Music as language: sight playing through access to a complete musical vocabulary

American Music Teacher, June-July, 2004 by Sheryl Iott Richardson

This article was inspired by a request to be on a panel addressing the above topic for a local MTA meeting. My first concern is with what exactly we, mean by the term "sight reading"--is this something that is done only in one's mind? If someone is writing words on a chalkboard in front of you, you are probably reading along as they am writing, but you probably are not reading out loud. Would it be more aptly called "sight playing, "which involves both the mental process to see and recognize musical patterns on the page, as well as the technical means to produce those patterns on the instrument? Have you ever asked a student to "read" through a new piece and watched them sit, hands in their laps and look at the music? And, if so, do you stop and "correct" them, or do you recognize the value of that step in the process that is "sight playing"?

Have you found that your most successful sight reading experiences have occurred when you are what athletes call "in the zone . When you have the ideal combination of mental and physical awareness, at just the right intensity of each, without over thinking or undue physical or mental stress, where you are recognizing what is coming up at the perfect pace for the content of the piece and the tempo you have chosen? How can we teach this so a piece of music can be placed before our students, and they are capable of performing--not only accurately, at a consistent tempo and with good rhythm, but maybe incorporating musical elements such as indicated dynamics, articulations and possibly even a touch of musical phrasing and appropriate style?

When reading the excerpt above from Jabberwocky, we recognize that many of the words are not actually "words," yet we can read them through our knowledge of pronunciation rules, infer their meaning through the context of the sentence and paragraph, as well as enjoy the "music" of the sounds themselves. If we think about music as a language, with a syntax of recognizable patterns and structures, such comparisons acquire greater meaning.

Let's start by examining what we mean by the word "read."

If you think about teaching a child to read a book, you would recognize immediately the importance of that child having had extensive verbal experience--first a breadth of aural experience from hearing language for years, then the development of an oral vocabulary, beginning with the speaking of single words (often charmingly mispronounced), then two or three words put together and then simple sentences. We also would assume the child had been read to over many years while looking at engaging pictures, cuddled up closely to someone he or she loves and trusts, and memorizing bits of stories he or she hears over and over again.

How can we possibly hope to create the same experiences for our music students? Most of them are at least 7 or 8 years old before we meet them and may or may not have had positive, reinforced and consistent musical experiences at home. We certainly can't "speak" music to them twelve hours a day, nor will they encounter musical language with the same saturation as they do verbal, which appears throughout their daily lives--not just in books they read, but on road signs and billboards, labels on cereal boxes, homework, T-shirts and so on.

We can endeavor to create similar positive musical language experiences for our students. To do this, they need an atmosphere where they hear patterns over and over again and are allowed and encouraged to repeat them both through singing and playing on their instrument. This should be done without risk of "punishment" or humiliation if they make a mistake, until they build a vocabulary that allows them to recognize patterns they know how to perform before they ever see them in printed notation. If we develop this atmosphere, we will have created an environment and vocabulary that will develop our students into good sight players.

As I'm sure you've experienced in your own teaching, some students are able to sight read easily and well from the very beginning. Their ability to learn and recognize patterns intuitively is what allows them this. But you also know that many students are not intuitive readers and must be taught the mental and physical steps and processes required to read and perform music comfortably. This accomplishment involves two distinct, but interrelated, activities in the lesson. First, we should create musical experiences away from both printed music and the instrument itself, through the listening to and repeating of patterns. Secondly, through development of technique, which includes the obvious, such as five-finger patterns, scales and arpeggios, and chords and chord progression patterns, as well as tonal and rhythm patterns sung by the teacher and repeated by the student at the instrument, and finally progressing into learning to read and recognize patterns within the context of new pieces.

For a research project, a colleague, Debra Pajtas, examined the repertoire in two standard late-beginner/early-intermediate anthologies, the Celebration Series Level 1, published by the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and Essential Keyboard Repertoire, Volume 1, looking for the repeated occurrence of common tonal patterns. The ten most common, with the frequency of their occurrences noted below each pattern in parentheses, were: