I am a jazz piano student. Here in Iceland there are grades that you can take while studying the piano. There are seven grades that you can finish. Recently I took a test that allowed me to go to the next piano grade (grade 6).

The thing that I failed almost entirely on while taking the test was sight-reading. Do you know any good sight-reading exercises for both hands?

I know i can easily find some Bach preludes etc. But I wondered if there is something free material on the internet that begins easy and then the difficulty increases.

Could somebody knowledgeable add approaches to sight reading to that question?

Reading and transposition go hand in hand.
Improving your reading and transposition skill is all about improving your musical perception. The ideal way to approach reading and transposition is to view musical lines of notes as waves of sound. If transposing, a contour or shape that must be intervalically preserved regardless of the starting point. For example, regardless of which rung of a 12 rung ladder you place any object on, the object itself remains unchanged, only the object's relative position to the rest of the room has changed. It's still the same ladder, the same room, and the same object.

When we first start to read text as children, we identify individual letters, then how these letters form a word, which we identify. Then the words form a sentence and convey an idea. At some point, when we're fluent readers, we no longer see the individual letters or words. The shape and content of the sentence's components take on a macro-meaning, and at some further point, we visualize the words, seeing the action described by the words. To improve reading, one must strive to emulate this visual process aurally. To hear the music on the page based on these intersecting contours rather than identify notes and string them together individually.

Most don't read music this way, but they should. They should see the melodies and harmonies by their contours, not reading individual notes. Once you can view music as a series of contoured, interconnected lines, a fabric, then preserving this contour is an easy task, regardless of which rung of the 12 rung ladder is the starting point and reading along with the ability to instantly transpose are acheived!

Reading and transposition, along with the ability to do so instantly, whether a song, a melody, a riff, a chord progression, etc., is the key to unlocking creative limitation and becoming a superior musician and excellent reader.

Um, Disciple, I have to criticize your remarks. You have not answered the question about how to learn sight reading very directly, and your remarks about transposition aren't helpful at all - you're just saying how wonderful it is to be able to transpose, not how to approach learning it. I have encountered this kind of response on PW before, and while I don't want to be harsh, I think it is worth pointing out this problem.

As to the question of how to learn sight-reading and transposition, I have some suggestions that I have used, and they have helped, although I'm not great at this:

1. Get a copy of "Super Sight-Reading Secrets" by Howard Richman. It contains a series of exercises that help approach the problem systematically. This book has been discussed on PW before, and it does not produce miracles, but it's a reasonable start.
2. Buy a copy of the Riemenschneider edition of Bach chorales. Play one or two pages of them at sight per day, slowly and in steady rhythm. This teaches you to solve an admittedly narrow class of sight-reading problems, but it's helpful, too. After I went through this book about ten times, I started to know the chorales so well that they no longer constituted sight-reading practice, so my teacher suggested transposing them at sight. So now I do that every day, and I'm getting better.
3. Get a a book of music that is much too simple for you now - your old method books might be helpful, but preferably you'll use something unknown. Play through the music at sight, as slowly as required to get the right notes. Using easy music reduces the problems unrelated to sight-reading and helps you concentrate on that.

The general principle is: force yourself to do this as slowly as necessary to avoid mistakes, do it a few minutes a day, and be patient. I think it will get easier.

...then go stick your head in the oven.

Disciple, strangely enough I actually understand you. That's where I'm coming from.I lived most of my life untaught, reading "waves of sound" and patterns by extrapolating from the tonic and seeing/hearing patterns, and I could transpose that way after a fashion too. You look at the notes, they sound for you, and off you go, correcting a white key into a black key if it "sounds wrong" or diddling similarly with other instruments. You can do the same in writing. But I have learned since to read notes as notes, know note names, key signatures, and that I'm sharping an F when I'm sharping it. I spent a year learning rudimentary theory so now I can (among other things) transcribe the usual way and I appreciate the difference. Maybe those who are locked into a very mechanical process need to learn to hear waves, but I'm on the other side and I appreciate the clarity the formal way gives me. The notes still sing to me.

What I was looking for was something like what I read in a piano book for musicians of other instruments that was passed on to me. It taught, for example, that before you begin to play you: examine the key signature, scan the music anticipating where on the keyboard your hand would go, hear the music in your head ahead of time, scan the fingering, and then start to sight read. It had little 5-measure practice passages.

I could imagine for example that it is good to have practiced scales, chords, and arpeggios in different keys so that you have those patterns in your fingers. Are there strategies or preparations for sight reading, other than just working through a choral or similar book?

Paul:
That may answer my question.
Neato! A pile of piano books were passed on to me at Christmas, and that was one of them. You don't forget the word Riemenschneider. I'm working on the Czerny preparatory exercises. Actually I'm not at sight reading yet, but I suppose I'm doing some in the process.

Disciple: Yes - I have that part and it's a great thing to be able to do. Now I'm getting the other half. Sometimes those contours suggest "variations" that aren't there so it's good to learn to slow down as well.

Thanks to both of you.

KeyboardKlutz!

...then go stick your head in the oven.

Nice to see you back! You've made me laugh! Things like the recommendations above only work if you are there in the music making capacity....and then again, if you were there, you could probably write those books yourself.

If, if, if, people studying the piano by improving their sight reading would simply stay in the Basic Notation - Basic Skills arena long enough, most of the grief that haunts their lives would be only little slip ups of digit confusion or missteps NOT mistakes.

All the "horses" seem off and running at the horse race, and the gun hasn't been fired yet and the gate is still closed. (Whoa!)

I think it's nearly impossible for a teacher to corral an adult learner and keep their focus on the places it needs to be focussed on for the steady development of the potential musician.

Keyboard Klutz, maybe I should go stick my head in an oven?

Regards!

Betty

Not till you've played all your Bach chorales first!

Of course my remarks aren't helpful if you view them with the usual music convention that stifles reading ability.

Yes. It is wonderful, and a very practical outcome if you embark along the same type of path you did when you learned to use words[/b], combine them into sentences, and organize those into paragraphs to convey "thought images" that carry the action.

Let me ask you this. What determines fluent literacy? The ability to recognize words and use them, or the ability to organize text in your mind so that individual word recognition isn't necessary, the words translated into action in your mind? How do you perceive my written words? As mere words, or as ideas?

This is where the term, "the mind's eye" comes from and in order to acheive musical literacy, you must move beyond individual notes. If all music were just one note, moving beyond the individualistic approach, the same approach we use when we first learn to read text, sounding out the consonants and vowels, would be unnecessary.

The mind's ear must be trained to see these contours on the staff as sounds in space that combine to form an idea.

Why are you doing this seated at the piano? What about Solfeggio? What about just reading and hearing the printed page? Sightreading is a mental endeavor, not physical.

Keep in mind that once you sightread through a piece of music repeating that will no longer produce the same effect. You will know what comes next because you've heard it before and some degree of muscular memory will aid your second read through, not because of any gain in reading skill.

Disciple, since I have spanned both worlds I would be interested in your comments to what I wrote.

Another question - have you at any time also had formal training in music theory or instrumental playing. Is what you do currently based only on what you describe? I find that while I naturally do what you describe, I need the other part which I did not learn at all. As I get the formal training, the spontaneous part does not die - I get control. There are two halves that complete each other.

My teacher (house pianist at a jazz club) told me that for him, sight reading and playing by ear sometimes become the same thing: he reads, hears the music in his mind, then plays that music.

Ed

Keystring,

If you want to flame me, I don't mind it being in public. I would prefer that you share it in the thread here rather than make it a private communication between us. Especially since what the controversy is happened here in the forum. I'm sure we can be polite about it. I think this would be interesting to other forum members who post.

Thank you.

Betty

http://www.geocities.com/mecmirror/sight.htm

http://www.soundfeelings.com/free/music-reading.htm

I use a hymnal, but that recently got rather easy, so I'm using some large books of ragtime. Good fun!

That's the general idea. The notes should jump off the pages to you as sounds, much the same way that written words jump off the pages to you as ideas and mind pictures.

Unless you strive to acheive this same result with music as words, which comes as second nature to most literate individuals, sight-reading, even proficient sight-reading, will never become more than translation.

By that I mean the way most second language learners never quite move beyond having to think of a word in their first language and then translate it into their second language.

I'm extremely well-studied in composition, theory, and piano, many genres, from Classical to Jazz to funk/R&B.
When I play, I want to be a listener too. I want to enjoy joining the flow and altering the course of the flow based on the limits of my virtuosic ceiling, theoretically and technically.
To do this, I must leave my training behind so my training itself isn't doing the playing.
The sound is everything, not the theory behind it when playing in the moment and even the instrument itself contributes to the feedback. There are things that I would play on a 9 foot grand that I might not play on a 6 foot grand because the sound wouldn't be the same, each succession contingent upon the last. I would play a Baldwin differently than a Yamaha because the sound would be so drastically different, even the articulation would differ drastically, a Yamaha able to speak twice as fast as a Baldwin action and with far more high end formants.
I'm eager to abandon what I've played before because I need to hear something new, or I would simply put on an old recording of something or replay one in my head!
In essense, your training, your skills and knowledge gets you to the doorway of instant composition but if you try to take those tools through with you, you won't make it through the door. At that point you leave the tools and let your ear and mind take over. The tools will be still be there with you in spirit, but will augment, not hinder your creativity and flow.

Disciple did a great job of describing the goal and process of an advanced sight reader. And Betty did an excellent job of describing the problem of why many never seem to be able to reach that goal. Betty also tells us indirectly what one needs to do to improve sight reading.

I will say that it does not matter what you sight read, although as Betty says reading basic material is best. I say what's most important that you do it daily for a good period of time. That's how we learned to read words and sentences in Kindergarten, a few hours every day of basic reading and that continued for years onward!!!

Of course the usual super basic stuff helps if you don't know what you are doing; such as learn to visualy recognize steps, 3rd skips, 4th skips, 5th skips etc...develop expert ability to tap all notated rhythmic divisions and combinations...look a little ahead in order to see the shapes that Disciple speaks of...know theory so you can observe the harmony you are in... Basically you have to put in the daily practice time of practicing sight reading with basic material. There are no short cuts.

Yes! This is 50% of it. The other 50% is learning how to translate sound from the page into our minds and into the air as easily as we can translate text! And it can be done and best be done away from the piano relying on our minds to hear the printed page and voices to solfegg or scat it.

Keep in mind, most musicians hear on a purely linear level, one voice at a time. Just like most people think linearly, one concept at a time, and become confused when trying to sustain two different conscious streams of thought.

You can train your mind to think two, three, four, five, six, and far more unrelated conscious streams of thought simultaneously!

Try it. Start with one idea and then think about and superimpose something else over that, and then add more.

We all have far, far more mental capacity than we think and children don't place learning constraints on themselves as adults do. They constantly challenge their minds and are quite comfortable doing so until adult matters distract them from using their full capacities.

We can rekindle that by exercising our minds with any ideas and musical ideas away from our instruments, where it does the most good because it takes the manual element completely out of it.

Even when playing 8 note locked hands chords, most musicians, even the seasoned vets, hear and conceive linearly, their training and harmonic knowledge filling in what their minds aren't providing.

Learning to use your brain polyphonically must be done away from the piano first, then applied manually.

I respect what you have to say, Disciple, but there is a certain amount of problems with attempting to understand what you're saying as an adult beginner.

It sounds like you've been studying music intensely for a very, very long time, and probably since early childhood.

As I'm sure you're quite aware, when people begin later in life the challenges start to become insurmountable unless there is an incredible amount of focus and energy put entirely into the pursuance of musicianship.

Your concept of seeing music as multiple lines is simple enough for you to say, and makes sense, but if someone unskilled at sight-reading were to attempt what you're asking I'm sure most of the notes being played would be totally off from what is on the written score.

I have a lot of trouble focusing, and sight-reading is the biggest barrier because of the enormous requirements it places upon the reader. Unlike written word, the reader of music must also keep track of the various rhythms that have been notated.

Advanced concepts given by someone who has been steeped in music their entire lives really does not help the novice much.

I really don't know what else to say. Those who have been studying music their entire lives do just about anything on their instrument with ease. Putting an adult mind up to the task of becoming a professional level pianist is nearly impossible.

-Colin

Excellent post, thank you Disciple! I am going to practice what you recommend, thinking of multiple subjects simultaneously, that is something I neglect and it's doable with practice. I am an advanced player with 40 years of experience. However, I suspect though that for those with little sight reading skill it is a little like asking a kindergartener to comprehend Shakespeare when they cannot even easily read "See spot run." Hopefully, they will eventually hear what they are reading after enough exposure (practicing doing it), as with learning to read in kindergarten one can eventually hear the words in ones mind without actually speaking them (like your mention of hearing the phrases away from the piano while sight reading). But for many adult beginners there isn't enough time in their life for such excellent mastery.

.

Synaesthesis

http://www.musicalratio.com/synaesthesis.html

1. The Synaesthesis Technique

"Synaesthesia means multiple simultaneous perceptions. The brain is designed for perceiving multiple sensations at the same moment. With the senses of sight, smell, and taste, we expect our sensory experiences to be loaded with multiple simultaneous stimulations. Even a simple pie is a combination of different flavors from fruit, flour, sugar, salt, spices, eggs, butter, and the effects of cooking. The culinary art lives because people adore eating food that is highly dimensional in flavors. Each dish mingles salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and savory (meaty) in various proportions. We supposedly taste the different flavors on various parts of the tongue. This creates the effect of synaesthesia. The senses of sight and smell function similarly. A large measure of the joy of viewing Monet's paintings is to see all the colors of the palette on every square centimeter of surface on his best paintings. The sense of hearing likewise needs that same level of stimulation. Yet classical music is performed today in a manner designed to eliminate synaesthesia altogether. This is due to a basic ignorance among musicians about how the ear/brain makes sense of heard experiences.

Although the many different frequencies and timbres are detected differently by the ears, we 'hear' or perceive musical and other regular simultaneous sounds as composites as opposed to distinct and discreet frequencies and timbres. When music is performed in a way designed to have sounds such as chords heard as composites, the normal human ear hears only one sound. If the composer has written a four note chord, and all the notes are played simultaneously, the normal listener will hear not four notes but one sound only; a rich sound, but nonetheless only one sound. If the performer endeavors to perform each note in the chord so that the notes don't sound absolutely together or simultaneously, the normal listener will easily hear all four notes and the chord simultaneously. That creates an experience for the normal listener of hearing a total of five sounds altogether.

The synaesthesis technique requires heard musical information to be slightly desynchronized; just enough for the mind of the listener to perceive all the timbres, all the pitches, all the melodies, all the rhythms, all the details, all the harmonies so that they all emerge into the consciousness of the normal ordinary music lover.

The normal ordinary human brain is so competent that it has no trouble to follow as many as 6 simultaneous streams of information as long as those lines or streams are functioning with total independence, even if they are "supposed to be together" as in music. The proof of this is that there are typically 6 parts in a normal rock group. Rock musicians understand the need for conveying the feeling of independence of parts even when the score would indicate otherwise. They are exceedingly sensitive to synaesthetic boredom and work very hard to create synaesthesia in their performances...to not do so would spell financial disaster for them.

In 1768, Jacob Adlung in his Musica Mechanica Organoedi, vol. 2 chapter 22 paragraph 522, says of playing the harpsichord, "One must endeavor to use more arpeggios and such, rather than striking the keys together or playing too slowly since the strings cease vibrating right away." Mozart and Chopin also insisted that the hands are never played together.

The result of having the notes in music be "misaligned in time" is that they are desynchronous. Desynchronicity, when other than an end in itself, produces a kind of independence of voices. When voices sound truly independent, the brain is able to perceive each individual voice more easily. When we perceive two or more voices or lines as distinct yet simultaneous expressions the effect in us is called synaesthesis. It's an amazing paradox that when the motion of the voices is truly independent, the surface appears exceedingly complex but, in fact, the music is simpler for the average listener to behold and easily follow. Indeed, the listener feels deprived when the feeling of independence of voices is missing. The synaesthesis technique depends on the ability of the performer to hear, follow, and create multiple voices in the music; voices that are clearly independent of the others yet always manage to agree.

When the lines are played as one usually hears them played today, that is, always together or simultaneous, even a trained musician has trouble to tell the voices apart. This is because the brain reads the interval played in this manner as being a composite or parts of the lowest heard note. Once so recognized, the brain little needs to pay attention to what is happening except in the lowest or the highest voice. Indeed, very few musicians today have the ability to expressively sing and maintain two voices at the same time...this inability results from a "keypunching" attitude in performing, ironically, an attitude that has now even infected singers. Only by consciously creating distinctions between lines and singing each and every voice in the music can the performer make clear to the listener what is happening in any music which has more than one line. Differences in timbre and volume help to create more distinction but these devices never are as consistently successful at creating clear distinctions between the different lines in music as when the synaesthesis technique is used even to only a very slight degree.

Furthermore, Giovanni Tosi, in his treatise on singing titled, The Art of the Florid Song, published in 1736, uses the term vacillare to describe the effect of vacillating in the melody from being before the bass to lagging behind the bass. He states that "the singer should endeavor to sing before the beat or after the beat and never with it." Astonishing!!!!! Today, almost no classically trained singers do this because they are usually mercilessly censured for doing so. Bel Canto means beautiful singing, not beautiful tone. Tosi says of this effect that it "is one of the most beautiful effects in music." The vacillations he describes give the synaesthesis technique a feeling of flow and freedom...a most beautiful effect indeed.

It is interesting to realize that Bach, in manuscripts of his keyboard pieces, uses vacillare just as Tosi recommends. A careful inspection of his manuscripts reveals that the vertical alignment of the notes of the right hand either precede or follow the notes of the left hand. About 60% of time the right hand notes precede the left hand notes and about 40% follow the left hand. To suggest that Bach was doing this either unintentionally or that he had problems with vertical alignment is preposterous because Bach was probably the most intentional of all composers especially when it involved music and he had no problems aligning notes in orchestral scores.

Forqueray gives instructions in his published arrangement for harpsichord of his fathers Pieces for Viola da Gamba that the player play the music exactly as it appears on the printed page. The pieces that follow show the right and left hand notes being vertically non-aligned even to the extent that some whole notes in the left hand appear in the middle of the measure!!

And Giulio Caccini, in his Nuove musiche e nuove maniera di scriverle ("The New Music and the New
Manner in Which it is Written," Florence, 1614), suggests something very similar to vacillare when he writes: "Sprezzatura is that elegance given to a melody by several technically-incorrect eights or sixteenths on different tones, technically-incorrect with respect to their timing, thus freeing the melody from a certain narrow limitation and dryness and making it pleasant, free, and airy, just as in common speech, where eloquence and invention make affable and sweet the matters being expounded upon."

Does all this mean that using a synasthesia technique in the form of vacillare is easy? Certainly not. It must be practiced to become proficient at it. Even harder is to develop the ability to think and imagine all the voices one is playing, be they 2 or 5 at once, so that each voice is sung both extremely expressively and independently of the other voices. But it can be done. We have coached an organ student who was unable to play all voices of a 4 part Chorale Prelude from Bach's Orgelbüchlein and within 20 minutes he was singing and playing all four voices independently and expressively throughout the entire piece. So we know that it is possible for all musicians to learn to do this. Furthermore, Bach's music cannot be heard as it was intended to be heard unless one masters this technique.

Application: Always play with one hand leading the other and vacillate between which of the two hands leads. Give up trying to be together in ensembles. The exception to this is when one arrives at the end when a simultaneous concurrence of the voices tells the brain that the music has come to an end.

Application: Sing expressively each and every line or voice as independently as possible of the other lines or voices. Prevent yourself from lapsing or dropping your attention to any line or voice or the listeners will hear the lapse in attention and cease to pay attention.

Application: In ensembles, vacillate between having the upper voice lead the lower voice and the lower voice lead the upper voice. This vacillation needs to follow the logic of the musical lines and structure. When the upper voice leads, the music soars. When the lower voice leads the music lingers-resisting forward motion"

Examples, the first piece is a Bach Three Part Invention.

http://www.musicalratio.com/heartechniques.html

Rintincop,

I appreciate the website you posted! Full of interesting things - articles, art gallery, and about the instrument maker. I'll want to visit again until I have read everything offered there.

http://www.musicalratio.com/synaesthesis.html

Synaesthesis was only one topic of many on this site.

Betty

This 'Synaesthesis' site has been posted before in another forum. Their definition of synaesthesis is quite bogus and the scholarship on the site very week to non-existent.

Maybe so, but it has some interseting points.

I agree with you both. 50% practical, 50% impractical information there. Worth reading but taken with a grain of salt. An interesting read none the less on a subject not much is relatively written about.

Great!!!.. I used to think the multiple inaccuracies in my playing were mistakes and incompetence.. now I know I am playing synaesthetically... that is so much nicer:)

You're right! A pupil of mine came up a few marks short of a distinction because her hands were not together 100% of the time. Should I complain to ABRSM on synaesthetical grounds?

Thank you for your answer, Disciple. It is an important one for anyone reading your ideas who may have a different background.

Music sings itself to me, the waves of sound, patterns of shapes, transcribing by ear and knowing how to locate the tonic - hearing it, more - I've had that for several decades. But none of the formal training. Not even the names of the notes on the staff a few years ago. I'm at the other end of the teeter totter.

I've been pursuing formal instrumental studies, theory, ear training of the kind to identify more finely what I already hear and move from solfege to pitch recognition. It seems to me that formal studies are the skeleton that give the flesh shape, or maybe it's the body and firm ground for the active dance.

I won't lose what I had first, though it will probably be changed and enhanced by the formal stuff. In any case, because of where I am, my path is the formal learning that you have completed and can now use without being enslaved to it. What I am understanding from your input to the forum is that there are two, and that is good to know for the future.