Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Questions for proficient sight readers

Yes, you're right. That's also why some people who speed read well don't memorize well; their attention isn't on the details, it's on the bigger picture, so when the brain tries to fill it in, sometimes it fills it incorrectly.

I think this is likely to happen if a person's earlier music education is irregular.

While I'm not claiming to be "very competent", I do think I'm in a similar boat. Even though I started learning the piano at a very young age, I switched instructors every 3-4 years due to circumstances, and then I took a 14 year hiatus from music. When I restarted the piano half a year ago, I found my technique improving at an alarming rate, simply as a side effect of being grown up. Today I can polish off something like Debussy's Arabesque 1 in about 1-2 weeks time.

But my sightreading skills has fallen far, far behind. I simply cannot sightread anything higher than rank 2 or 3, which is absurd. To draw the reading analogy that people are making, I understand all the grammar of the language, but I have an elementary schooler's cache of vocabulary.

For me it wasn’t when I first started learning. I remember being in the middle of the John Thompson grade 1 book and not knowing how to read the notes (I read by finger numbering on the printed music). I did get past this, but I wonder if this earlier “laziness” taught me how to read by interval instead of letter names, which is a key to being able to read faster. My dad would sometimes play through the rest of my method books, and he would also play through some other collections of classical music. I picked up on this and started doing that myself, probably when I was getting near the end of the grade 2 book. Since then, I’ve always been playing through my music, and checking out other scores from the library to play through. My dad and I also played through duets together.

When I started with my first piano teacher, she always wanted me to practice hands separately at first. I refused, and just played through my pieces. I also didn’t ever stop to repeat sections. I wonder if this also aided in my reading ability – I would imagine that people who spend the majority of their practice time drilling sections do not have to actually read the notes after the first few times, whereas people who just play through the pieces need to rely on reading for much longer. Now that I do have better practice habits I feel that my sight-reading ability has dropped. Or at least it hasn’t returned to what it was prior to my 10-year break from piano.


I did play for church and started accompanying in high school. I was questioning why people say you must play with someone else in order to improve skills. I believe it has to do with the ability to focus. When playing with other people, you are obligated to continue on, and for me I have to live up to the “challenge” and look good for the others. I think one should be able to stimulate this kind of focusing even when practicing alone.

When 14, I just wanted to play as much as I could, all the Mozart/Beethoven/Chopin was at hand, so I started at page 1, didn't stop until the end of one composer's volume, etc. Did this for 1 year or so, and then had to accompany many other instrumentalists, one is just coaxed into relying on one's ability to be economical with one's time: a prima vista! Later, in my early twenties, I became repetiteur of the student's choir, a very good way of playing from scores you normally wouldn't touch, from Bach Passions through Verdi's Requiem, whole opera's went through the fingers, at Conservatory, same story: played all the duo repertoire for piano and violin/viola/cello/double bass/all the woodwinds/all the brass/ the time-pressure did miracles, although I must admit, for solo-concerts, and playing by heart, it did me no good, so to concentrate at playing without music is my big challenge now..

We're quite similar in this regard (and others I've noticed). When quite young, once I'd had a taste of the greats (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc.) I simply wanted to learn more and would spend literally hours working my way through whatever volume I'd plucked from the bench. It's always been that way...I played one Mozart concerto at 11 and wanted to learn them all and so did. Chopin ballades, scherzi, nocturnes, waltzes, Beethoven sonatas (save 106) and concerti, Bach French, English suites, Partitas, WTC, etc., etc.
At any rate I was always working (or trying to work) on repertoire that was JUST beyond me and the more I did it the easier it became until soon the rep wasn't just beyond me any longer and my reading skills have always been strong as a result (at least it's my belief that that's the primary reason they've always been strong).

When I was a college undergrad, I was a proficient pianist and got roped into becoming the choral accompanist...not just reading the accompaniment but picking out voices and reading them off for the singers in various combinations. This was a huge help. I don't regret this kind of work for a moment...it was tremendously rewarding for me, not just for sight-reading but for opening the choral literature to me, including early music meant for small choirs. We were fortunate to have great choral directors who chose music of substance.

I was also super-interested in contemporary music back then (still am) and was pressed into service to perform student scores, sometimes on short notice. Great practice.

Tangleweeds, as others here have said, good sightreaders see groups of notes instead of just individual notes. It's like looking at a sentence in a book and seeing words instead of just a series of letters.

And that means, for the most part, seeing chords. (I don't think anyone has explicitly said that.) So the more familiar you become with chords and chord progressions, the better you'll do.

When I teach beginners, before we even look at notation, I help them to play simple pieces that are made up of broken chords. That way, right from the start, they're thinking in terms of groups.

On a personal note, though, I'll never forget the precise moment when I began to enjoy sight-reading. I was maybe 7 or 8 and had already been taking lessons for a few years. One day I opened up one of the beginner's books I hadn't touched for a long time. It was a large collection of simplified arrangements of classical pieces, only a few of which I had actually studied.

And suddenly I realized: wow, I can read most of the pieces in here and play them without even practicing them! And the arrangements were interesting enough so that, even though they were technically much easier than the music I was currently working on, I really enjoyed playing them.

And from then on, sight-reading became a great source of pleasure for me. So I kept getting better and better at it.

And that's what you need to do, Tangleweeds—find a way to make sight-reading fun!

Listening to classical music has always appealed to me. My family of origin was not very musical and would more likely just turn on the pop radio in the morning just to have sounds in the house. They did not encourage nor discourage my interest. We did not have a piano in the house nor could we afford lessons.

Jump ahead to when I was 14 or 15 I and decided to learn to play the recorder based solely on hearing an LP of the New York Pro Musica. I couldn't play the recorder. I couldn't read music. So I got the Erich Katz book "Recorder Playing" and over a year learned both. That was the beginning.

As a fiery adolescent with raging hormones I would listen to Beethoven's symphonies in my basement hideout and play along on the recorder(!!) with Josef Krips and the London Symphony. Luckily no one heard enough to complain. Soon after I picked up the one book that got me started in earnest to learn how to read music beyond folk tunes. That book is George Grove's "Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies". Because it reduced many of the motifs to fairly simple notation I was able to learn to play along. Knowing the "tunes" before seeing them on the staff helped my a lot amd over time I was able to get the notes right. Soon I found a full orchestral score of all Beethoven's symphonies in a remainder store and soon was following along. It's great practice. Find simple things and tunes that you know and listen and follow along.

OP returns to say thanks to everyone who replied. I'm an adult beginner so my sight-reading level is pretty low, but I've been working on reading music a lot over the last year, and have reached the point where it has just begun to be a recreational instead of requisite activity. My intuition is that this marks a turning point in my learning curve, where reading music can begin to develop its own momentum as something I enjoy doing for its own sake.


Thank you, I had been wondering whether my correlating language:words => music:chords was appropriate. I do practice seeing music in terms of chords, both when I'm playing something new and when I'm just listening & following along with the score.

I enjoy studying theory and am now working on recognizing and building chords on different scale degrees of different keys. Is this the sort of work which likely to be helpful in developing my ability to read in "words"?

My problem right now is that playing level low enough that the material I can fluently sight-read is pretty basic, and therefore not all that inspiring to play. Often I spice things up by playing it transposed into other keys, but generally, when entertaining myself I don't so much sight read as "recreationally stumble through," playing through material that's too hard for me to read fluently, but more interesting to figure out harmonically.

Yes! "Recreationally stumble through"
I think that's what many of us were describing when we said we used to just play through piles of music in our earlier piano days.

I agree!



Absolutely.



Another possibility is to challenge yourself to make that simple material interesting by how much beauty and expressiveness you can bring to it. The key is to listen deeply to every single note and have a clear intention for what you want to do with it.