Piano & Theory Teacher
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Posts tagged sight reading
The 30-Piece Challenge
Jun 7th
This past season was phase two of developing reading skills in my students. We know that students who read well will be lifelong musicians. And one factor of being able to read music well is accumulating a large number of hours reading something new. But, when we get busy preparing for performances and exams, we spend a long time working on just a few pieces. So I launched a studio-wide challenge: Could students learn 30 new pieces in a 36-week season?
This idea came from Elissa Milne’s own 40-piece challenge. Elissa is a teacher from Australia where the piano season is typically 40 weeks long. That’s one new piece of music each week. Elissa wanted her students to “learn, perform and experience far more music than our exam-focussed culture usually allows. And to do so in order for students to develop much better reading skills and much broader musicianship, which will lead our students to be more likely to play the piano for the rest of their lives (no matter what grade exam they make it to before they stop taking piano lessons.)” Well, it turns out there are many other teachers who want the same for their students. This idea was the shot that was heard around the world, if you will. It’s gone global.
The terms of the challenge: You must learn something new. Any level or length. One week to learn it to a high standard. Memory not required.
Things that counted were a new time signature, key signature, score type, time period, tempo; transpose, or create an arrangement of something.
So what happened in my studio? It blew the doors off all my expectations. Not only is it possible to learn 30 new pieces in a season, it’s possible to learn 40, 50, or 60 pieces. The highest total was 69 pieces by a level 4 student.
While the totals are very impressive, I am the most interested in the long-term skills gained during the process. Here are the big-picture results:
- my student’s sight reading skills improved dramatically
- my students loved searching through music to find a piece that contained something NEW!
- my students bravely tackled any and all new challenges
- I became reacquainted with some great music that was in my lending library
- I became acquainted with some new music that I purchased for my lending library, such as Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Canadian National Conservatory of Music’s Northern Lights series.
It was amazing. And we are going to play more – a lot more – next season!
20/20 Sight Reading
Sep 1st
Sight reading is reading an unknown score while performing the music. The skills for sight reading are different than the ones that we use for performing music that we have spent time practising. For amateur musicians sight-reading is the most significant step towards musical independence. They can keep learning and enjoying music-making even after they stop taking lessons.
Last piano season, my studio-wide goal was to develop and improve everyone’s sight reading ability. I read a lot of research papers. In November I attended an ORMTA Information Sharing Session on the topic of sight reading. [Information Sharing Sessions are a great resource for me. They are informal meetings of teachers from the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Registered Music Teachers' Association. We get together to discuss how to teach a topic and share our insights, successes, and resources.] And coincidentally, RCM released a new edition of the 4 Star Sight & Ear books in 2015.
Some things I learned:
- Sight reading relies primarily on short-term memory, while performing rehearsed repertoire relies primarily on long-term memory.
- Research confirms that a reliable predictor of sight-reading ability is sight-reading experience. The single best predictor of sight-reading achievement was the number of accumulated hours of sight-reading practice up to the age of fifteen.
- Quantity, frequency, and range of experience (solo pieces, accompanying soloists, accompanying ensembles, etc.) were factors for improvement.
- Eye movements in sight reading are not the same as in reading language. In sight reading music our eyes move left to right, right to left, vertically, and zigzag. It turns out that experts look further ahead than less skilled readers do.
- Aural imagery [the ability to imagine in your head what the music sounds like] was the strongest predictor of sight reading ability.
- Good sight readers had well-developed visual and kinesthetic imagery of the keyboard.
While I am an excellent sight reader, I needed to break down the skills for my students who are still acquiring knowledge, fine motor skills, and keyboard geography. Here are some of the things we did that worked:
- We gained experience. Nearly every student completed their 4 Star book last season. I had several contests and competitions running during the year to keep our momentum going.
- We planned ahead. Before beginning to play a sight reading piece at lessons, the student and I spent a significant amount of time preparing to play. In fact, I guided students in what to look for: patterns of scales, chords, arpeggios, rhythms. We planned and wrote in fingering for some patterns and circled any flats or sharps as indicated by the key signature.
- We worked on keeping up with the beat. Many new sight readers stop and backtrack at every mistake. One of the tenets of good sight reading is being able to keep the music flowing forwards. So, after the student had had one attempt to play the sight reading piece at a steady beat and as correctly as possible, I gave them a second turn but with a different focus - I played the piece along with the student. The goal was for the student to finish together with me by the last measure, no matter what happened or what had to be skipped over. I allowed for unlimited errors, but no additional attempts.
Item 3 had the most dramatic improvement. Item 2 was very valuable as well. Students are still acquiring knowledge and abilities. The hierarchy of things I pointed out in the music were not always the same things they focussed on.
This is just the beginning. There is so much more to come this season!
RCM Releases New Piano Syllabus
Jun 6th
The Royal Conservatory of Music has released a new piano syllabus and edition of their Celebration Series books. My students and I have been previewing the new material all week as we look ahead to next season. There are exciting changes coming.
The Repertoire contains more compositions by modern composers. An excellent selection of pieces from the masters in the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras is presented with only a few carryovers from the last edition. There are also many new selections in the Etudes books.
The number of technical items required for an exam have been reduced in order to allow for an increase in the Musicianship skills.
The 4 Star Sight & Ear books have been completely revised to contain the new requirements. For ear training, all homework questions are now available online at rcmusic.ca. The access code is included in each 4 Star book. Some highlights:
- Intervals for each grade may be asked in either direction.
- Chord identification has been updated to include augmented chords.
- Instead of identifying just cadences at the end of a short melody, students will identify the full chord progression.
- Rhythm clapback and melody playback questions have been revamped so they are both combined in the same melody, and the student will hear the melody three times. Questions are in a new selection of major and minor keys.
Sight reading has also been revamped with an emphasis on the ability to tap a steady beat while speaking, tapping, or clapping the rhythm.
As I look over the new requirements, I am pleased with how well positioned my students are to make the changeover. We already use solfege, takadimi, and many keyboard harmony principles in our lessons that go beyond the syllabus requirements My only regret is that the technical lists had to be trimmed to make room for the new musicianship skills. But, we’ll likely go beyond the syllabus requirements in that area as well in order to grow well-rounded musicians.
