Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum why not HS for sight reading

I agree. It's not wise to tell people what they should not or should do. What we can do is tell them some of the things that reading entails, what kinds of skills a pianist is aiming for, what is used where. Then people will make intelligent decisions.

Dangerous assumption!!

I'll reword that. It is more likely that people will make good decisions, if they have some knowledge about a matter, than if they have no knowledge about it. "Intelligent decisions" here means that the person has some information that he can weigh, and does weigh it.

This is an Internet forum. The ideal is consultation or working with an excellent teacher or knowledgeable musician one-on-one in person. That is not the reality here. In the least, then, the more information that the men and women in this forum have, the more likely they are to make intelligent decisions.

You are aware, of course, that I was agreeing with your statement that members should not be told what they should do. I added to your statement with the idea that must follow, that having information will allow them to decide what to do without being told what they should do. Most of the members of this forum appear to weigh information carefully. It's often said that PW members are not the "average" person, by the very fact that they do seek more knowledge.

I was not able to find this via Google search. What is it exactly?

Thanks... onto the Wish List it goes!

Forgive my beginner's ignorance- but what is prima vista?

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music (4th ed.):

Prima vista [It.]. At first sight, i.e., sight-reading.

To expand on packa's response, prima vista sight reading means concurrently reading and playing written music which you've never seen before. When you've read and played the music before, reading it from is simply called reading music, not "sight reading".

That said, often "sight reading" is colloquially used to mean reading music while you play it, even if you've seen the music before. But that's not how the term "sight reading" is used in piano pedagogy literature, and it's generally not used that way that around here either.

But sometimes people will explicitly add "prima vista" when they say "sight reading", just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, so nobody is confused by thinking we're talking about "reading music" instad of (prima vista) "sight reading".

Did that clarify, or just confuse more?

"reading" can mean:

1)reading and playing without ever having seen the piece
2)reading and playing having seen the piece (the fingering and motions of the hands are memorized, but not necessarily the notes)

"prima-vista sight-reading" only means:

1)reading and playing without ever having seen the piece

Sorry, Bobpickle, but that isn't quite right.

'Sight-reading', the phrase, is a contraction of 'first-sight reading'. The term makes no sense otherwise.

Prima vista sight reading literally means first sight sight reading, a nonsense phrase.

Playing from the score at first sight is sight reading, thereafter it is reading.

I agree. Sight-reading = prima vista. Practicing a piece in progress or performing a finished piece while still referring to the score is not sight-reading in the common usage of the term. Again, from The Harvard Dictionary of Music (4th ed.):

Sight-reading, sight-singing. The performing of a piece of music on seeing it for the first time. . . . Performing at sight on an instrument requires the ability to grasp the meaning of musical notation quickly and call upon the relevant technical skills for execution; this should be accompanied by the skills of the ear as well. The ability to perform efficiently at sight and the ability to give finished performances of distinction do not necessarily go together, and both should be among the goals of musical instruction.

What a good response tangleweeds and Bobpickle. I've had people say they sight read but don't really do so if they haven't seen the music before. Thanks for posting the distinction. I may have been guilty of this myself a couple or 6 times <blush>

I can't see practicing a piece with each hand separately as anything but an intensive preparation method for undertaking technically difficult (for ones level) material. In that sense it is akin to writing in fingerings, playing isolated passages or figures repeatedly until mastered or spending lesson time breaking down a piece musically with ones teacher.

Doing these sorts of things once only, at speed, on pieces of music one after another being seen for the very first time seems a complete waste of effort. It would be like going to the gym and doing one bicep curl, one pushup, one stroke on the rowing machine and so forth and calling it a workout.

One of the key skills in sight reading is integration (reading both staves simultaneously), and when you isolate the clefs you obviously eliminate that. In sight reading, the difficulty of reading both staves together is greater than the sum of each individually, if that makes any sense.

As others have mentioned, working through a piece HS is sort of at odds with the meaning and purpose of sight reading. However, good beginners sight reading material will often be written with little HT going on to keep things simple. The ABRSM takes this approach, excluding HT altogether from grade 1 sight reading. Excerpt from their syllabus about grade 1:

“a four- or six-bar piece in 4/4, 3/4 or 2/4 in C, G or F majors, A or D minors, with each hand playing separately and in a five-finger position. Simple dynamics, note values, articulations and occasional accidentals (within minor keys only) may be encountered.”