Music Video Lesson: The 3 Secrets of Sight Reading

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today is such an important show, the three secrets of sight reading.

I have told this story about how I was a miserable sight reader as a kid, even at the high school playing advanced music, but I couldn't read the simplest music and I had an epiphany.

The epiphany was reading through the entire orchestral part of the Tchaikovsky B -flat minor piano concerto with my father and missing most of the notes but never getting lost. And I learned the three secrets on that day that changed my life forever and I became a really good sight reader and did a ton of accompanying in conservatory.

And that is how you must combine what you see, what you hear, and what you feel.

That is exactly in a nutshell how to become great at sight reading. Now at first when you try this, and I'm going to demonstrate, I purposely pulled up a Chopin mazurka that I've never seen or heard before. I just randomly picked one up and I'm going to read it and I'm going to show you, you're going to look at me as I'm playing this and you're going to see that I am not going to look at my hands.

I might miss some notes. Occasionally you can glance. Now if you do glance when there's a big leap and you have no choice but to glance, you never glance this way because you'll never find your spot again in the score. It takes too long. You only glance with your eyes. That's it. And notice you look at complete measures or chunks of notes depending upon the context of the music.

You don't look note by note any more than you look letter by letter when reading. And you ascertain the harmonies and fill in what you can't see based upon the assumptions you make from what you can see. You're essentially analyzing the scope of the score on the fly.

What is this saying? Where is this going? Now I talked about hearing. So you may for example be playing and you know you're playing wrong notes for a moment and you must shift your hand to the right. You might be tempted to look down. Where is it? Well you do that. If you're accompanying somebody, they're already way ahead of you. So let's see what happens. I'm going to try this, put myself on the spot and see what we have.

I'm going to take a comfortably slow tempo so I can try to have a sense of accuracy.

I could go on. Now notice I didn't play perfectly. But I kept the music going. I kept my eyes going. I didn't get bogged down with I missed looking back on what I missed. I really wanted to. There was one harmony there. I go wait I don't think that's right. But no. I kept going forward. Why is this so imperative? Well of course if you're accompanying somebody or playing an ensemble you have no choice but to keep going right? But even if you're reading for your own pleasure just to get a sense of the music if you could go through really painstakingly slowly and every time you miss a note correct it but are you really going to get a feel for what that piece is about? Now you might want to take it under tempo so you're not playing bombastically and you're getting the notes.

But getting the feel for the music, the flow of it, not stopping every measure or two to make corrections because you're not really getting a feel for what the score is like. What I just did there I have a general feel. Of course I wouldn't want to do that more than once because you start practicing your mistakes then. But to go through it and get a feel for what a piece of music is like by making yourself look at first you're going to think oh I can't possibly play without looking down. And I sometimes liken this to riding a two wheeler or a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. You think how could you possibly stay up? Well you can. You absolutely can. You listen to what the music sounds like. If it's all bombastic and clashing harmonies you know one of the hands has to move up or down. You're in the wrong place in the keys and listen for it. And if you have to glance once again just with your eyes making that connection, listening, keeping looking at chunks of music, the rhythm and the timing is the most critical thing looking at a chunk at a time, a measure at a time in this case in three, four. If you're in four, four time perhaps looking at half measures at a time and keeping the flow of the music knowing where you land. This is the secret to developing great sight reading.

And any of you have other ideas about how you can develop your reading? Leave them in the comments at LivingPianos.com. We're your online piano resource. I'm Robert Estrin and really appreciate all of you subscribers out there. See you next time. Bye.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-3-secrets-of-sight-reading/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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