Thursday, June 27, 2013

Ear-based Sight-Reading

When are piano teachers going to stop teaching children to read music in the manner of those old Fred Astaire Dance Studio charts with pictures of feet in various positions on the floor with arrows?

Equating the lines and spaces with the alphabet is already pretty irrelevant, but attaching them to keys on the piano just makes it all that much harder to get the point: these are not mechanical instructions, but maps of sound.

I am amazed at how much better people read when their natural hearing is engaged before the fact of playing the notes.  There are simple ways to achieve this which I will go into in subsequent posts.