The Sight Reading Thread

rogerch Easy Classics to Moderns

Nice! It just so happens that I ordered that book yesterday. I really look forward to it now

Pallas I have Easy Classics to Moderns 17 and I'm really looking forward to the day that this is sight-reading practice for me too! (Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...)

You will get there!

I found the difficulty of the pieces in the Easy Classic to Modern to be all over the map. Many of them were challenging for me to sight read while others were much easier. You may be able to find some pieces in there to sight read now, or much sooner in your journey than the complete book. It’s tricky though, at least for me: it’s not immediately obvious to me which pieces will be easy by just looking at the scores.

That's good to know! I found that Library of Easy Piano Classics and Library of Easy Piano Classics 2 are all over the place as well, difficulty wise. In fact I find the pieces in part 2 a little less hard, overall.

For now though I put both books on the backburner because I don't want to stretch myself too thin by adding even more to Alfred and the blues course. I get my sight reading exercise by going back to older pieces. The same will probably happen with the Easy Classics to Moderns but eh, a girl needs a collection to admire and dream about playing someday

rogerch I found the difficulty of the pieces in the Easy Classic to Modern to be all over the map. Many of them were challenging for me to sight read while others were much easier.

I had the same experience, so I'm saving the book for sight reading when I'm a better player. "An Introduction to Classics to Moderns" was a much better fit for me at the time and I finished it a few years ago. Masterworks Classics are also good, as each book is a single grade. Supplementary repertoire books from various method book series, covering different genres such as pop and jazz and 2 or 3 levels below current technical ability are also good.

Do you think sight reading is important? Why or why not?

Yes, even though I'm terrible at it. I learn quickly with audio recordings of tonal music (I usually have a piece memorized by the time that I can actually play the notes correctly), but what am I going to do if I have to play a piece that's seldom-recorded or is completely new?

Although, thinking about it, I think the actual skill that I desire the most currently is the skill of "put your hands where your mind wants them to be". Speaking off the cuff, we get input streams (visual from sight reading, audio from listening to people we're playing with, etc.), process them, and then transform that into an output in our hands. While I do want to improve the throughput of the visual input stream from sight reading, that last step is more of my current bottleneck. As an example, I sometimes do impromptu transcriptions of orchestral pieces on the piano for fun based on what I hear, but even though I can hear it in my head and decide how I want to play it, my hands don't always end up in the right places.

WieWaldi I got this book: Sight-Reading & Harmony (Complete Edition)
It contains about 160 one-liners in different keys (from 3 flats over plain C up to 3 sharps). Each one-liner is printed in 5 different difficulty levels on one page. All the one-liners are chorales - with a German title (no lyrics, haha).

I tried to do it, but I gave up when I was confronted with keys I couldn't play. I said to myself: If I get to a piece with a new key, I practice the scale in this key, before. And then things got boring

In the publicity for the book you mentioned, I see this: "The four-part chorales of J.S. Bach are regarded by most educators as the “ultimate litmus test” in music reading and sight-reading." I don't agree. If you spend a lot of time playing through chorales, you're going to get very good at - - - playing chorales. That's fine if you adore chorales, they never bore you and you don't want to play anything else. But if you want to get good at reading other styles, you need to practice reading those styles.

I also looked at the sample page. Each example is only half a chorale! No wonder you got bored. It's as if you were given a book of 4-line poems, but each one was cut off after the second line, so you never got to the end of a poem.

If you want to get better at sight-reading without boring yourself to death, you need to read complete pieces. Pieces that tell stories. All sorts of stories: short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones...

You already posted a list of compilations. There are some good ideas there: I'd have a look at the Classics to Moderns series. Apart from that, just look for piano music anywhere you can find it: in secondhand shops, in libraries, on the internet... Discovering stuff yourself is fun!

If a piece doesn't look ridiculously hard to you, put it on the piano and try to play the first few bars. Just the first phrase. Can you see where that phrase ends? Even if you play it very slowly, even if you make mistakes, can you work out how it ought to sound? If you thinks you've sussed out that phrase, great: it doesn't matter for the moment if you can't play it up to speed. Go on to the next phrase, do the same thing and slowly you will see and hear the story of the piece unfold.

@"MRC »#p6676
QUOTE «  The most important thing about sight-reading is not to see how many notes you get right, it's to see how quickly you can understand what the music is about.

Think of learning to read a language. You first learn to understand and speak your language. Before you start learning to read, you are already fluent in speaking: you can take part in conversation, listen to stories, tell stories, recite poems... When you begin learning to read, at first you're stumbling over individual letters. You get used to combinations of these letters making up words which you already know. Then you string these words together and get to the stage where you can read a whole sentence and grasp what it means. When you've got this far, you start reading stories, and if you take delight in discovering new stories, you read more and more and become a fluent reader. » END QUOTE

THIS !!!

I learned how to read music at the same time I learned how to read (a, b, c …). As a result, sight reading is very much second nature to me and I will forever be grateful to my parents for my childhood piano lessons even though my dad was just beginning his career at the time with a new house, wife and kids so finances were really tight and $5 a week for lessons weighed heavily on the family budget.

I would just have two comments to add to many of the points already raised in this thread.

First I feel the point made by MRC is spot on with the analogy to language. If I paraphrase further his writing to the music world, at first one is reading individual notes and this turns into recognizing chords (let’s see a D, then an F# and an A …. hey that’s D major on fundamental - without even having to stop and analyze it). The cognitive pattern recognition later evolves to a higher level where one now pretty well automatically sees a series of chord related notes (whether together or in sequence one after the other - arpeggiated) and then to a chord progression structure (think sentences in grammar). So, by now in one glimpse you acquire the ability to have a pretty good idea of a few bars of music at a time. At this point, you only need to focus on the irregularities i.e. notes that stick out like a sore thumb in the otherwise regular chord pattern. For example, if an F Maj 7 also has a G written in there, your concentration is on that one irregularity as the rest is already known territory.
So there is a big difference on having your attention drawn to a whole bunch of discrete notes as opposed to only focusing on the irregularities. Knowing your scales and chords on the tip of your fingers is obviously pretty well required at this stage. At least that is how it works for me.

My second point is that I wonder if people have realistic expectations as to what constitutes the definition of sight reading. There are obviously many levels to this skillset. I get the sense that for many wanting to take any piece of written music score and sight reading it right away with perfect rendition at the keyboard is a little bit like the proverbial pie in the sky (sorry to burst your bubble). I would suggest that this would depend on the difficulty level of the score with respect to your current level of playing and reading skills. If the score is below your level, even if only a little bit, then you would likely be quite successful (but not necessarily perfect depending) and in any case it would only take just a few passes at most to have the piece under your fingers. (you may need to figure out best fingering to use in some passages for instance, or maybe there are some large jumps you need to tame, etc).

Thanks Pallas and everyone else for the very useful information! I have been a lifelong avid reader of both fiction and nonfiction, so I'm quite happy to add music reading to that skillset... gradually

WieWaldi you could look up the RCM complete syllabus online
https://rcmusic-kentico-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/rcm/media/main/about%20us/rcm%20publishing/piano-syllabus-2022-edition.pdf

Then check some of the pieces at each level on IMSLP to get a bit of an idea of the difficulty level of the RCM rep books

I'm using a couple of books in addition to the easiest repertoire I can find for sight reading: Paul Harris's "Improve Your Sight-Reading!" and Keith Snell/Diane Hidy's "Sight Reading" (Kjos).

Nowadays I'm going through easy pieces by various well known composers through imslp. I figure it would double as musical education.

Pallas Yep, go in chronological order and you start to see how the music evolved over the years too.

Sophia To the ones who have the book, is there any piece you would recommend to start with?

Hey Sophia I went through the book today looking for the easiest pieces. I did this after I read @WieWaldi 's post about looking at notes on the page and thinking about where the key is, and I'm afraid I may have given you a bum steer about "Easy Classics to Moderns" containing sight reading pieces for beginners.

WieWaldi, Sophia, Pallas, Nightowl, and others who are posting recordings: Your playing sounds really good and I am grateful that you are sharing recordings. I love listening to you play! You all play so well that I forget about what you may be going through with reading music. Thank you WieWaldi for reminding me and in no way do I mean to disparage anything you're doing! You are all amazing and I'm so glad you are here!

Anyway, I identified what I think are the three easiest pieces in "Easy Classics to Moderns" vol. 17:

Dmitri Kabalevsky: Chit-Chat, p. 138: I believe this is the easiest piece in the book. Only one hand plays at a time.

Dmitry Kabalevsky: First Dance, p. 136: This is probably much harder than Chit-Chat. If you work out the chords in the LH before playing it may be doable.

Jean Philippe Rameau: Rondino, p. 34: Played slowly this might be approachable. Watch out for the polyphony in the left hand in the second measure of the fourth line, or maybe just skip the last note in the left hand in that measure.

I suspect that "Chit-Chat" is the only piece that's even close to being sight readable. That's not a lot of sight reading material for a 160 page book!

I'm past being a beginner but when I was working my way through "Easy Classics to Moderns" I struggled with many of the pieces. It's amazing what the editors of these books call "Easy"!