Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner "Not a natural sight-reader, you'll never be good." Discuss

How would you know that?

The more, the better, I'd say. I just read through masses. I got four books out from the library yesterday, Glassworks, a volume of Couperin, Bach's English Suites and Nyman. I will read through a lot of those, try out some of them. I've just spent half an hour going through Frescobaldi partitas, will print out some and try out. This is all music that interests me, composers I like.

My thinking is that whatever it should be called you weren't thinking of it as work. That's why I always say what I said a few posts earlier when posters say they want to "work" on their sight reading.

It's mostly just my opinion based on my own experience and observations. I can't really imagine that good sight readers spent most all of their time just preparing their lesson pieces for years.

That means that you have been around people as they went from being beginners to when they became good sight readers, and/or good sight readers told you how they got there. There would have to be enough people for you to have a definite impression. If this is not the case, then this statement might needlessly discourage someone trying to learn to sight read.

The person I was "around as they went from beginners to good sight readers" was myself.

I don't think my ideas are discouraging.. It's never too late to learn how to sight read by not "practicing" sight reading. Although I'm sure good teachers can offer many good ideas to help a student's sight reading, I think depending too much on these things is similar to students who take SAT courses hoping to learn a lot of tricks instead of concentrating on learning the math.

It's complicated.
Because we're talking about different kinds of things.

He was right, strictly speaking -- and I bet your professor was too.

Pianoloverus was talking about the degree of looking-over that you described. Sure, it's good to look over a piece before sight-reading it, if we have the opportunity. But when we do it to the degree that you described, I think most would agree that's not "sight reading" -- and I'd bet that would include your professor.

No offense intended to you or to anybody. But it's good to be clear what we're talking about. As we've seen on this site quite a bit, the term "sight reading" often gets used in every which way; people sometimes even use the term for when someone uses the score during a performance.

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND....
The things you said are very useful for reading through music in general, which is a broader thing than just "sight reading" and also very important. And sometimes the line between these things can be fuzzy. Like, suppose you're told that a singer needs an accompanist in an hour, and they give you the score meanwhile (I've been in that situation a couple of times). Then, there's some time to look through it, and you can do the kinds of things that you said. When you get up there, it's not really "sight reading," but it's similar. Or, more commonly, if we pick up a score and want to be able to make the best sense of it that we can upon the first reading, we can take some time to do some of what you said, and it's not really "sight reading," but it's something, and it's good. And BTW I think it helps one become a better "sight reader."

DottedNotes: This is beyond awesome!! What you have accomplished and what you have been doing in your teaching is just great. Reading a story like yours makes many of us feel guilty for ever complaining about any obstacles that we have had to overcome.

What a COOL post! It is so easy to let other people define our limits, and then we are forced to live within those limits. But we can do it to ourselves too.

Each time I have made a "breakthrough" in my life, learning to do something I did not think I could do, it felt fantastic.