Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Should I push for note-reading?

I'm coming into the topic late. The difficulty lies not in the age of the student, but in having entrenched a particular way of relating to music. Several things come into play:
- When you have a thing by habit that works after a fashion, you will automatically fall into doing things that way. Think of the old treatment of "lazy eye", where the good eye is patched up so that the eye with the weak muscles is forced to exercise. Otherwise the good eye takes over, the weak eye eventually shuts off to get out of the way etc. We will do what comes easiest.
- When going to an entirely different skill than what you are used to - in this case reading - then the "final product" which is the played piece, will seem to be of a much lower quality. I.e. you can memorize the piece, dash it off (wrong notes and all) and maybe even convince a non-musical listener that you "sound like a musician" through that fluidity. Truly reading the music, as a new skill, will be slow, hesitant, at a much lower level of music. The teacher will perceive progress in the reading, and in the accuracy. Subjectively to the student his performance has gone way downhill. This is disturbing and scary.
- You are, in fact, moving into an utterly different experience. It is like having been a human in a cave trying to use your eyes, and suddenly you are a bat floating in the air using echolocation. You will want to get your feet on the ground, get a flashlight, and use your eyes. You won't know you're now a bat, and that the "music playing" you once knew is a totally different thing, so you will want to fight it, and still do things your old way.
- Even if you do want to do things the new way, your strongest skills will want to take over (memorizing, using ears, orienting through the hands)

The above is all subjective. I did not have those particular habits, but had others that needed replacing. Since I was already aware of what was going on, I was highly motivated to do the work.

An important thing to be aware of: When a brand new skill is being learned, such as here, brand new neural pathways are being forged. CAT scans show that for a familiar task, a small portion of the brain lights up. When the task is unfamiliar, a large section lights up until one section has become "dedicated" to that task. If you have reading skills, and you are improving reading skills, then you're using that small section. If reading is something you've never done, then you're in the "large section" scenario. Practically - this means that such sessions should be done for short periods, several times a day. If the concentration and focus are real, you can get tired out after 2 or 3 minutes in the beginning. After that focus wanders, you slip into old habits, and sort of erase what you accomplished.

This is assuming a movable Do that moves with the tonic and is based on the sound quality. When I learned to sight-sing, we learned it with do-re-mi where do, re, mi, etc all had different sound *qualities* that helped us remember it. Do was Home. aka, I, the tonic. "Ti" for example always sounds like it wants to go home to "Do". Singing with note names is different because if you're playing in a key other than C, for example in G Major, you'll be singing, G, A, B for example, instead of "Do-Re-Mi", where Do is "G" not "C". "C" in G Major would actually be "Fa" and *sound like* "Fa".

Good to note, I'll mention this to my student.

Why bother with solfege or note names? There are so many songs with written lyrics that are a lot more fun to sing.

I think it's useful to practice that connection if you want to learn to sight-sing, especially in a choir, or strengthen your aural skills for playing by ear.

keystring, thank you for that description of the challenges of learning something new when one has old habits to fall back on, and ideas of how to push through. I have been wanting to learn intervallic reading. After reading your post, it occurred to me to try this with Bach Chorales, which I have in an edition using C clefs for the upper three voices. Among other things, your comment about focusing for only s few moments helped me decide that just doing soprano line of one chorale was enough for today, before my brain got worn out. I'll pick up the alto line tomorrow.

Thanks again.

How is it going since the time you wrote this post?

It's going well. I'm being patient with myself. It's an interesting contrast to play the SAT parts (separately) by intervals, and then compare it to how it feels to play the bass part (written in bass clef) by the way I normally read.

I'm also trying to bring intervallic thinking into my sight reading practice. I'm using the app Sight Reading Factory, in disappearing measures mode, so I'm trying to learn how to spot the shape of a measure as I read it ahead, as a gestalt, rather than reading each individual note.

But it's very early days yet. Ask me in s month, or s year.

Very cool. I'll check out that app! I sent my student home with some interval homework and I feel she has improved with her reading already, at least by a little! She seemed pretty winded though so I can tell she is working hard. Best of luck

I got a new transfer that I'll be teaching online. His old teacher apparently left Minnesota cause it was too cold or something, so I guess he doesn't have many options locally. Again with the reading notes thing. This is similar to my last topic about my adult student, except this is a kid who is 10 who seems much more malleable and does what I tell him.

He's in the 1B Alfred books (the old ones). I asked him where he was at, and he told me he learned "C Position" and "G position", but when I asked him to play, he wasn't able to play his Recital 1B piece "I've Been Wishin" partly cause it's been awhile, and partly because he can't really read much music forreals. I'm wondering if this is perceived as a fault of the series (I know I've heard this thrown around here on the forums) and if I should focus on mitigating it, or if I should just expect that over time, reading will come, and just go with the "positions."

Personally, I find it rather funny for people to be playing pieces yet not be able to read the music, but I guess in other methods (Suzuki?), this is common. I can't imagine not purposely teaching how to read notes. Him not being able to read notes makes it difficult if I want him to work on a specific measure, because he can't really just pick up where he left off. I taught him to have landmark notes and go from there (skips, steps) to figure out where his hands were supposed to be. I have a feeling though that the lesson may have been somewhat painful for him. I originally wanted to just hear where his last teacher had left off, but it turned out that we barely made it through two lines of music because I had to stop him over and over for wrong notes (going up instead of going down, stepping instead of skipping, starting on the wrong notes so an entire three measures would be incorrect) and correcting it took him time.

He's a really bright kid, seems mature for his age. I don't want to "drill" the love of music out of him, but I feel like this could be an easy problem to solve if he puts in some work and it would open more doors.

Update-- Dad said he loved the lesson, so I guess it was okay *phew*

With the advent of the internet, it is likely to become more common. All the kids are on it these days and if they also have access to a keyboard and a bit of interest, this is likely the reason.

The good thing is they have found the interest on their own and have already started developing it. As a Teacher, I would think the most important thing is that we don't discredit anything they've done to date. I know you personally are not, nor most Teachers. The attitude of "you'll never amount to anything the way you are going" will turn these students off. In their minds, they are already better then most of their friends, including some that are taking lessons. Furthermore, they've already realized there is more to it and why they are coming to you now. Hopefully this step was also on their own initiative and is not being forced on them by the parents.

Yes, push for note reading emphasizing how it will strengthen everything else and introduce material they will be interested in. Probably the same level as material they are already playing and above.

They're not being rebellious (a bit maybe) and have a genuine interest to learn. Anything that contributes I do not think should be viewed as bad. It's been shown over and over again that people can reach amazing levels regardless of the inefficiencies in how they achieved it.