Sight-Reading

I’m also spending some time learning to sight-read. Using the Allemande from the first Bach Cello suite. Since it’s for the cello, it’s in the bass clef, mostly in the octave below middle C, with occasional excursion above and below. It’s best played in concert pitch on the guitar, as opposed to an octave lower, though it could be played an octave higher.

Repeat after me: Every Good Band Deserves Fans And Cash. Those are the notes on the lines of the bass clef, starting with the ledger line below the main stave and ending with middle C(ash) one ledger line above the main stave.

I tried this a long time ago, but I struggled with the bass clef. Attempting to sight-read on the piano, which takes the “Grand Clef” (treble on top, bass below, middle C, well, in the middle) seemed to have eased reading the bass clef, partly because I spent a long time reciting the notes on the staves.

Remember running your finger under the words to help you read? Remember pronouncing a word one syllable at a time? Remember looking at a combination of letters and thinking “huh”?

All that and more. I follow the notes for a while, and then the tune drops to the bottom of the stave and I’m like “ummm, A? B? G?” Or I follow four notes but don’t finish on the E but the D. Huh? Oh! That’s an A I should be starting on, not a G.

As for playing the notes so that an actual tune emerges?

Oh. The tune? Where’s that?

The tune emerges when I play the notes without hesitation, fluently.

Ah yes, fluency. Playing the right notes in the right order isn’t enough. There’s more.

I know what it takes to read fluently: one has to read ahead and think about that, while one’s fingers are playing what one read a moment ago, because it was passed it to the complier, translated into muscle actions which were stored in short-term memory and are now being played . Which is what fluent word-readers do.

It takes a while for the brain to create that compiler, the memory, and the mechanism to take the muscle actions from memory and execute them. Building all that is what it means to “read music”.

It isn’t memorising the piece. That’s different.

This is one of those tasks that one starts and carries on despite seeming to make no progress, because I suspect that when the brain does construct the read-ahead compiler, it kicks in fast and makes all the slog worthwhile.

Talk to me in a year.