I did some violin teaching many years ago but only started doing it seriously after doing the CTABRSM seven years ago. Back then, at any point through the seventies and eighties, I never noticed any children struggling particularly with notation. They all seemed to grasp it pretty quickly including the ones I wouldn't have called outstandingly intelligent, and a player who'd been playing for a couple of years or so wouldn't suddenly mistake a D (third finger on the A string) for a B (first finger on the A string) and end up having to peer bewilderedly at the music when I pointed out they'd played a wrong note.

But nowadays it seems to be the complete opposite - most of them, inherited or otherwise - seem to really struggle to remember which note is which no matter what method I use and no matter how slowly I introduce and reinforce each note. Is it because they all read much less if at all, so struggle to comprehend written symbols? On the other hand the teenagers amongst them are all happily messaging away on their computers every day so they can all read and write!

Interestingly I do have one student who's an amazingly good sight-reader. She's 9 and being brought up in quite an unconventional way with an alternative sort of mum, hardly any after-school activities very little TV and no computer games. Or perhaps because of the lack of TV and computer games she practises more, like the students I had in the 70s and 80s. She's a very quick, bright and altogether delightful child as it happens, with a fantastic imagination and a very strong sense of self.

Have other posters here noticed this and if so what do you think?

Hi,
I have a 7and half years old son who started learning to play the violin since January 2008. Since then, he has passed his violin Grade One in autumn last year with a merit, and is quickly progressing in his Grade 2 pieces. He is a very good sight reader. Well, I don't really know if it is a coincidence but my son too has very little TV and only computer games an hour each in the weekend. He is also not unnecessarily booked up for after school activities. I do think that children need to have uncomplicated lives in order to give them some breathing space at home. He loves to play the violin and does not consider it a "practice time" when he does it. Perhaps our modern lifestyles norms provide too much distraction for children these days but I also think the ability to sight read largely comes from their inner capabilities and interest in music itself, rather than any other reason. Also, I honestly think lots of children are "pushed" (again our culture of making our children super achievers) into learning a musical instrument these days with a disregard of whether they really have it in them to pursue it at exam level.
Hope my comment helps.

Yes I'm inclined to think this has an element of truth in it, and also some children who are bright believe that playing a musical instrument will come to them as easily as their schoolwork does. They are a little reluctant to put in the effort to make really good progress with their instrument. Perhaps for that reason, learning an instrument teaches them a valuable lesson for life.

QUOTE : Yes I'm inclined to think this has an element of truth in it, and also some children who are bright believe that playing a musical instrument will come to them as easily as their schoolwork does. They are a little reluctant to put in the effort to make really good progress with their instrument. Perhaps for that reason, learning an instrument teaches them a valuable lesson for life.


Quite agree. My worst student is one who's jumped a year at school and so he, and his parents, think he is gifted and so everything should be a piece of cake. Actual graft is not appreciated nor the idea that he cannot instantly achieve what he wants to.
Actually, it's probably more the parents' fault than his . . . .

Hmm, interesting responses and thanks. Quite honestly I think all this time so many kids are spending on (highly addictive) computer games is wrecking their capacity to learn difficult technical skills. It's so easy to sit at a screen flipping a switch and the screen just draws you in....

When I started learning instruments - first piano for a year then violin - we had no TV and the only things I did at home were draw, read, play with bricks etc or play outside. Apart from the music lessons the only after-school activity I had was one ballet lesson a week. Playing the piano was a favourite thing and I never needed to be reminded to practise, partly because it was just there waiting to be played. It was a bit harder with the violin because of the psychological slight block of having to get it out of the case, get it tuned, rosin the bow etc. OK OK, I know but you know what I mean.

As for learning notation - I had the time and space to absorb things properly because there weren't really any distractions to pure thinking and learning. I remember Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and FACE, I remember making mistakes from time to time but also actually wanting to understand it and get it right for my own intrinsic satisfaction. Once I'd learnt to recognise both clefs on the piano at the age of 6 it was no problem learning where the notes were on the violin, and that means learning all the sixteen notes in first position. With a lot of my pupils I find that they can learn all the notes on the D and A string fairly easily but when you introduce the other two strings they start feeling overloaded. Or they learn them OK but then forget the D and A string notes. It can be SO frustrating!!!

I do recall spending ages with one particular child getting her to learn the G string notes. I wish I could remember exactly what we did because a year or so on she never ever makes a mistake with a G string note; however she has a tendency to get the notes on the other strings muddled up than is too often for comfort. She plays with her PS2 at every opportunity, for the record.

It gets so frustrating at times I sometimes wish I could just sack all the sloppy practisers and just stick with the rest - but then one's working life can't be perfect can it?

But if you did that, would there be enough pupils left for you to earn a living? Maybe the pushier parents are misguided in attempting to give their kids the opportunity to try lots of activities, but it does mean there are enough pupils to go round.

With respect, I think this is utter nonsense.

I agree, and I find that I have one particular pupil who could be really good if only he put his mind to it. I seriously considered writing out a sort of questionnaire for everyone to take home over half term to think about with parents about practising and whether enough time was being spent/proper practising was being done. But I've changed my mind because the ones who are not practising and making satisfactory progress are in the minority at the moment and it would be counter-productive, I think, for those who are doing a reasonable job. I don't want to put them off.

I think there are strong grounds to Violina's claims. I do not believe a child who spends a majority of his time at the computer screen would not complain if he is required to spend the other 3/4 of an hour practising on the violin. Computer games need lots of concentration, even "post battle" - as they are highly engrossing and addictive. Unless you are speaking from experience,I would be interested to speak to such a child who plays the electronic game AND practises religiously - I'd like to know if he practices out of self motivation or parental pressure?? It is never a win/win situation like this, because I believe time is a constraint and so is a child's developing brain.

Well that's precisely why I said 'I wish' instead of 'I'm going to'.




Well actually no it isn't. Perhaps there are some unusual people - children even - who can spend hours and hours on computer screens and lots of time practising as well but there are only so many hours in a child's day and there are other considerations like homework that has to be done otherwise the child is in serious trouble or embarrassment at school. Once an unsupervised (because the parents are busy doing things like working, cooking etc) child has spent a couple of hours playing a computer game and then it's supper, then homework, music practice is going to be squeezed into the last couple of days before the next lesson, and then not much progress will be made.

In fact the more I think about it the more apparent it's becoming that the children with PS2s and computer games plu unlimited access to them are the ones who are making very little or slow progress. My good practisers practically all come from families where access to computer games is severely restricted. And the girls don't have PS2s.

[ In fact the more I think about it the more apparent it's becoming that the children with PS2s and computer games plu unlimited access to them are the ones who are making very little or slow progress. My good practisers practically all come from families where access to computer games is severely restricted. And the girls don't have PS2s.
[/quote]

The important phrase here is "unlimited access". If children have unlimited access to TV (which many seem to) I believe it's much worse than unlimited access to computer games, which are at least interactive and therefore require the child to put his brain into gear.

I suspect that, more to the point, the ones who do put in the work are the ones who have parents who care enough to limit access to both TV and computer games etc and who take a more active interest in what their children do and therefore encourage them to practise regularly.

So, what you're saying is that we parents need to help our children prioritise, rather than that computers are evil as such. My daughter loves the computer - mostly for socialising rather than gaming BUT she puts homework then music practice first. Actually, she's always been keen to potter on the computer since she was tiny. She's a really good sightreader, but not very keen on reading books, so I'm a bit doubtful that there's a direct relationship there.

Yes I'm not suggesting parents should ban computer games altogether but for some children especially boys, they do seem to be very addictive and there are only so many hours after school and before bed. If a child puts homework and music practice before time on the computer then I wouldn't worry about music practice, obviously. But you say she's not very keen on reading books; quite apart from my suggestion about word reading possibly aiding notation reading, don't you think there might possibly be a connection between your daughter's time spent socialising on the computer and a lack of interest in reading?

When I was at school and not everybody even had a TV, pretty much every child I knew enjoyed reading. It was because there wasn't much else to do once everyone had been called in from playing and the homework had been done. I remember avidly discussing the Narnia books with the kids next door (who weren't particularly academic); we all had books on the go all the time. Obviously we can't turn the clock back and who's to say all this online socialising is a bad thing in any case - perhaps it's even good for strengthening friendships between children who can't get together outside school for logistical reasons. But there's only time for so much, and reading does take time. Also, the decline in children's reading does seem to have coincided rather revealingly with the advent of PCs.



I don't know - I think playing computer games can be a very mindless activity - it depends on the quality of the game, surely? And some of the brightest brains in the country spent large amounts of time in childhood watching TV - but they probably discussed some of the programmes around the dinner table with their parents afterwards and didn't imbibe a 100% diet of the more rubbishy cartoons.

I'm sure some of the brightest and best watched their share of rubbish on TV, and got something useful out of it, as long as that wasn't all they did every day! A contemporary of mine once commented (about 30 years ago on the striking difference between the "TV generation" who were just a few years younger than we were, but who would have almost certainly have had TV since preschool age, and our age group, who had much more limited access to TV and who turned first to theatrical and cinematic values rather than TV values when making movies or even drama. The TV kids were making great movies, but their "instincts" when it came to visualising crucial scenes were different.

I think that is true in other areas too Japan revised its curriculum to emphasize English speaking skills, such as the ability to follow a topic in a conversation or speech, understand how it had evolved, and participate in a relevant way. Teaching the products of this curriculum, I could see that they were much better at thinking on their feet, and they did have the improved listening and speaking skills you would expect...although they were worse at spelling, and had trouble writing complex sentences (in English, this is, not in their own language).

Anyway, after a few years, the new curriculum was lambasted as "worthless", because the exams had not changed to reflect the new curriculum. Therefore, all that was measured was a deterioration of older goals, while the achievement of new goals remained invisible!

Modern language curricula were designed to meet important needs, such as computer literacy, and clear verbal communication skills. I am sure that some children learn to read easily under any system, but some definitely need more time and attention than they get in modern curricula. If experts underestimated how much time was needed to teach reading and writing, that is a failure, but it doesn't mean that the new goals are worthless!

Viohazard was brought up in the same sea of books that his print-mad brother grew up in, and he has a passion for stories and the emotional content of poetry and fiction that his brother doesn't have...yet it was much harder for him to learn to read text or music fast, fluently, and accurately. He started school just as Japan's "lite" reading and writing curriculum came into effect, and he was one of the kids who really needed more time on those skills.

Let's acknowledge the weak points of the new education and the new childhood, but let's also consider what this generation of children are better at - I would bet anything that early exposure to "composing" and similar music software would give them a better feeling for harmony, and I wonder if kids have a better memory for music (not necessarily better trained in formal aural skills) than their parents. They certainly have more exposure to classical music, albeit recorded, than we have, and also have access to many different instruments and styles of music if they are interested.

Do you see any positive changes, Violinia?


Regarding the value or otherwise of the kind of games that can become obsessive:

Viohazard argues, and I admit, that some modern games are works of art. I can't disagree, most movies I've seen lately have been vapid, one-sided, and incredibly politically correct. That still leaves the very real problems of violence. As for promotion of anti-social or criminal behaviour, a la Grand Theft Auto, I have no love for GTA, but I am just as disgusted at the Disney values which tell us that it's fine for Aladdin to steal because he's cute, smooth, and a fast talker.

Consider the game STALKER, for example, whose music remains very popular...it has its origins in an early '70s Russian scifi paperback which is a continuation of a basically verbal artform belonging mostly to men born in or just after WWI and old enough to fight in WWII, although this book is a kind of turning point where the utopia OR but not AND dystopia usually seen in scifi turns to something much more ambivalent. Yes, a novel for its time - in format, it is basically pulp fiction, but it has something that catches the eye of a "fine art" movie maker, Tarkovsky.

In the late 70s, he turned it into the movie Stalker. It's an astonishing movie, very 70s in its use of color and dreamlike mood, but it also has an ambivalence about values or just when the time comes when we are able to assess something as definitively good or bad, but also an ambivalence in mood - is the hero happy or unhappy with his choices? It's a very different movie from Tarkovsky's earlier work, lost him a lot of friends, but those who saw it didn't forget it.

Now, here we are in a new century, and the same theme inspires a most unusual game, going by the same name. It attracts people who are not interested in shoot-em-ups or bouncing coin-collecting characters, with a world that is very dystopic, but not without beauty or value, and not utterly destroyed. It is a first-pereson shooter game, and I find that extremely disturbing (while acknowledging that is less violent than most action movies these days) and don't let Viohazard play it. However, he is very taken with the lyrics of the lament "Dirge for the Planet", and it obviously touches a chord in him and his contemporaries.

I think the thoughtful child of our century grows up with an awareness of destruction and loss, both intentional and unintentional, that we didn't have (because "instant news" reached us from far fewer places, for one thing), and their chosen art forms reflect that. Viohazard started school in long sleeves after a radiation scare at a nearby nuclear power plant, he saw those images of people throwing themselves out of buildings on 911 and brooded on images of heavily armored hi-tech soldiers pointing guns at ragged toddlers in Afghanistan before he was old enough to read the front-page articles that accompanied them. Since then, there has been an endless tide of partisan violence fueled by political games, and natural disaster exacerbated by greed and indifference..."how with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than a flower?" I'm not surprised that he and his peers are drawn to the very operatic mood and scale of the new role-playing games.

These newer games range wider in their choice of existing music and attract some very fine new music, and the music not only builds tension, it is almost operatic in the way that lyrics narrate or express a character's unspoken thoughts, allowing the tension to build between desired and possible actions, or between choices and regrets. The plot shows a constant shifting of alternatives according to the choices you make, something that must seem more real than the kind of book or movie where it's OK to want, bring about, and rejoice over the total destruction of "them", mostly just because they are "not us". The choices not taken, the guys on the other side - tell me about High School Musical, tell me about the Famous Five, and you're telling me about puppet-worlds that seem farcical to many children and distasteful to many adults!

...so are we sufficiently by now?

It's interesting what can rekindle enthusiasm for practising, and hence hopefully an improvement in reading notation. My son who's 14 has just started DoE bronze and it involves him in learning guitar (new instrument for him) and helping out at Sunday school which in his case means playing keyboard. So he's dead keen to practise guitar, but knows that I say the trumpet (original instrument) has to be practised just as much.

He has time to fit this in, plus doing a new sport for the DoE, plus homework for GCSE. So now he comes home and has limited himself to playing on his Xbox until 4.30pm. That's his down time, relaxation just when he gets home from school before springing into action with his homework.

I noticed something similar when I was at uni light-years ago. The boys used to call in on the games machines in the SU building before going to lectures. They had to do this before lectures. I thought they were mad, but somehow it injected some sort of impetus in them and then they were able to go to lectures. But I appreciate that this is different to the playing of computer games (or similar) for long periods of time.

I don't think computer games have a bad effect on all children but some children WILL get addicted - I know because I was one of them! I find playing games on a screen enjoyable at first but utterly addictive and eventually comletely joyless and I try now to avoid them at all costs - luckily my son is too young to play with them yet. I don't think we know enough about the effects of staring at a screen (computer or tv) for hours everyday as most adults didn't grow up doing this. I expect we will find out with the next generation....

I don't think they should be banned but limited yes. BTW the most musical family I know didn't have a tv when they were growing up and I think there is some correlation because practice, like gaming, is addictive - when you practise more, you make more progress and it becomes more enjoyable - but you can only practise if you have enough time in the day to do so.

You seem to be confusing two issues here.

Your initial post seemed to state as an absolute known fact that playing computer games is directly causal in reducing the ability of a child to (as you put it) "learn difficult technical skills".

Where is your evidence of this? Video games have been around for 30 years or more and, especially since the home computer boom of the early 80s, each successive generation of children have had the latest and greatest technology to distract them. If what you say had any substance, we would have millions of people in their 30s and 40s who were completely feeble at achieving anything in life. I'm not sure this is actually the case.

If we take a broader view of your initial post and your followups and see that you actually meant to say that children who don't practice are slow learners - then we can all obviously agree with that. This has probably been the case ever since an Ancient Egyptian decided to build some kind of rudimentary stringed or wind instrument. In this case, what you say is hardly breaking news.

It is the case that some parents will encourage their children to practice and others will not. I submit that the issue at hand is how teachers can effectively persuade those parents to take more interest in their children and their music, rather than using the TV/video game/etc/etc as an automated babysitter. This is surely part of the teacher's job and I would hope that many teachers have the skills to be able to do this to some extent.

It's all food for thought, Violinia, and I am grateful to you for starting this discussion. Where we disagree I think is in the emphasis of your original post.

No, I don't think there's any connection at all. My 15 year old son is an extensive reader of what I regard as very grown up and difficult books but also spends a lot of time catching up on missed TV programmes on the computer. My daughter is more like me. I grew up in the 60s. I love books, but am not always keen to actually read them, and was very like her as a child. I went through phases of avid reading, but more usually got books out of the library only to return them unread. When I was small I went out to play rather than sit and read. I suppose that was my socialising, whereas hers is computer based. As I got older I preferred to grapple with my homework, rather than read, and watched Norman Wisdom on TV for relaxation... I do regret not being better read, but it's still not my form of relaxation of choice.

In the 60s, as now, all children were different. My daughter, incidentally, writes extremely well (in my opinion), and I have a job that involves lots of writing.. so we non-readers are not entirely doomed..

i don't know about that. while it's true of some games, the majority of modern games (at least in terms of number of players) seem to be "twitch" games where the ability to press the right button in 1/100th of a second is enough to win; no need to turn your brain on!

i think this is something that's gotten worse recently... until the mid-late 90s, the technology was still primitive enough that games like that tended to be quite uninteresting; unless there was some element of strategy that required the player to actually think, they'd get bored pretty quickly.

nowadays, FPS games are realistic enough that you can ditch the thinking element and still end up with a popular game.

Not at all. A good game is a good game, regardless of era. I fondly remember playing many classic early-80s arcade games for hours on end (well, until my 10p pieces ran out). Many of them were not that strategic.


The FPS genre is just one (albeit a large) segment of the market. Many of them are strategic. If you want to get a long way into games like these, you have to think your way to success, develop strategies and adapt to the increasingly-subtle "AI" (as well as having a fast trigger thumb, of course).

I don’t really know if computer games affect children’s ability to do other things – either positively or negatively but I do believe in the saying « moderation in all things » (well, I believe it moderately, anyway)

I think one of the problems with musical notation is that it doesn’t take a child long to find you can cheat on notation. You can play your pieces by ear, by memorising fingering, by memorising the pattern of key depression or by sheer muscular melody. You don’t need to struggle with this frighfully boring thing called learn to read music and your teacher will never know you are cheating.

In the early days of my teaching I got nicely fooled. I am less innocent now. I don’t want to open up yet another argument about the pros and cons of reading and not reading notation. All I know is that those of my pupils who found reading difficult were not necessarily good at playing from memory or by ear.
And those who found reading music relatively easy romped through far more pieces and got more satisfaction out of their music.

The inadequacies of my own teaching have shown up over the years in that many of my pupils have not, in fact, been as good at sight reading as I would have liked. I have yet to come up with a really satisfactory solution for the older beginner or someone who is coming back to music but I now pay far much more attention to reading with my younger beginners. I try to keep early pieces well within their reading range and I try to make the learning of reading music an enjoyable activity – the usual things we all do – games, flash cards etc. I think you very often have to do lots of work at the same level and really reinforce before progressing to something more difficult to read. But the context has to be varied. When I was at college they used to call it « over learning. » The same ‘over learning » principle applies to the learning of vocabulary in a foreign language. My little French pupils will assure me they have learnt a word that they can’t remember and tell me that they do know it really - because they knew it last week.

I think that it's quite often a by product of learning an instrument having the same sort of priority as a lot of other activities. It's something that the child does because they like it well enough to go to once a week rather than the lessons being the result of a real desire to learn to play the instrument. In these cases it's hardly unexpected that practice will not be taken seriously or seen as a necessity and the interest my not be sufficient to make things like reading notation stick.
I think that as teachers we make the decision whether to accept this and hope that a real interest and increase in effort between lessons will result as long as the child enjoys what they are doing or to part company where we are not satisfied with the level of commitment

My own approach is to stick with it if they and the parents feel that the child is getting something from it but to ask from time to time if they are sure they do want to continue when progress is very slow due to lack of practice. I usually do this at least when we are coming to the end of a book before the outlay of more music is made. I also try to give suggestions of how practice may be fitted into the week and also quite specific instructions on what and how to practice along with trying to get an agreement on a minimum which is acceptable to both parties.

The converse is also true. From the ages of about 9 to 14, most weeks the only thing I practised between lessons (both piano and violin) were scales because I had to play them from memory. I was an excellent sight-reader and knew that I could turn up to my lesson and just sight-read through the pieces. My teachers never asked me to sight-read a new piece in a lesson so had never realised quite how good I was at it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have no memory of having learnt to read music (either treble or bass clef) - I feel it is something I have always known how to do.

I have recently joined a departmental (county) wind band in which there is another oboist. It turns out that despite living some 50km apart we have the same teacher. She is about my age, like me she started the oboe as an adult (having previously played another instrument as a child) and has been learning the oboe for about the same length of time but has very poor sight-reading skills. She was fascinated by my sight-reading ability and kept asking me how I learnt to do it, to which I can't give an answer.

She then went to her next lesson and told our teacher she wanted to be able to sight-read like me. She told me that our teacher said my sight-reading was "impressive" that it was something I must have worked at in England, where they obviously have a better way of teaching it than in France but did suggest various ways she could work on hers. At my next lesson our teacher said he felt he ought to thank me for finally convincing the other woman that sight-reading was something a pupil could learn to do and not something reserved for professionals!

My daughter's clarinet teacher maintains that the British are the best sight-readers in Europe! I've no idea if he has any scientific basis for this. Certainly, his explanation as to why this is so doesn't seem lvery likely to me. All to do with poor funding for the arts in the UK, apparently !

The British are reputed to be good sight readers, which in a professional orchestral sense is a self-fulfilling prophecy. British orchestras will expect good sight reading skills from people that they audition and so only employ good sight readers. It doesn't necessarily mean that we are actually better on average though that's possible.

I was a reasonably sight reader as a child (and a very quick reader of English which might be a similar skill) and had a somewhat similar attitude to practice that kerioboe described especially on the piano. Unfortunately I wasn't quite good enough to pull the wool over anyone's eyes for a prolonged period.

I guess if you find reading notation difficult you will avoid doing it, similarly if you find it easy then you'll exploit that when you can. Sometimes more productively than others.

I agree that we need to teach our kids how to prioritise their time. My girls do all their music practice in the morning before school, half an hour per instrument, which has just started to become to little for the elder one so she often practices at school as well, but with the exception of music lesson and swimming nights when they get home from school their time is their own, provided homework is done first - and actually because there are 2 of them they will often play games or read rather than get the wii out. (although I do often come out of my lessons to find apple cores everywhere and them lounging on the sofa watching the simpsons) Consequently they are both good music readers - because they practice doing it, even in the early days when it wasn't particularly natural.

As for the comment that computer games were around in the 80's yes they were, I was a teenager and had my ZX spectrum, but didn't have a copious supply of 10p's to waste at the arcade, and the spectrum took at least 10 minutes to get any game to load - by which time I had often started reading a book or playing the piano. The games back then weren't so instantaneous although I still spent more than my fair share of time on them it was never at the expense of music or reading which it increasingly seems to be today, and these days what I considered alot back then they consider hardly any - some of my students seem to think they've done really well if they've managed 10 minutes music practice 4 days running.

QUOTE from Aquarelle : The inadequacies of my own teaching have shown up over the years in that many of my pupils have not, in fact, been as good at sight reading as I would have liked.

This is what bothers me.

It's obvious that those who don't practise at all will be poor sight-readers/ poor players. But I have quite a few pupils who play a reasonable standard, enjoy piano - and still have lousy sight-reading.

I obviously worry that it's my fault. Yet I've always made it a priority - right from the beginning, lots of repetition, flash cards, specific books, all the obvious ideas that have been mooted on this site.

Most books focus heavily on rhythm (assuming that note reading is easy after the early levels ?). But I'm not sure.

Yesterday, for instance, a Grade 5 merit student with about 7 years of piano was sight-reading a piece of Clementi - it wasn't bad for the notes roughly under the hand but twice he couldn't read LH G-D-G - the octave plus a note, or arpeggio missing a note, or however you want to think of it (it was in C major). How difficult can this be ?

I should add that we do a small but consistent work on scales, chords, arpeggios etc. (and not just those in the exam syllabus) where they all get very good marks and some theory (above boy is Grade 4) so what am I doing wrong ? Or is it that computer games/modern schooling methods are frying their brains ? (I doubt it somehow).

I know that in some other European countries there seems little emphasis put on sight reading and scales. I remember a prominent British brass player visiting Norway when I lived there and being astonished that the music students in the Conservatoire weren't used to either playing scales or sight reading!

I think that for those who find it hard, it just takes much (as in much, much, much ) longer than we think it will take.

Son found it hard to read fast and accurately, both in text and in music. I can say that effort pays off, but it takes AGES. Five years would be my first guess...maybe less if pupil has not lost faith in his or her own ability to actually get there in the end.

With both text and music, it was hard to find one big cause or a magic button to fix it (he does have a small problem with visual tracking). In both cases, he was highly motivated by the subject material, and would read and process quite sophisticated material when it was presented accessibly. (In reading text, that meant things like smaller chunks of text, broken up with visual cues such as headings or illustrations, don't quite know how that would work with music...).

With reading, people talk about "chunking", and I suspect that if you could spend enough time on it (or persuade parents to help), the same approach would work with music. For example, it wasn't really a matter of familiarity - he was just as likely to misread the "A" bang in the middle of the treble clef as a note with several ledger lines.

I think flash cards work best - practicing identifiying individual notes in a piece he was playing was always humiliating, because his teachers (and I!) literally couldn't believe that he couldn't identify the note, so he would panic and give totally illogical answers, whereas drilling with flash-cards in an attempt to "improve your speed, dear" is respectable and acceptable.

As for chunking - I used to get him to go through and identify certain patterns of intervals (even if the "run" started on a different note) or certain chords or motifs, and color them in...I don't think this made him a secure sight reader, but it did increase the amount of information he got from reading music (and maybe quite a lot of sightreaders get a surprising amount of information from their reading, it just stops short of fluent sightreading).

However, in terms of actually scanning and processing, I think that his violin teacher's insisting that he identify and mark off phrases or sections for intensive practice actually helped his sightreading - helped him to figure out "how far" ahead to scan, maybe?

If there's any magic solution, be sure and let me know before you make your millions marketing it, please!

It's obvious that those who don't practise at all will be poor sight-readers/ poor players

I'm not sure. I think some of the poor practisers get by on good sight-reading skills. It was certainly true of me when I was growing up. Conversely some of my best practisers / progressers are not the best sight readers.

Yes, the late, lamented carol*piano was probably a good example of this kind of beast...

Now to go Off Topic:

I am interested though in what we can actually define as 'sight reading'. Give me a (say) gr8-level piece of piano music which is written in a historical style and not in a massively remote key - then I can give it a good bash at sight. Give me a (say) gr5-level piece of piano music written in an avant-garde (or just plain awkward) style then I struggle.

This is because I have a knack of knowing what should come next and can therefore anticipate harmonically/rhythmically what is to come on the page (in the historical style) and therefore produce a reasonable interpretation of the piece. With the avant-garde/awkward stuff, this anticipation doesn't work and therefore I fall down because I can't read ahead and assimilate what is to come.

Can I therefore 'sight read' in the true sense of the word, or am I just good at busking when I am in sympathy with the idiom?...

*cough* excuse me!


As someone who sight reads all the time (mainly because I am too lazy to practise), I would say busking along with the idiom is a perfectly valid way to do it - most of the things I play are a special "carol*piano" version of whatever it is. I like to think my arrangement is sometimes better than the original...

Confutatis, I know what you mean exactly.

I busk my way through a vast range of music very respectably (and, yes, at the expense of proper practise) but the style that I find easiest is baroque/ classical music - I really cannot understand how one can play for years and not get the gist of a Mozart Sonata in F major at first go. (I emphasise gist - I'm not making any claims over and above that).

(N.B. this certainly counts as sight-reading - you're almost certainly pretty good at the funky stuff too but don't think so because you know it's not as good as the other).

And it's this discovery (that none of my students can do this, on a far simpler level) that has lead me this term to drop the sight-reading books which seem to emphasise rhythm and, quite early on, difficult key signatures. Instead we're spending a term sight-reading Minuets, Rondos, Airs - all nice little tunes in G major or whatever, in 3/4 or 4/4, with lots of tonic chords, basic scale passages etc.etc.

Because it strikes me that nowadays the variety of music our children play is infinitely broader than what most of us had as children (and that's great) but obviously this means that they have far less exposure to the Bach/Mozart fodder that I grew up on (and enjoyed). So maybe the basic shapes and patterns are far more difficult to recognise.

Anyway, I'm going to give it a go for a term and then do a rain-check - maybe if we do enough the students will get better at 'anticipating' what's coming, but then again . . .

Emsoboe has always been good at sight reading and doesn't have difficulty with it even on Piano which she generally finds harder than woodwind. Stragely I don't think she has ever been taught sight reading and none of her teachers practice it with her (don't think they ever have).

I think this has come about because from day one she was playing pieces in her tutor book and other books just for fun. It wasn't simply a case of having the book recommended by the teacher, she had several books at the same level and dipped in and out of them. I appreciate for Piano pupils it might be more difficult to do this and her skills on this instrument wouldn't be as strong if she hadn't already been playing woodwind.

I guess most people would agree that playing in ensembles will also help with sight reading which is something single instrument pianists will not have much opportunity for.

Oh yes, I quite agree that the converse is also true. One of my pupils went on to become a quite well known professional tenor and when we met up again years later said "Did you know I never practised the piano?" For some unaccountable reason he was an excellent sight reader - it was certainly not as a result of my teaching. I did actually have a strong suspicion that he didn't practise much - but since he was such a natural and seemed more than happy with his music I left it at that. One of those "he knows that she probably knows that he knows that she knows ......" situations!

Our experience is similar to notmusimum's. My daughter - also a good sight reader -started learning the piano about 10 months ago after several years of learning cello, recorder, and clarinet. Her piano teacher is the first of her teachers ever to ask her to work through an "Improve Your Sight Reading Book". I have the impression that's because it's what the teacher usually does, and because my daughter has an exam coming up, rather than because her piano sight reading is bad. None of her other teachers has ever taught her to do it; she has just learnt by playing pieces, going to orchestra etc. I am curious as to just how one teaches sight reading, but I suppose it can be done, just like with reading words

I remember being taught how to approach sight reading a piece. Scan the bigger picture noting major accidentals, key changes, etc. Then realise when stuff is a scale run or an arpeggio and pick up any obvious rhythmic patterns.

I'm pretty certain this assumes actual decoding is in place, which I think is pretty much down to drill and recall. My decoding abilities in the tenor clef are still extremely slow, although I can work it out given enough time, I can't sightread in the tenor clef, but can sight read to a greater or lesser extent in alto, treble and bass clefs (some better than others).



I think that in modern/contemporary music it's extremely helpful to have a really good recognition/understanding of intervals as I'd agree that the key to fluent sightreading is knowing roughly what you expect it to sound like before you play the specific notes. Compared to the viola, on the oboe - where I associate more strongly notes with specific key combinations - I think it's slightly easier to sight read modern music. I'm less likely to play the wrong note without realising, but the intonation is still rubbish. On the viola, when I sightread some early 20th C music recently, I struggled to hit the right note at all in some of the (req) position shifts and couldn't tell that there was a problem - my recognition of intervals from score is clearly not great.

Completely agree with Notmusimum that the best way is to do it yourself by dipping in and out of a variety of books (how I did it too).

Sight-reading method books seem to be new-ish inventions, I remember the sample books but not methods.

The problem is, obviously, what to do for kids who don't do it that way at home.

My push last term was that the children didn't have enough music - music is pretty expensive in France (about 20 euros for your average book). So I sent all my pupils' parents details of good websites that have free to download music which is the perfect standard, nicely laid out etc.etc. Only one out of a dozen bothered.

So I'm now back at square one, having tried the specific books, tried very hard to encourage more playing by themselves for the pleasure from other pieces (not to mention various other things). Now, as I said, it's a push on baroque music for recognising patterns - doubt this will be the magic answer but you never know.

Isn't this making it all a bit complicated? Surely the best thing is to explore as much music as possible at verious levels. I think Halka touched on the multi-instrumentalist aspect of aiding sight reading. I suppose the more instruments you play the larger repertoire, variety and style of music you come into contact with, the easier sight reading becomes.

I wonder if Teachers could do some sort of book share where each parent buys two books. The first one is a tutor to be used in lessons and the second for fun. If parents are asked to buy different books of similar value the second books could be passed round on some basis.

[quote name='notmusimum' date='Feb 10 2009, 02:13 PM' post='790449']
[quote name='plonkee' post='790395' date='Feb 10 2009, 12:55 PM']
[
Isn't this making it all a bit complicated? Surely the best thing is to explore as much music as possible at verious levels. I think Halka touched on the multi-instrumentalist aspect of aiding sight reading. I suppose the more instruments you play the larger repertoire, variety and style of music you come into contact with, the easier sight reading becomes.

I wonder if Teachers could do some sort of book share where each parent buys two books. The first one is a tutor to be used in lessons and the second for fun. If parents are asked to buy different books of similar value the second books could be passed round on some basis.
[/quote]


In about November I sent out a list of suggested 'fun' repertoire for my pupils that their parents might like to get for their offspring for Christmas. I highlighted the ones that each pupil would be able to manage and put an estimated Grade by each book. Many parents really thanked me for this. When Granny said 'What can I get them for Christmas?' one parent gave them the list!!! Many got these books in their stockings..... many told me 'What a good idea'. These books are great for sight reading..... the rhythms in Junior Guest Spot Abba are well worth exploring. There are changes of time signatures in Disney tunes. There are lots of triplets in Take the Lead Bumper Pack (star wars for example). For those that don't like Abba, there's Junior Guest Spot Beatles. There are Making the Grade books.... which have some good accidentals and some Pavane's and Sarabandes mixed in with Any dream will do (good for a bit of an explanation about different periods of music history). There are Guest Spot books for more advanced pupils etc..... Harry Potter etc . Not all of the parents bought these books... but many did and I've been careful to incorporate this music into their lesson plans. I'll write a list for parents again.

It's not necessarily complicated if you've been taught to look for patterns in music from the start.
This is how I approach new pieces from the start when I'm teaching. We look for patterns and for same bits before playing.
Even noticing a few things can help and how much you pick up on scanning the music will depend no your experience of what you've payed before.

Having said that I can see these useful things but getting my fingers in the right place at the right time is another thing. Not sure if it's a good or bad thing that at least I know when I don't manage to get it right?

I'm really struggling with a 15 year old student who thinks the same! This has been going on for quite some time and I can usually react in a fairly good humoured way, but last week he started the lesson by telling me that he thought Top Cat would be much better if was played 'his way' and started to show me what he meant.
I was perhaps not in the right mood for this (and he was my last student of the day, so I was feeling a bit weary) and my reaction was to take the piece away. I know I could have handled it better - much better - but I'd just had enough of his 'I know better than the composer' attitude!!

I agree that it is extremely annoying in that kind of situation.
I'm a piano teacher and accompanist though and often my arrangement, especially of pop songs where they seem to put no thought at all into whether the arrangement is pianistic or not really is better!

Have you tried accepting that they like playing around with the music but then asking that it's first played as written?

I was never taught to do what plonkee describes but if I think about it, it is what I do. I certainly don't "read" all the notes individually in a scale run, for example, and this is why I think it is easier to have the flats/sharps in the key signature rather than as accidentals since with accidentals you do have to process each note individually.

I also think sight-reading requires heightened concentration - my second attempt is often not as good as my first.


When I was a child I used to talk my mother into buying piano music from jumble sales. I was initially fascinated by the old covers but then once I'd got them home played through the pieces. I never took these to my lessons, in fact, I don't think I even told my teacher I had them.

These days e-bay is a great source of very cheap second-hand music.

Yes, I've tried all sorts of things. His problem has always been that he doesn't read carefully enough and just plays what he thinks he's read. We've talked about this a lot and I've been very patient and made him slow things right down to make sure he plays what's written. That usually works. But it's when he says that he likes his version better (as with Top Cat) that I start to get annoyed. He's a really nice boy and I'm a very kind, patient teacher, so I don't like getting annoyed! Even my husband occasionally asks about this boy and if he still thinks he knows better than the composer.

Re insisting on playing their own, 'better' version, I have one like this (in fact, several but one in particular who bugs me).

I have a strict 'turn-taking' rule - like kids sharing in the sand-pit - once his way, once my way, once his way, once mine.

He's only 9 so it seems to work (although I find it frustrating).

My other main offender never used to do it (although she's always messed around with the music a bit and that's not a problem, in fact, I rather like it - shows signs of originality). But now she's hit secondary school in a MAJOR way, she's asserting herself - which is fine and normal - but only up to a point. I 'get my way' in the end but it is rather trying.

I'll reserve opinion till I see some proof. What I do know is being absolutely amazed my first few months in our italian wind band when, every time our conductor brought new pieces to try, everybody played them perfectly.

What made it worse was that I honestly thought I was a very good sight reader.

Steve