces at a performance level for a concert. They don't just sit down and sight read things and never practice.

If you could sight read everything at performance level, you wouldn't ever need to practice, that doesn't make sense to me. Aside from just trying out pieces, I do sight read some things in order to play with others (chamber ensembles, accompanying singers, etc.), so that is another purpose, but the things I sight read that way are definitely not at the level of things I could play with a lot of practice. I can sight read simpler things to amuse some folks who aren't demanding (show tunes, simpler pieces, etc. -- like for relatives or at a party), but that isn't the same thing as working on a piece to play it really well that is a more difficult work.

Now I can sightread things well enough that they are enjoyable enough to hear (or play, for me) that are things like you mention -- simpler Chopin waltzes, simpler Schumann, stuff like that. But I can play things at a higher level than that which I work on and practice for a while, so I think that's the whole issue. You never will be able to sightread things and have them immediately be at the same performance level and things you are capable of with some work. Just won't happen. I think even piano virtuosos who are some of the best players in the world can play things with practice at a higher level than they sightread, even though I'm sure they can sightread things that sound pretty darn good. It's just the same thing as why I can sightread things that are of higher difficulty than a total beginner who can't play very well.

Zazen, this adv.-interm. "wall" that I've
referred to is a rather strange phenomenon.
The piano is a deceptively easy instrument
to play: no special physical skill is
needed to get it to sound, like on a trumpet
or guitar or violin; you just press keys
and the instrument automatically produces
the right tone. Moreover, the amount of
physical force necessary to press a key
is minimal; thus, it would seem that one
could continue to improve on the piano
with, say, more and more lessons or more
and more practice. And indeed there
are a number of a-i forum members who are
taking lessons from high-priced teachers
in the hope of making big-time improvement.
But they are on a futile quest: they
might polish up their playing to some
extent, but they will not be able to
advance to conservatory level with even
10 yrs. of such lessons; they've reached
their terminal level and significant
improvement is not possible.

The reason this universal "wall" that all
pianists hit--not just a-i players--is
due to a variety of physical and psychological
factors. But one thing's for sure: once
a player has reached "his level," whatever
that may be, further significant improvement
is next to impossible.

You keep saying that you are not trying
to sight-read at your level--a logical
impossibility--and yet you keep listing
pieces that you want to s-r that are at
your level, like Clementi sonatas. You
cannot at your current level s-r a
Clementi sonata. And you are continuing
in what I believe is a flawed approach to
s-r, that is, practicing s-r with material
below your level and expecting to gradually
improve. As pointed out above this
is a fundamentally flawed approach
because you are doing what you can already
do, and one does not raise his level
by doing what he can already do.

However, if you want to improve your
general reading--this is not the same
as sight-reading, which is playing pieces
significantly below your level at near
tempo, like John Thompson bk. 2--then
the way to do it is to stop memorizing
and stay with the score until you have
it fluent. That is, you continuously
attempt to do the hard work of deciphering
a score and playing at the same time,
and not take the easy way out and memorize
so you don't have to read the score and
play at the same time. And you'll need
to do this with pieces at your level or
higher, because if you do it with
pieces below your level you gain nothing
that way.

As for the Black Key etude, the way for
a player like you to play it is to
simply start on it and beat it into
the ground by repetitive effort over
a long time. This is a concert pianist-
level piece, and if you expect to gradually
improve to the point where you can sit
down and work it up in a couple of months,
then you'll never be able to play it.
Think about this: if you could sit down
and work it up in a couple of months, you'd
be at concert pianist-level, but with only
a-i talent you cannot steadily progress to
that level even if you took a hundred years
of lessons.

Christina, I think I probably could have been clearer with what I meant by "sight-reading". I'm not referring to what has been called elsewhere on these forums "prima vista" sight-reading. I don't have the illusion that I will be able to pick up a piece that I've never seen and play at near performance quality the first time. What I would like is to be able to do is read and play a piece (even if I have to play it a thousand times) at a near-performance level. Right now, if I want to play something even fairly well, I have to memorize it. I don't think I'll ever be able to read and play advanced material at the same time.. but that's ok. I just want to have a large repertoire of intermediate-level pieces that I can read and play alongside my more technical memorized works.

In other words, right now, I can either play one of Chopin's nocturnes that I have memorized... or I can play a broken version of happy birthday... I just want some middle ground

(ok, that's an exaggeration, but you get the idea )

Gyro... Perhaps we're thinking of different pieces, but I don't think the easier Clementi sonatas are on par with, well, almost anything that Chopin wrote (aside from a few Preludes, maybe). Also, by sight-reading easier material than I can technically play, I have seen a clear improvment over the past several years... so I think "futile" may be the wrong word. This happens because I'm not simply rehearsing something I can already do. Technical skill and sight-reading skill are two different things. I'm actually sight-reading pieces that are slightly above my current level of that skill... and that seems to work well. It's still difficult for me to read those pieces, so learning does occur.

I think maybe we've had different exposure to musicians and students, but I don't recall seeing anyone that I thought was at a "terminal" level of skill. I agree that not just anyone can be a concert pianist, but I think it's more a problem of motivation and opportunity than "talent." Don't get me wrong, with respect to mathematics, for example, everyone has a kind of "ceiling" as dictated by natural ability. I've worked with students that will almost certainly never understand modern algebra, for instance... but it's not because they've hit a ceiling.. it's because they progress slower than those that are smarter/"talented" at mathematics. My experience with virtuoso musicians has been that the practice that they did "clicked" early and often and resulted in greater skill.. which resulted in more opportunities... which redoubles itself. I'm not sure people are very limited technically... now musically... that's another story entirely.

As stated in the above posts, sightreading should be practiced slowly and, generally, on pieces that may not be up to your playing level, until your sightreading skills catch up. But it should be done slowly. Accuracy is important, but there is a little bit of wiggle room there, depending on your goal. For many, the most important application of sightreading is the ability to accompany other musicians (including singers....). To do this, you certainly must be rythmically VERY accurate and you shouldn't play something riddled with wrong notes, but you are allowed to leave out a note here or there in the interest of keeping going at the correct tempo in the right rythm, so long as you are within the chord structure and not clashing with the soloist. This amount of slop notwithstanding, the goal when practicing your sightreading skills ought to be to play every note accurately with correct rythms. For the time being, this will mean sightreading below - possibly FAR below - your technical skill level. But, as has been stated before, if you ever look at a piece more than once, it is no longer sightreading and you get less benefit by doing this than you would by looking at each piece only once at the keyboard. By all means, read it through away from the piano, think it through, dissect it with your mind, a hundred times before you actually sit down, set the metronome and start playing. But only play it once if you truly want to be sightreading.

Walls are not clues that we've run out of potential. Most of the time walls are artificial barrier that sooner or later collapses. I have seen many pianists taking sabbathic years because they hit a walls. After such time they indeed overcame the obstacle and improvement began again.
Sometime the wall is the wrong teacher, the wrong method, the wrong school, the wrong moment in your life or the wrong motivation. Often all we need to overcome an obstable is stop, rest and wait for the bulb to switch on. I think we have often heard or experienced how not studying or not practicing actually improves your knowledge and technique. Like you have not been able to practice for a week and come back to the teacher expecting to suck like never before and actually she tells you've improved and sounds better than before. Everything is so relative that we can't really claim that whatever wall we meet is the boundary of our talent and potential and it will never go down.

Gyro wrote:

The argument presented in this particular post is completely fallacious. You've simply assumed what you were trying to prove and disguised it as a fundamental definition.

The only thing I can agree with the idea that one's technical ability is the upper bound for one's sightreading ability. This follows from other definitions; I will supply the proof.

Technical level can be defined in terms of the most difficult keyboard actions one can perform in general by one's own accord(perhaps with sufficient practise, etc...). Sightreading level is defined in terms of the most difficult keyboard actions one can perform without having seen a given piece of music before. Let these values be represented by some magnitude, U and V (of arbitrary unit that can be ordered), respectively.

Proof (by contradiction): Let X be a person who has a a technical level of U and sightreading level of V. Suppose that V is strictly greater than U. This is immediately a contradiction, because U should have been the most difficult possible for X (and it clearly isn't, since V is something even more difficult, by hypothesis). Therefore, V is less than or equal to U.


Other claims, for example, that you have to raise your technical ability to raise your sightreading ability, are unproven (and I personally do not see how it follows).


For the topic at hand:

I think you should just try to read as much stuff as you can in as short a period of time as you can. The more you do it, the better you will get, as with almost everything, as long as you do it honestly and judiciously.

Good luck!

SantaFe: I enjoy getting different perspectives on this... you're right about there being two different approaches, I think. If I'm accompanying someone, I could see how maintaining rhythm and basic structure would be a good skill to have. I play along with music sometimes and whatnot, so this idea is somewhat familiar to me.

Coolkid: I agree with what you said.. just wanted to throw in a quick comment about technical ability and sight-reading. I think increasing technical ability can indirectly help sightreading since having a technique down cold leaves one less thing for the brain to process when sight-reading. If I have to think about my sight-reading and worry about executing the technique correctly at the same time, it makes reading more difficult (Fantasie Impromptu comes to mind since the 4 on 3 thing needs practice on its own). Actually, I think a simpler example works as well: scales. If I'm familiar with the fingering of a particular run, it makes it a lot easier to sight-read it and play it than if the fingering itself feels unfamiliar to my fingers. Anyway, just a thought...

Of course.

I wasn't saying that you would not improve sight reading by improving your technique. My sightreading has definitely improved as I've progressed with the piano.

Gyro's claim was that you could only improve sightreading if you improve your technical ability, which was obviously false.

I read this post yesterday off line at home at I want to thank the contributors in particular Betty for the fantastic and easy to absorb advice. You're posts eliminate the need to buy expensive music books.

There were lots of details I never knew and techniques to make retaining the information easier. Just what I need at a time when I'm finding it increasingly harder to put fingers to keys.

Thanks!

Zazen said: "I have to admit I'm now a bit confused. Betty, I understand what you're saying about staying 'in the present moment' so to speak (hehe) and not reading ahead, but I can't help thinking that a little reading ahead is probably good (if not unavoidable).

For example, if I know I have an alberti bass line that alternates between the I and inversions of IV or V (common with easier pieces, as you know), it seems to really help to quickly look at the whole measure and see what the arpeggiation is so that I can concentrate on reading the melody in the RH. Same thing for the RH when the melody is simply a scalar run... would you agree that it's good to see these things a little ahead of time, perhaps reading one measure at a time? Or maybe, if I can read one measure at a time, is the piece too easy and I need to find something more challenging?"

Betty: My answer from my point of view is "Nope!"

But, please do it the way it works for you!

I can think of several different remedies that would help you adapt to what I'm suggesting.

Jamie147 said: "I read this post yesterday off line at home at I want to thank the contributors in particular Betty for the fantastic and easy to absorb advice. You're posts eliminate the need to buy expensive music books.

There were lots of details I never knew and techniques to make retaining the information easier. Just what I need at a time when I'm finding it increasingly harder to put fingers to keys. Thanks!"

Betty: Yes, learn them, do them, retain them. Train your fingers. I'm glad you found my posting helpful!

To those who thanked me for my posts: I appreciate hearing from you, and I'm glad it's helping.

Just to set the record straight, the things and the way I say them are not in any "book" that I know of. It just has not been universally discovered yet that there are many ways to say the same thing and some just are more effective in this century than others.

Betty

Ok, so after practicing sight-reading almost exclusively and reading these forums for a week, I have a few observations.

First off, naturally, thanks to all that have responded - I can definitely see a little improvement and I'm very thankful for that. Whether it was the advice specifically or simply being inspired to play, it's working

As for sight-reading... from what I can tell, I was playing too much in my "comfort zone" even when it appeared as though I was working hard. What I mean by this is that I played through pieces over and over, but was not focused on making things 100% accurate. As such, I reached a certain plateau of accuracy that never improved even with repetition since the learning had basically stopped. So, it seems to me that gaining skill in sight reading depends a great deal on playing accurately. There is a danger in repeating the same mistake in the same way. Not that I didn't already know that I needed to "slow down and play it right", but the perspective I've gained shows me a bit more of just how true this is when it comes to learning.

In fact, I think this same philosophy can be extended to building technique as well. There again, the focus is on building correct habits. For example, I'm working on Chopin's Prelude in G (very simple RH, challenging LH played quickly and softly). The A major arpeggiation in particular is difficult and something that I have only made progress in when I slowed it down to a crawl and hit it in exactly the way that I wanted - fingering, timing, dynamics, etc.

I've heard before (I think it was Glen Gould... I can't remember) that one of the famous pianists used to practice at one note per second when preparing for concerts. This may be overkill... but it may also be a speed that ensures that muscle memory helps very little, thus encouraging better memorization.

Anyway, the beauty in all of this for me is that I feel as though I understand better how to learn to gain sight-reading skill. That was my stumbling block before, so I am grateful to have insight into that now.