My name is Daniel Grabois, and I am the new editor of the Pedagogy Column for Horn and More. I would like to congratulate Ab Koster on his six years of service providing this column. These are big shoes to fill!
I have been teaching horn for 33 years, in addition to performing. I am now the horn professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I began teaching in 2011 upon the retirement of Douglas Hill (more big shoes!). Before teaching at UW, I spent many years teaching at The Hartt School and at Princeton University, and I chaired the Contemporary Performance Program at the Manhattan School of Music as well.
As a performer, I’ve been a member of the Meridian Arts Ensemble (brass quintet) since 1989. I was also an active freelancer in New York City from 1989 to 2011, playing chamber music, orchestra, ballet, opera, new music, Broadway shows, jazz, rock....
As a freelancer, every day is different: different music, different colleagues, different conductors, different situations. The common element is that you sit down and play the music that is put in front of you—and that can mean sight reading on the job.
What I have discovered in my teaching (and through my own self-study) is that we need to sight read music very differently from how we read written words (and most people can “sight read” a passage in a book without needing to explain that “I’m just sight reading here—I might make a mistake”). When we first learn to read, our eyes move from letter to letter, sounding out the words (although I’m sure children learning to read character-based languages like Chinese undergo a somewhat different process). Once we’re well into elementary school, though, our eyes pick up entire words, or even groups of words, all at once.
If we try to sight read music this way, we often fail. Our eyes may take in a group of, say, eight 16th notes—after all, they are beamed together in groups of 4, so they really look like chunks of notes rather than lots of individual notes. But if we are hoping to play all of those 16th notes correctly, we actually need to notice, to see, what the pitches are. This more closely resembles the letter-by-letter approach we used when learning to read than the “chunking” approach we end up with.
When I am sight reading and I mess up, most of the time I realize that I didn’t actually know what note to play, and that is because I didn’t see which note I was supposed to play. As I get older, my eyes take in even bigger chunks of material unless I discipline myself to notice and see each pitch.
We are often taught that in reading music, we must look ahead. True enough—it’s always good to be prepared for the next thing. But we also must know what to play NOW, and then we must play that thing NOW. It is a very in-the-moment experience.
It is also an experience that can be practiced. Take a piece of music you don’t know, or don’t know well. Insist that your eyes track along with what you are playing. Try to see the pitches, the note values, and even the articulation marks and dynamics. Note when your eye stops seeing what it needs to see. Your level of concentration should deepen.
If you get to a place in the music where you become confused and need to stop, ask yourself if that happened because of a playing issue or a seeing issue. Over time, you can train your eyes to see better and to take in more information.
Finally, if you notice that the next eight 16th notes form an E major scale, great! Let your eyes peek ahead while you play the scale, but then start tracking again—return to the present moment.
Please let me know if this method works for you and if you are able to improve your sight reading. dgrabois@wisc.edu
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