Piano Sight-Reading for Adult Beginners: Fast Learning Techniques (Level 1)

If we wanted to determine the speed at which a pianist reads written music, we would need to know how fast he or she could understand it. In a neophyte, however, the understanding of musical language is not often as immediate as it is for words. We have been taught as children to read and write letters, then to combine them into syllables, then to build words, sentences... Let's go back in our memories for a second to remember how many hours we spent at school just to learn how to write a simple sentence. The art of combining letters, syllables and words into meanings has required a lot of time for each of us to be mastered, and if we are now here reading fast as lightning hundreds and hundreds of characters in just a few seconds, it is because we became expert at understanding them. In reading a musical score, the same thing happens: it is not enough to mechanically learn by heart or to perfectly know all the elements of musical theory, but rather, we must understand the role of those elements within the context in which they are placed. This does not mean that we should sit comfortably and not practice anything we read in this handbook, but instead we must give the right space to both method and application. Let's take repetition as an example: any musician, at some point in his career, has faced the situation of having to repeat a passage over and over in order to read it better, play it better, understand it better. Now imagine repeating a hundred times a whole composition or a passage in a way that was wrong from the very beginning! We would get more harm than good. So the time alone is not enough if there is no method. Vice versa: imagine spending hours and hours reading this book without putting into practice anything written in it! Again, we would get more harm than good. Balancing method and application is not easy at all: since both are essential but cannot be cultivated at the same time, it is necessary to set priorities in order to understand when to cultivate one or the other.