How to sight-read

Hope you've all had the break you hoped for! I spent most of it asleep, and most of the rest of the time playing World of Warcraft, but that suited me just fine :-) I'm back at work on Monday, so no doubt the sleeplessness will return, but for the moment I'm quite mellow. I'm supposed to be doing schoolwork right now, in readiness for Monday, but I seem to have found lots of other more urgent things to do instead, and blogging is one of them!

I'm not sure what made me think of this last night, but a while ago I promised to give you all some tips for improving your sight-reading. So, I've just jotted a few down. Please don't think I'm saying you're all rubbish at it - I'm not! - but it's something I'm pretty good at, so I'm just trying to help the people who say they can't do it at all.

The first thing to say in regard to sight-reading is: Please don’t be one of those people! By which I mean someone that says “I can’t sight-read, I’ll never be able to sight-read, so there’s no point me trying to do anything about it, and in any case even if I did want to, I’m too old and it’ll take too long.” It’s true that getting to the stage of being able to sight-read perfectly will take some time (although probably not as long as you’d expect, if you try hard enough)... but if you think you currently can’t do it at all, then surely any improvement would be a good thing?

Some of these tips are ones you can follow instantly; others require some degree of preparation. Of course, you don't have to follow all the tips - just doing any ONE of them will help. Maybe you could make it a new year's resolution to try a new one each month? :p I should also point out that Jamie regularly gives general sight-reading hints, and they're always good ones - I include some of them here. So, if he gives another one, listen to him!

Hints for improving your sight-reading

1. Sight-read EVERY CHANCE YOU GET, and make as many opportunities to do so as you can. I don't believe it's possible to improve your sight-reading without ACTUALLY SIGHT-READING. A LOT.

2. As part of this, you HAVE to embrace the "loud and wrong" philosophy. By which I mean "sing SOMETHING, even if you're not sure it's right". Only by doing this will you increase the proportion of times when it IS right, because you'll soon realise when you're wrong, and you will automatically start to self-correct. No conductor worth his salt minds hearing wrong notes when people are sight-reading. (In performance is a different matter!) I really can't stress this one enough - until you start doing this, there isn't much point worrying about any other aspect of sight-reading.

3. Sing on the beat, whatever happens - you have to regard watching the conductor as more vital than getting the notes right. Seriously. Now, this may seem a bit odd, but think about it - if lots of people don't sing on the beat, the resulting sound is just a mush, in which no-one can hear the harmony, because there ISN'T any harmony for large parts of the time. And, as you'll see from later hints, being able to hear the harmony and relate your own part to it is key (hee! you see what I did there?) to being able to sing the right notes. Also, if no-one sings on the beat, the rhythm is nonexistent, making it really difficult for people who struggle with rhythms to work out where the notes fit. But now, just imagine for a second a scenario in which half the choir are singing the wrong notes, and half are singing the right notes - but this time everyone is singing ON THE BEAT. Well, first of all, which half are singing the right notes? Probably the confident half! So they'll be louder than the "wrong" half. And because everyone is singing on the beat, two things are now possible: 1. Those (of the "wrong" half) who are listening can now hear the harmony quite clearly, AND they can hear, much more clearly, the people on their own part who ARE singing the right thing. Both of these aspects will help them self-correct. 2. The *conductor* can now hear exactly where the problems are, and can solve them very quickly.

4. When you are given a new piece of music, go through your part BEFORE STARTING TO SING IT. (I'm always amazed that most people seem not to do this!) Go through every page and mark which line you're singing. Look to see where you'll get notes from (see later). Mark VSs (i.e. pages where you have a long rest at the end but sing again at the start of the next page). Put a ring round anything else that you think might be a potential stumbling block - e.g. speed changes, time signature changes, new key signatures, etc. Note: there's almost always time to do this while you're waiting for the rehearsal to start, even if you've only just been given the music. (Because, invariably, the rehearsal starts late when music's being given out!)

5. When you're looking through your line, try to hear the notes in your head - don't hum (or try them out on the piano, if you're near one at the time). If you always rely on external sounds, your inner sight-reading machine won't develop as quickly. (And if you hum during a rehearsal when you're supposed to be being silent, it's incredibly offputting for other people.) You need to develop the skill of pitching a note in your head so that you can come in confidently after a silent bar.

6. When you're actually singing, LOOK AHEAD all the time. Turn pages earlier than you might previously have been used to. You should NEVER still be looking at any page while singing the last note on it - you should have got that note into your short-term memory and turned the page to see what's coming. The only exception to this is when you know (because you've gone through your part and WRITTEN IT IN) that you have a rest on the next page, AND you've been told not to turn. (If you've NOT been told not to turn, I think you should turn anyway, just to keep in the habit.) What about if you've been told not to turn, yet you don't have a rest over the page? Then you have to memorize a bit more of the page leading to the turn, and turn EARLIER.

7. Also while singing, keep looking at the other parts - and the accompaniment - and work out from this where to get your notes from, and how your part fits in with the others. This helps much more than you might expect. For example, often the basses have trouble getting a particular note, yet on many of these occasions the altos - who sit right next to them and invariably get stuff right :p - have just sung the same note. It's obviously harder if the clefs are different - but not impossible, particularly if you make a habit of looking so you get used to it!

8. Try and do everything - don't ignore the words or dynamics just because you're sight-reading. Now, I know lots of people refuse to even try this, and I know it does make things harder in the short-term... but trust me, if you MAKE yourself try this, it really improves your sight-reading, and it does get easier.

Now, all of the above are things that you can do immediately, at the very next rehearsal, with no preparation. They're also all fairly general hints. The last four, though, are specifically about how to sing the right notes, but they may take some work on your own.

9. Be really, really familiar with all keys (major and minor) and know how to recognise what key you're in (not just from the key signature - if the music modulates temporarily but doesn't change key signature, it will really help your sight-reading if you can spot this). By "familiar", I mean: know what key you're in, and know which note of its scale you are singing (e.g. if the key is F Major and you're singing an A, it's the 3rd). This is vital if step 10 is to work. It’s also incredibly helpful for tuning purposes - you will, I’m sure, be aware that, in relation to the 1st note of the scale, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 generally need to be tuned higher than you think, and 4 generally needs to be lower. (That’s in a major scale - in a minor scale, 3 and 6 are low as well. Why? Because of the pattern of tones and semitones. Tones need to be wider than you think; semitones need to be smaller than you think.) If you’re familiar with what number in the scale any note is, you’ll automatically be able to sing in tune more often! Now, all this may sound impossible if you've never had theory lessons, but most of you HAVE had theory lessons, and this stuff is easily learned if so. And if not... well, you have something to aim for!

10. Be able to sing any degree of a scale, having heard the tonic chord. So if I played you an F major chord (without telling you what chord it was), and asked you to sing the 3rd of the scale, you could sing an A without necessarily knowing it was an A. The Kodaly sol-fa exercises that Jamie does from time to time (you know, with the hand signals) are brilliant for practising this skill, although, sadly, I get the impression that most people can't see the relevance. But I had a lesson every week on the Kodaly method when I was at school, and I'm pretty sure that's why I can sight-read. Most of you weren't lucky enough to go to the same school as I did, so I'm afraid I've got quite a big headstart on the practice of this skill. The unfortunate part is that it's hard to practise it on your own - you need some way of knowing when you're right and when you're not. There are ways round this, but maybe the best solution, at least temporarily, is to hope that Jamie does more of his hand-signal exercises! Actually, another relevant exercise that he does sometimes - but not as often as I'd like - is the "choral chords" one. You know, where he plays a G major chord and says "sing any note of this G major chord", and then directs us, as a choir, to sing C major, D major etc. In order to do this, you have to (a) know what the three notes in the chord are (you do know that the notes in any chord are the 1st, 3rd and 5th of the scale, right?); (b) know which of them you're singing; (c) know what the three notes in the next chord are; (d) know which one is nearest to the one you're currently singing, and how to get to it. You can see how this will help you practise the skill of being able to sing any degree of any scale, I hope.

11. Step 10 is FAR more help with sight-reading than being able to sing intervals. If you base your sight-reading on being able to accurately sing the interval from one note to the next, as so many people do (including most of the ones who claim not to be able to sight-read very well - funny, that...), you have to do a mental calculation on EVERY NOTE in order to work out the interval to the next one. If you look at the music in terms of what key it's in, though, you notice that many degrees of the scale (e.g. the 1st and the 5th) come up quite often, and they're easy to sing, so you find that you can automatically sing half the page without thinking very much about it. However, occasionally you get a modern atonal piece, and in these cases you have to use step 10, which is to know your intervals. Note that even in an atonal piece, short sections are quite often fairly tonal (i.e. in a key), so if you can work out what key you're in for those few bars, step 10 still applies. But if you have to use the interval method (which is very rare), practice will help. I did a list of these a few years ago - you may find it useful if you haven't seen such a list before.

12. I should probably mention something about how to sing the right rhythms. The thing is that generally people DO sing the right rhythms, I think, but they're less good at singing them in exactly the right place! The solution to this is to ALWAYS relate everything to which beat of the bar it's on... and always KNOW which beat of the bar the music has reached at any given moment! Once you can do these two things without thinking, rhythms become much easier. But never be ashamed of having to write in the beats of the bar (probably not in EVERY bar, but in tricky ones) in order to see more easily how the rhythm fits in with the beats. I also find it useful, in bars with lots of notes or notes in unexpected places, to divide the beats up with vertical lines. (And in pieces like Belshazzar where there are sections with dotted barlines, so that each mini-bar acts as one beat of the maxi-bar, I find it invaluable to (a) make the non-dotted barlines much clearer by extending them; and (b) write the beats in over the mini-bars.) Also, if you have trouble following certain conductors, remember that however the conductor beats, the downbeat is usually clearest, so if you get temporarily lost you know you can join in again on his next downbeat. Oh, and one final tip: If there's a section of music in which the beat is hard to follow (because of offbeat accents or no accents at all etc.), watch the conductor like a hawk (obviously), but also count out the bars with your finger (while watching the conductor - you don't actually need to look at the music to do this, you'll find), tapping on a new bar every time the conductor does a downbeat. I have often needed to do this - the example that springs to mind is the page of Belshazzar leading up to "Then sing, sing aloud", where if you listen to the orchestra you have no idea where the downbeats are. Many times when I've sung this, using my ignore-the-orchestra-and-count-the-bars method, I've been the only one to come in correctly at the bottom of the page :p

---

Right. There you are. That was much longer than I intended it to be! Hope you find it useful. And if you're thinking "pfft, what a stupid way to sight-read, I'll stick to how I've always done it thank you very much"... that's fine - this is just the way *I* do it! :-)

Some links to finish. Firstly, I can't believe I totally forgot about that pillow fight in Albert Square! So I didn't see any of it. But if you didn't either, here's a slideshow of photos that some helpful person has put on Flickr.

Here's a Telegraph article about Christmas urban myths - I meant to post it when it was a little more relevant, but it's still interesting!

For some reason the Question Time Opera has hit the news this week. Why now, I have no idea, but it is also mentioned in the current Radio Times (on page 12, if you missed it) as due in "early 2007".

Slightly more alarmingly, the BBC has also announced a new reality show - not satisfied with the whole Sound of Music thing, they're looking for a cast for Joseph! Sacrilege!

Here's a blog post about the top 51 classical music blogs. I haven't looked at many of these, although there are a few I recognise (and they're on my blogroll to the right). If any of you has time on their hands, maybe you could let us all know which are the good ones from the list?

I also found this really useful site called Second Hand Songs, where you can find out which was the original version of a song.

And finally, Musicovery. It's a self-explanatory interactive web radio, and normally such things just annoy me, but this is a pretty good one. If only because of the pretty colours! Enjoy :-)

EDIT: Almost forgot... I notice that the football fixtures are still not on the official choir schedule, so until they are (I've asked!) you might want to keep an eye on my unofficial one, which is up to date AND has the fixtures on. To save you the hassle for now, you may wish to add to your official schedule the fact that these dates clash with football at Old Trafford: Wed 31 Jan, Wed 7 Feb, Sat 10 Feb, Wed 7 Mar. There are currently no clashes with City games. I'll keep checking and let you know when there's an update.