After reading my first post, you may be wondering what qualifies me to give expert advice on sight-reading. Excellent question! Everything I know about sight-reading has been gained through experience. I was once where you are now: frustrated with my sight-reading abilities.
Starting at age seven, I had no natural inclination or prodigious talent at the piano. For the most part, the pieces in the piano lesson books my teacher assigned me bored me so I felt little motivation to practice. As a teenager, I bought a sheet music book book with my own money for the first time. This book, Easy Piano Classics by James Bastein, did not feel so "easy" for me. Unlike the method books, Easy Piano Classics contained pieces that I wanted to play. Because my teacher had not assigned this book, I played this music on my own using whatever modest sight reading skills I possessed at the time.
Soon I discovered that I had a thirst for playing new music. The boredom I once had for piano vanished as I explored any sheet music I could find. One summer I found my mom's sheet music stash and I attempted to play through it. I struggled to keep a steady tempo, play the right rhythmic patterns, and play the correct notes. Despite of these difficulties, I enjoyed encountering new music and played it even if I butchered many of the pieces. I may not have been consciously aware at the time that I had been sight-reading through all of this process.
My teacher never mentioned sight-reading during my lessons. However, if I did not play a piece well during a lesson, my teacher would play it for me and later it dawned on me that she was most likely sight-reading when she was demonstrating. I would think to myself: I want to be able to do that someday.
Many years later, frustrated with feelings of despair generated upon looking at advanced piano sheet music that looked like nothing more than dense indecipherable blobs of black ink, I decided to take college level music theory courses with the end goal of improving my sight-reading. This training provided a much more solid understanding of music than I could ever hope to obtain from just taking piano lessons alone. Once I developed a thorough comprehension of music notation, it would only be a matter of time before I could apply all of this knowledge to sight-reading.
Eventually, I took a church pianist job where on occasion the music director would make a last minute change in the liturgy and I would be required to sight-read a hymn for the congregation. This job brought me to the awareness that I really needed to work on sight reading in a more concentrated way. I soon began to prioritize sight-reading in my daily practice. Because I had received almost no direct instruction in sight-reading, I started looking for ways to improve by reading books, articles, and academic theses as well as watching videos on the subject. Unfortunately, really good resources are hard to come by, but I would apply every useful suggestion into my daily one hour sight reading practice over a period of years.
That is where this blog comes into play. The suggestions, links, and information listed on this blog are designed to simply the process so that sight-reading is no longer a struggle and that good reliable information can be found in one place. The books that I am now writing (and coming soon to this website) are intended to provide you with an extensive background of patterns needed to sight-read well without the need to take college level music courses. This material will be accessible to everyone regardless of age or current ability.
Please stay tuned for more information,
Robert
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