Reading music - when does it start to come together on sight?

[maggiethecat]

Dd is 6.5 yo and has been playing violin since she was 5. She's enjoying it atm and recently started playing ABRSM grade 2 pieces. Yesterday she was playing Rigaudon and although she was producing the right notes and her timing was ok it wasn't until I played the cd that accompanied the book that it clicked and sounded as it should. She was pleasantly surprised at how the piece sounded after listening to the cd which was very different from before.
My question is - does it take years of playing for a child to play pieces on sight reading that sound similar to the way they should without first listening to the piece played?
Is this analagous to developing literary fluency?

I'm not sure - but think it may depend on the instrument. I started clarinet at age 9 and piano at 10, but always found sightreading on the clarinet far easier - just because there was only one line of music I think. 6.5 is still quite young, so it will probably click at some point.

I'm sure it will in time but the vast difference before and after listening to the cd made me wonder if her rhythm was way off!

TBH I don't remember not being able to read music but even now after 20 years of learning instruments I can rarely play a piece perfectly on sight, although I will typically get 80 or 90% first time. That applies even for relatively easy pieces which are unknown because each symbol contains a huge amount of info to assimilate without any point if reference. It is like literacy fluency- you start to recognise patterns and building blocks and then you can work things out relative to what's around them.

Seeing and hearing is an important part of reading music and encourage her to listen to music and follow it on the score without the intention of playing it by ear (useful but not what we're talking about here) just so she can recognise how certian groups of notes and rhythms should sound. Often people either get the notes and pick up the rhythm later or the rhythm and perfect the notes later. I confess to being the former type as your daughter might be.

There's also a big difference between sight reading where you play through the piece and are expected to get it right first time and playing through a piece fir the first time. A piece designed for a sight reading test will often be simpler in terms of notes or rhythm than a piece that needs to be learnt for a lesson. I think what I'm trying to get at is that sight reading and being able to read music are actually different things and some people never pick up sight reading skills yet can read music perfectly well.

Sight singing is also great for readibg music because you don't have to worry about placing your fingers anywhere - you focus on your voice and the relationships between notes.

DD is slightly older (just turned 9) and a bit more advanced in terms of grade (4/5) but still benefits from hearing a piece played before she tackles it herself. I think it's partly to do with putting in expression (not just the dynamics, but a bit of feeling). Her violin teacher has recently been getting her to play the same piece (rhythm and notes) but alter the mood and DD has been quite amazed by how different a piece can be made to sound.

Frakkin I thought I was following you until I re-read it. Are you saying that there is a specific term called sight reading that is applied to exam purposes which is different from reading music which incorporated more than just rhythm and note identification but includes picking up patterns etc and drawing on knowledge base?
I find it all interesting, trying to work out how the music learning process works.
I remember her teacher saying to her once that she should have a quick broad look at the music before she starts to play to get a feel of any rhythm pattern and the type of notes in general (on top of working out accidentals, dynamics etc - I know now why I don't play an instument!)
Her first teacher used to get her to sing a piece ...do, re, me etc (and even handmovents of Kodaly) and used to get her to clap a rhythm - all before starting to play.
Sadly she does not have that teacher anymore but it may be something that we could do practising at home now and again.

Thanks Maria. The strange thing is that she used to play very intuitively and with nice feeling until she started to pay attention to the dynamics!

It will all come together and at the moment I find it all fascinating.

Erm sort of.

There is sightreading as a skill for an exam - you do a test where they give you a piece of music and you have to play it as accurately as possible first time, start to finish, with the right notes, rhythm and dynamics. Some people never get this skills.

Then there is playing through a more difficult piece that you will be working on 'at sight'. Some people try to cram everything in. Some work out the notes and approximate the rhythm and dynamics, some get the rhythm.... This is the actual skill of reading music and producing something from it but the first time you do it you are, by definition, sight-reading.

It's the same skill - the difference is in the relative complexity of the piece and the result anticipated.

The first teacher had an excellent approach IMO and your DD would benefit from that purely in terms of aural training and general musicianship from doing that at home. And the teacher is entirely right that scanning the piece before playing helps identify repeating patterns and the structure of the piece. Some start slow and simple but get v complicated (the page looks black!) but if you haven't looked through you go galloping off, run into difficulties and have to slow down so the piece sounds nothing like it should because the contrast in rhythm isn't there.

Basically when people refer to sight-reading they often think of the exam version, where you play it perfectly first time, and not the actual seeing-it-for-the-first-time sight reading and therefore have slightly unrealistic expectations of how good a first play through should be.

Does that make more sense?

aahhh!!! I see what you mean. It helps to understand what she might be going through - thank you.

I think even very experienced musicians practice a piece many times to get it to sound right musically (as opposed to technically) even though they are capable of playing the notes and rhythm right first time. The sight reading bit of the exam will be a couple of lines of quite basic music when compared to the grade pieces. My DD can now sight read violin music ie get notes and rhythm right pretty much first time for a piece at her standard (grade 4) but still prefers to play the piano by ear - finds sight reading much harder - two lines to focus on and two hands doing different things. Her school prefer them to start the piano later than other instruments for that very reason

Sight reading practice for exams is not her favourite but usually once she gets stuck in she's ok.

I have a lot of respect for people who play -the amount of mental and physical co-ordination seems enormous!

Welcome! Hearing a piece always makes it easier to play musically - I always liked to listen to a couple of recordings before attempting a concerto. It's easier to get the 'feel' for something, rather than just learning the notes and rhythm, when you've heard it.