Ok, now…
Bart, I love this topic, thank you for starting this thread! I’ve been wanting to read and post in it but it’s taken me awhile to get caught up…
I don't want this to be a hair-splitting debate about the definition of "sight reading" and wheather that means first time only or more general reading
Bart, I agree about not wanting to open up the debate in terms of what “counts” as sight reading, bc in my opinion, it’s all reading and that’s the most important thing. (Oh and I don’t care if it’s music that you know in your head, i.e., you could hum the melody or something, versus music you don’t know at all. Both are equally useful for sightreading)
But a while back, I wrote at the other site a fair amount about the difference between “sight reading” (playing something house not read before) and what I call “read-playing.” To me, “read-playing” is playing or practicing something, maybe you’ve been working on it for months so you know the music well, maybe you could even play the piece completely or almost from memory without the score. But the point is, even if it’s not the first time, or not the 10th time, you’ve seen it, you are actively reading it while playing, making it a point to keep your eyes on the score, reading along, making sure you’re not passive in how you read (or look at) the score.
I think a lot of people have the score on the music stand while playing, but over days and weeks of practice, they are reading less and less, even though they may not be aware of it, because they’re passively memorizing the music.
So my point in making the distinction between sightreading and read-playing is to say that it is absolutely crucial that we be aware of reading and that we make it a point to do this “read-play” activity even with pieces we have been working on for a long time.
I think this is perhaps one of the most important activities one can do to develop sightreading ability. In other words, over time, active reading of known pieces contributes to the ability to sightread new pieces, i.e., to play through a piece of music you’ve never seen or only seen and played a few times.
So hopefully my bringing this up doesn’t sound like more of that hair-splitting debate, because if I recall correctly, the folks arguing about how to define sightreading were caught up in the question of what counts as sightreading, whereas my point here is that if you want be able to do one (play through a piece you’ve never seen before at a reasonable tempo), you have to be able to do the other (read-play through a piece you know while actually, truly, reading it). Because I strongly believe that active reading of known pieces contributes to sightreading ability, but only if you make it a point to always (or almost always!) ensure you are doing active reading.
