From: mjs@fc.hp.com (Marc Sabatella)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers,rec.music.makers.guitar,alt.guitar,rec.music.makers.synth
Subject: Re: Concrete questions on music reading
Date: 12 Jan 1993 00:16:41 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Company
Reply-To: marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com
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Tim Bagwell (timb@sr.hp.com) wrote:

: I have been taking lessons from a master pianist and I put the question
: to him once. His response was not very encouraging. He said that it
: really took him about 17 years to get to the point where he was fully
: comfortable with sight reading a piece.

And to add to the bad news, I've found that it took me all of about 5 years of
sight reading inactivity to lose this ability.  Actually, some types of music
(pop sheet music, for example) I can still do OK on - it mostly consists of
"easy" to recognize patterns.  Similarly, I do OK on music from the early
classical period, where the patterns are pretty straightforward.  Sightreading
something of the harmonic, rhythmic, or melodic complexity of Bach or Debussy
is a skill I may have lost for good - they contain hard to recognize patterns
and I don't practice it enough.

I believe sight reading is about pattern recognition.  It's really easy to see
a triad; if you know the bottom note and the key, your hand will find it easily
enough.  Similarly, a scale or arpeggio is pretty easy to see, and even
accidentals don't throw things off if they are related to the original key.
Even a simple F major scale is hard to recognize if it is notated in the key
of E major, but conversely, a B major scale is easy enough to recognize in that
same context.  Enharmonics are the worst for sight reading - a Gb following an
F# sure *looks* like it is an ascending line.

To answer the question a little more specifically, then, I would say that you
eventually learn to actually read only a few notes and then you simply see the
patterns around them.  It doesn't take much at all to start recognizing scale
based lines; triads and other simple chords - as well as their arpeggios - come
with practice.  Sometimes, you'll see a chord spread out over two hands and
you'll get the top and bottom notes right, but may have the inner voices wrong;
usually it won't even noticeable if you've gotten the chord right.  Then there
are other conventions you'll get used to as well - especially left hand
patterns like repeated block chords, arpeggios, Alberti bass - where you can
sort of go on auto pilot after seeing only the first note or two of the
measure.  Occasionally, you don't have to look that far - if the pattern is
well enough established, sometimes merely getting the chord from the right hand
is sufficient to let you know what to do with the left - sometimes you'll guess
wrong, and be playing the root and fifth instead of the third and fifth, but
again, normally no one would notice.  Sometimes you can go even beyond this,
anticipating a measure or more beyond where you are based on what you know
will be happening - for instance, if some ppor copy editor managed to fit all
of a piece written in C major onto a page, except for the last measure, and the
second to last measure was a half note chord "G-G G-C-E" followed by another
half note chord "G-G G-B-D", I wouldn't even bother turning the page before
playing the last chord "C-G E-G-C".

I don't expect you to be able to read the above and say, "OK, now I can do it".
It does take practice.  But I think this is the feeling you should be going
after.  Pattern matching.

: Pick up a copy of "The Real Book" and
: learn your 7th chords and the Jazz nomenclature. It may help make all
: that practice a little more enjoyable.

If nothing else, it will help you become more conscious of chord progressions,
but this is the sort of thing that lead to to get out of practice with
romantic/impressionistic era music - in the Real Book, all those strange chords
are notated very simply; in sheet music, I'm not used to seeing the pattern
for what an F7 arpeggio looks like in E major.

--
Marc Sabatella
marc@hpmonk.fc.hp.com
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