Speaking as an adult learner who has passed Grade 8 but whose sight-reading is still stuck at Grade 2 1/2, this is absolutely my problem and as obvious as it seems now, it wasn't diagnosed until I started to work with a new teacher who has excellent strategies for improving sight-reading. I like her description of sight-reading as trying to read War and Peace aloud while playing tennis, particularly on a polyphonic instrument like the piano. It's obviously a lot easier for flute or voice as the system of musical notation works well for monophonic instruments, but is a huge compromise for polyphonic ones. So if you have a student who can neither read nor play tennis would it make sense to try and teach them to do both all at once?

In her opinion, this is where it goes wrong for a lot of would be sight-reading pianists. Teachers try to teach them to sight-read before they can read properly or play properly (because the exam boards demand it), the sight-reading demands gets difficult too quickly (in her view the difference between a Grade 3 and a Grade 5 piece is not that big whereas the difference between Grade 3 and Grade 5 sight-reading is enormous), so most students start to get discouraged, think there must be something wrong with them and stop putting effort into reading altogether. Especially as you can easily pass your Grades and get Distinctions and Merits and still be a terrible sight-reader. I am Exhibit A. It would be interesting to get stats from exam boards to see whether points for sight-reading as a percentage of the student score for the pieces is linear or tails off as the grade difficulty increases.

The most important thing she has got me to do is to write music. She thinks it is insane that the vast majority of instrument teachers in her experience address reading without addressing writing. If we did the same with language learning, a huge proportion of the population would be illiterate. Learning how to spell and how to construct grammatically correct sentences are both a crucial part of learning how to read written text, it is so obvious, and yet a lot of music teachers (no teacher I have ever had before the current one) has ever asked me to write out even a note of music, except for the Theory exams.

Every week she would ask me to write out the melody to e.g. Three Blind Mice, Jack and Jill or You are the sunshine of my life for homework and then she would play what I had written on the piano. All sorts of musical illiteracy was exposed. Anacrusis, dotted notes and rests, triplets and notes tied across the barline were all accidents just waiting to happen for me, so she knew what to work on, and she devised rhythmic exercises to help me to correct specific weaknesses. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the "just do more sight-reading and eventually it will get better" approach that I had experienced before. No, practising the wrong things will make you get worse. She knows, and I now know, that if I can't effortlessly transcribe the fifth bar of Three Blind Mice then I have no chance of being able to read that bar fluently and play it in real time at the piano when I encounter it. There is no point trying to sight-read until you can read and write reasonably fluently.

It is working and I am now better able to transcribe more complex melodies with decent accuracy and crucially, it is improving my reading. When I am reading sheet music (away from the piano), I come across fewer and fewer bars that completely flummox me, and when I do, I make a note of the bar and work through it with my teacher at the next lesson.

There's a lot more to her approach. We do exercises to get my eye moving from beat to beat in perfect sync with an internal pulse, grabbing whatever info I can from each beat before moving to the next one, training me to never stop and never correct, but nearly all this work is done away from the keyboard. I am just learning how to read. If/when my reading becomes fluent, we will start to look again at sight-reading.

I still sight-read on my own, and I have noticed a massive improvement since working with her. For one, I am no longer flummoxed by difficult passages. If I can't read something, she has given me strategies to deal with that and keep the pulse going so I can rejoin the piece at a later bar. I have made more progress with my sight-reading in the last year than I have made in the previous ten.

And on her recommendation, I have joined a choir, which is also fantastic training.

Thank you for BY FAR the most interesting and helpful response to my question!!!

I don't want to switch teachers for the moment, but when I interview the next one I will ask something like "what is your approach to teaching sight reading?" and make sure I get something like the above or move on.

To summarize it sounds like (1) transcribe melodies and (2) practice reading beat to beat maybe with a metronome. ?

I can't offer anything in return, but I would to hear more, maybe where she learned her pedagogical approach. Really I want you and her to do a twelve page writeup, but consider that a compliment not a realistic request!

Some crazy posts in this section.

not least of which is your puerile non-contribution above.
have you perhaps forgotten to take your medication this evening?

Pianoteqenthusiast wrote:

BarbaraRB wrote:

That is truly beautiful, and so calming. You have inspired me!

Barbara, I appreciate your taking the time to listen. You have my deepest thanks. I’m so glad I can help. Here is another piece with different chords. Hope it inspire you and all in the forum. Chords are inspiring!  Learn chords and be a member of music, be connected!

Surprisingly this song instantly got the most views ever on my Youtube - over 1200 times, enjoy the chords:

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9941

Best wishes,
Stig

Thank you. Love it!

Thanks Barbara for your kindness. Stay tuned on Recordings...

Best wishes,

Stig

And thanks to dazric too.

Pianoteqenthusiast wrote:

BarbaraRB wrote:

That is truly beautiful, and so calming. You have inspired me!

Barbara, I appreciate your taking the time to listen. You have my deepest thanks. I’m so glad I can help. Here is another piece with different chords. Hope it inspire you and all in the forum. Chords are inspiring!  Learn chords and be a member of music, be connected!

Surprisingly this song instantly got the most views ever on my Youtube - over 1200 times, enjoy the chords:

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9941

Best wishes,
Stig

Thank you. Love it!

I enjoyed it, too. Thinking about chords and improvising is very liberating, but chords can also help with sight reading. One thing that I don't think anybody has touched on is simplification when sight-reading. I'm certainly not the world's greatest sight-reader, but I'm pretty good at quick harmonic analysis, and I sometimes use that to get through tricky passages when sight-reading. I know if I try to play complex patterns at sight and maintain the pulse I'll just play lots of horrible wrong notes, so I just reduce things to essentials to get an 'impression' rather than trying to play everything.

Also I very much like the 'write it down' approach described by mikali. Light shines from many lamps!

BarbaraRB wrote:

Pianoteqenthusiast wrote:

Hi wws,
I suggest you try learning some chords. My teacher talked theory on and on and I didn't understand much and it didn't help my little playing as he said I won't be a pianist..so I stopped playing. Now I have taught myself about chords and they give birth to music, my own compositions. One person said that this is how chords can be used, so I played a little according to his chord sequence and it became music.Here it is.
But we are all different. I wish you the best of luck regardless of which path you choose.

https://youtu.be/aivZOgYpAUE

For example some basic piano chords   C G Am F

Best wishes,

Stig

That is truly beautiful, and so calming. You have inspired me!

Barbara, I appreciate your taking the time to listen. You have my deepest thanks. I’m so glad I can help. Here is another piece with different chords. Hope it inspire you and all in the forum. Chords are inspiring!  Learn chords and be a member of music, be connected!

Surprisingly this song instantly got the most views ever on my Youtube - over 1200 times, enjoy the chords:

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9941

Best wishes,
Stig

Thank you. Love it!

Pianoteqenthusiast wrote:

Hi wws,
I suggest you try learning some chords. My teacher talked theory on and on and I didn't understand much and it didn't help my little playing as he said I won't be a pianist..so I stopped playing. Now I have taught myself about chords and they give birth to music, my own compositions. One person said that this is how chords can be used, so I played a little according to his chord sequence and it became music.Here it is.
But we are all different. I wish you the best of luck regardless of which path you choose.

https://youtu.be/aivZOgYpAUE

For example some basic piano chords   C G Am F

Best wishes,

Stig

That is truly beautiful, and so calming. You have inspired me!

Barbara, I appreciate your taking the time to listen. You have my deepest thanks. I’m so glad I can help. Here is another piece with different chords. Hope it inspire you and all in the forum. Chords are inspiring!  Learn chords and be a member of music, be connected!

Surprisingly this song instantly got the most views ever on my Youtube - over 1200 times, enjoy the chords:

https://forum.modartt.com/viewtopic.php?id=9941

Best wishes,
Stig

Hi wws,
I suggest you try learning some chords. My teacher talked theory on and on and I didn't understand much and it didn't help my little playing as he said I won't be a pianist..so I stopped playing. Now I have taught myself about chords and they give birth to music, my own compositions. One person said that this is how chords can be used, so I played a little according to his chord sequence and it became music.Here it is.
But we are all different. I wish you the best of luck regardless of which path you choose.

https://youtu.be/aivZOgYpAUE

For example some basic piano chords   C G Am F

Best wishes,

Stig

That is truly beautiful, and so calming. You have inspired me!

IanL wrote:

I've always found it strange that this general problem - of looking at your hands when playing the piano - isn't talked about more. One reason for it I think is that you often see very accomplished pianists who do appear to be looking at their hands as they play. Typically they'll be playing from memory - in performance. But I've come to realise that there's a huge difference between looking at your hands when playing and needing to look at them in order to play, specifically in order to guide changes in hand position. I could go into that further but it gets a bit technical (I have a background in the neurophysiology of human movement) and might not be of much interest here.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't other things to be learned in order to sight-read at the piano well. But they're all part of the business of learning the piano and about the technicalities of music in general. I think the fact that a lot of pianists (in particular) have a particular problem with sight-reading, when they might seem to be very good players otherwise, is likely due to a reliance (or over-reliance) on visual guidance for changing hand position.

This brings up some interesting pedagogical questions.

First, a good teacher must meet a student where they are...there's no magic prescription that will work perfectly for everyone. You coming to piano already with a solid foundation in playing classical guitar and reading music proficiently would have had a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses than a kid learning music for the first time through piano lessons (for example). The issue of looking at the hands is actually huge in the world of piano pedagogy (they even sell various gimmicky devices to cover the hands while the student is reading...many teachers just hold a book over the student's hands). New students almost always naturally look at their hands, and find themselves doing exactly what you described with looking back up at the page and getting lost, etc. There are times when looking at the hands is very helpful, even completely necessary (like when performing huge leaps at very fast speeds, or noticing and correcting basic technical problems). It's common for many teachers to take the "no looking at hands" principle too far for a lot of young students. But with a healthy balance you gradually learn to minimize the time spent glancing at your target on the keyboard; developing the skill of better tracking where you are on the page.

For a "typical" piano student, who hasn't studied music before, this is all part of the learning-to-read phase...which typically comes long before learning to sight read. Learning to read and learning to sight read definitely shouldn't be confused...

Second, and this speaks more to the OP, there are a lot of basic prerequisites a student needs before they're really going to be ready to get far with sight reading. This basically just means learning to play the piano and reading music. More specifically, things like learning all the notes on the piano, learning the layout of the keys, learning how notation works, memorizing the notes, understanding basic fingering principles/logic, gaining significant agility/dexterity with the fingers on the piano, gaining muscle memory (without looking) for chord patterns, basic scale patterns, various stretches and leaps, ear training, etc., etc. A student's reading abilities will naturally improve while they're learning these other things, but again, that's not the same as sight reading, which requires a solid base and which is a very long slow process even then. Easily thousands of hours of reading piano music will be required for most people to get "good" at sight reading.

Speaking as an adult learner who has passed Grade 8 but whose sight-reading is still stuck at Grade 2 1/2, this is absolutely my problem and as obvious as it seems now, it wasn't diagnosed until I started to work with a new teacher who has excellent strategies for improving sight-reading. I like her description of sight-reading as trying to read War and Peace aloud while playing tennis, particularly on a polyphonic instrument like the piano. It's obviously a lot easier for flute or voice as the system of musical notation works well for monophonic instruments, but is a huge compromise for polyphonic ones. So if you have a student who can neither read nor play tennis would it make sense to try and teach them to do both all at once?

In her opinion, this is where it goes wrong for a lot of would be sight-reading pianists. Teachers try to teach them to sight-read before they can read properly or play properly (because the exam boards demand it), the sight-reading demands gets difficult too quickly (in her view the difference between a Grade 3 and a Grade 5 piece is not that big whereas the difference between Grade 3 and Grade 5 sight-reading is enormous), so most students start to get discouraged, think there must be something wrong with them and stop putting effort into reading altogether. Especially as you can easily pass your Grades and get Distinctions and Merits and still be a terrible sight-reader. I am Exhibit A. It would be interesting to get stats from exam boards to see whether points for sight-reading as a percentage of the student score for the pieces is linear or tails off as the grade difficulty increases.

The most important thing she has got me to do is to write music. She thinks it is insane that the vast majority of instrument teachers in her experience address reading without addressing writing. If we did the same with language learning, a huge proportion of the population would be illiterate. Learning how to spell and how to construct grammatically correct sentences are both a crucial part of learning how to read written text, it is so obvious, and yet a lot of music teachers (no teacher I have ever had before the current one) has ever asked me to write out even a note of music, except for the Theory exams.

Every week she would ask me to write out the melody to e.g. Three Blind Mice, Jack and Jill or You are the sunshine of my life for homework and then she would play what I had written on the piano. All sorts of musical illiteracy was exposed. Anacrusis, dotted notes and rests, triplets and notes tied across the barline were all accidents just waiting to happen for me, so she knew what to work on, and she devised rhythmic exercises to help me to correct specific weaknesses. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the "just do more sight-reading and eventually it will get better" approach that I had experienced before. No, practising the wrong things will make you get worse. She knows, and I now know, that if I can't effortlessly transcribe the fifth bar of Three Blind Mice then I have no chance of being able to read that bar fluently and play it in real time at the piano when I encounter it. There is no point trying to sight-read until you can read and write reasonably fluently.

It is working and I am now better able to transcribe more complex melodies with decent accuracy and crucially, it is improving my reading. When I am reading sheet music (away from the piano), I come across fewer and fewer bars that completely flummox me, and when I do, I make a note of the bar and work through it with my teacher at the next lesson.

There's a lot more to her approach. We do exercises to get my eye moving from beat to beat in perfect sync with an internal pulse, grabbing whatever info I can from each beat before moving to the next one, training me to never stop and never correct, but nearly all this work is done away from the keyboard. I am just learning how to read. If/when my reading becomes fluent, we will start to look again at sight-reading.

I still sight-read on my own, and I have noticed a massive improvement since working with her. For one, I am no longer flummoxed by difficult passages. If I can't read something, she has given me strategies to deal with that and keep the pulse going so I can rejoin the piece at a later bar. I have made more progress with my sight-reading in the last year than I have made in the previous ten.

And on her recommendation, I have joined a choir, which is also fantastic training.

If you're not sitting too close to the keyboard, and you train your eyes between your hands, you can often keep the target keys in your peripheral vision. (By the way, if you don't wear glasses you can often use your peripheral vision to help you avoid looking at your hands.) The hardest jumps like this are when you have to leap to the very ends of the keyboard, but here you can glance at one target note, keep it in your memory, then start the jump the same instance you glance over to the other target note. It's always a bit risky, but with practice it can work quite well.

A good instance of this that immediately comes to mind is Chopin's Op. 25 n.1 étude (A-flat; the so-called "Aeolian Harp"... thanks Robert...).  It's definitely an instructive challenge, particularly in the latter half when making the return to the tonic, to maintain a delicatissimo touch, good separation of the voicing, and keep the whole moving a tempo with a refined (singerly!) sense of cantabile and nicely/accurately manage those leaps in both hands simultaneously... but, when mastered, it's breathtakingly beautiful.  The older I get, the more value I find in Chopin's études, both musical & techincal!

I've seen any number of piano teaching books over the years and no mention, or apparent appreciation, of it. The exception is Bartok's 'Mikrokosmos' where he really does seem to be at pains to introduce changes in hand position slowly and carefully, although there's no explanation as to why. I've guessed that he thought it obvious.

Yes, well most piano method books are intended to be used in private lessons with a teacher filling in all those gaps. The self-guided books for adults are typically just very lacking...

Mikrokosmos is a fascinating series, but also definitely not intended as a self-guided curriculum; with basically no instructions for either students or teachers. It also has a very steep curve fairly early on, so it's almost never used on its own by teachers.

Yes, for sure. That's where a good teacher can be very helpful. It all depends on context and skill. With some experience, you pretty much never need to look down for jumps within an octave, and hardly ever within a tenth or so. With huge two octave+ leaps at high speeds (less of these in organ music as it's more "pianistic"), it becomes much more helpful (and often necessary) to get a split-second glance in. You get better at looking down very quickly and finding your place again, with practice. Huge and fast simultaneous outward jumps are notoriously difficult, but then most people don't have much of a need to sight read Liszt (most would just learn it and memorize it).

This is a little off-topic from sight reading, but there are tricks to performing these outward jumps. If you're not sitting too close to the keyboard, and you train your eyes between your hands, you can often keep the target keys in your peripheral vision. (By the way, if you don't wear glasses you can often use your peripheral vision to help you avoid looking at your hands.) The hardest jumps like this are when you have to leap to the very ends of the keyboard, but here you can glance at one target note, keep it in your memory, then start the jump the same instance you glance over to the other target note. It's always a bit risky, but with practice it can work quite well.

Interesting to hear this. I obviously haven't read the right stuff. It's just that I've seen any number of piano teaching books over the years and no mention, or apparent appreciation, of it. The exception is Bartok's 'Mikrokosmos' where he really does seem to be at pains to introduce changes in hand position slowly and carefully, although there's no explanation as to why. I've guessed that he thought it obvious.

The trouble is that it's difficult, introspectively, to distinguish between a necessity and a (mere) reassurance. My wife's an organist and conductor and a very good reader at the keyboard. If she's not particularly thinking about it she'll go for the largest of leaps without looking, and get them, no bother. But if she's at all under pressure she might steal a glance, as if 'just to make sure'. It's understandable, but entirely unnecessary. In fact it may be worse than unnecessary. It may actually reduce accuracy and speed. Visual guidance of reaching movements feels nice and secure but actually tends to introduce delays, due to relatively long processing times in the retina and various parts of the visual cortex. And there's always the other problem I referred to which is that you can only look at one place at a time. If both hands need to leap, particularly outwards (ie in contrary motion), and at the same time, the only visually-guided solution is to look first at one and then the other target.

Although there's a huge literature (in the neurophys/behavioural psych fields) on the control of reaching movements, I never found anything during my time working in the area specifically on leaps at the keyboard. But I'm now over 20 years out of date with this stuff and someone may since have looked into it. I really should do a proper search.

Ian

I still struggle, but  a couple of suggestions might help;

Limit yourself to simple pieces in say the middle two octaves - yes, real beginner pieces.
As one of my teachers used to say "Say it as you play it".   

Note by note read the note out loud and play it - one note per second if that is what it takes.

A different instrument might help you to abstract sight reading from piano (keyboard) playing.
For me that is classical guitar - hard to describe but switching between keyboards and fretted instruments helps me to "un-hook" from the physical implementation of the sound making mechanics of things and focus on the sound and its representation on the printed page.

There is also the argument that says we learn to read and write simultaneously and this should be how we learn to sight read better.
Scoring pad and pencil or scoring software, either one.

I've always found it strange that this general problem - of looking at your hands when playing the piano - isn't talked about more. One reason for it I think is that you often see very accomplished pianists who do appear to be looking at their hands as they play. Typically they'll be playing from memory - in performance. But I've come to realise that there's a huge difference between looking at your hands when playing and needing to look at them in order to play, specifically in order to guide changes in hand position. I could go into that further but it gets a bit technical (I have a background in the neurophysiology of human movement) and might not be of much interest here.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't other things to be learned in order to sight-read at the piano well. But they're all part of the business of learning the piano and about the technicalities of music in general. I think the fact that a lot of pianists (in particular) have a particular problem with sight-reading, when they might seem to be very good players otherwise, is likely due to a reliance (or over-reliance) on visual guidance for changing hand position.

This brings up some interesting pedagogical questions.

First, a good teacher must meet a student where they are...there's no magic prescription that will work perfectly for everyone. You coming to piano already with a solid foundation in playing classical guitar and reading music proficiently would have had a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses than a kid learning music for the first time through piano lessons (for example). The issue of looking at the hands is actually huge in the world of piano pedagogy (they even sell various gimmicky devices to cover the hands while the student is reading...many teachers just hold a book over the student's hands). New students almost always naturally look at their hands, and find themselves doing exactly what you described with looking back up at the page and getting lost, etc. There are times when looking at the hands is very helpful, even completely necessary (like when performing huge leaps at very fast speeds, or noticing and correcting basic technical problems). It's common for many teachers to take the "no looking at hands" principle too far for a lot of young students. But with a healthy balance you gradually learn to minimize the time spent glancing at your target on the keyboard; developing the skill of better tracking where you are on the page.

For a "typical" piano student, who hasn't studied music before, this is all part of the learning-to-read phase...which typically comes long before learning to sight read. Learning to read and learning to sight read definitely shouldn't be confused...

Second, and this speaks more to the OP, there are a lot of basic prerequisites a student needs before they're really going to be ready to get far with sight reading. This basically just means learning to play the piano and reading music. More specifically, things like learning all the notes on the piano, learning the layout of the keys, learning how notation works, memorizing the notes, understanding basic fingering principles/logic, gaining significant agility/dexterity with the fingers on the piano, gaining muscle memory (without looking) for chord patterns, basic scale patterns, various stretches and leaps, ear training, etc., etc. A student's reading abilities will naturally improve while they're learning these other things, but again, that's not the same as sight reading, which requires a solid base and which is a very long slow process even then. Easily thousands of hours of reading piano music will be required for most people to get "good" at sight reading.