On sight-reading and having fun
And how I have always been a menace to my teachers
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I spent most of my childhood deeply confused about sight-reading.
Every week my childhood piano teacher assigned me a piece for sight-reading homework—usually something like a Clementi sonatina, Chopin waltz, or, once, Beethoven’s Für Elise—and told me to sight-read it at home and bring it in to my next lesson for her to check.
I didn’t understand the point of these assignments. “Sight-reading homework” seemed like an oxymoron; sight-reading as I understood it was that wizard-like ability my music teachers had, in which they could sit down in front of sheet music they’d never seen before and play it perfectly. If I practiced the piece at home, I reasoned, I would no longer be sight-reading, and it would be cheating for me to come into my next lesson having played the piece every day for a week and claim I was sight-reading it. Ergo, the correct way to do my sight-reading homework was to not do it. (Child logic is absolutely flawless.)
I got yelled at a lot in my lessons.
Every week I’d stumble virtuously through my assigned piece, groping for a dropped bass line, mangling a spate of accidentals in a melody, and falling completely to pieces when the key signature changed and I was suddenly menaced by an unexpected brace of flats. Exasperated beyond belief (the Sharon Special I have since inflicted on many teachers), my teacher would tell me how obvious it was that I hadn’t practiced my sight-reading, and I’d think silently, “But I am sight-reading! That’s what I’m doing right now!”
In fact, I was weirdly proud of every stumble and pause; the mistakes proved that I hadn’t cheated by practicing, that I was authentically sight-reading for the first time, and doing a pretty decent job, I thought! I didn’t understand what there was to be upset about.
(“Why didn’t you ask your teacher about these assignments if you were so confused?” the more reasonable among you may ask, to which I say, ha! You think I was that kind of student? You think that a kid who can play three-part polyphony from memory before they hit puberty gets there by questioning authority? Come on.)
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I started to understand—over a decade too late—what the point of those perplexing sight-reading assignments had been. My regular repertoire each year was crafted to be just a little too difficult for me, requiring me to do a lot of “deep” practicing: dismantling, drilling, slowly repeating in small chunks over and over and over again. Anyone, with enough slow dedicated work, can learn to play a piece that’s too hard for them (every once in a while you hear about an amateur, or an actor training for a movie, who learns to play one piece by rote but can’t do anything else on the piano).
It takes a different type of work to get properly familiar with your instrument, to navigate the keyboard without trained choreography, to casually learn something without having to take it apart first. It’s this kind of work, more than the technical drills, that really gives you fluency, and this was what my teacher had been attempting to give me.
The deeply ironic thing was that I did a lot of extracurricular sight-reading homework without realizing it. My parents stocked the house with “fun” sheet music for me to goof around with; my mom, who can’t read music herself, was constantly coming home with popular anthologies and arrangements for me. If a Disney movie came out, I got the official Disney-licensed book of piano arrangements for that movie; at one point Costco had some fat collection of hit songs from musicals, so I got acquainted with theater rep well before I ever saw my first Broadway show. I tore through all of it like cotton candy.
It never occurred to me that I was honing any particular skill—it was just fun to crack open a book and be able to immediately bang out a recognizable song without having to do any pesky practicing. The me who nobly slogged through sight-reading assignments with my teacher was a totally different kid from the me who sight-read “fun music” like it was nothing.
The dinner party sums things up (and explains a lot about me). At one point my parents had some friends over for the evening, and as "small child" and "dinner party" are somewhat mutually exclusive concepts, I had been neatly put away for the evening—bathed, dressed in fresh pajamas, and tucked into bed. I understood, vaguely, that I was meant to stay in my room and fall asleep.
However. I could feel, from my bedroom, the unmistakable energy of a potential audience. An audience, in my own house! How was I supposed to pass it up? Who sleeps when there’s performing to be done?
I wasn’t one to let a perfectly good captive audience go to waste. I got out of bed, bounded downstairs in my nightgown, grabbed a book of sheet music I knew would be a hit with this crowd—The Phantom of the Opera—and got to work.
There was a lot I didn't understand about the world as a kid, but I knew this: adults went absolutely feral for music from Phantom.
I trotted out “Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” to great acclaim. The “easy piano” arrangement my mom had bought me was, I thought, not interesting enough—too many measures of the left hand not getting anything more than a single note or simple triad—so I dressed it up, tossing in arpeggios and Alberti bass and octaves on the spot as I pleased. Bass notes were taken an octave lower for dramatic effect. Each song may have ended with excessive flourishes in the high registers of the piano. I took repeats that didn’t exist just to luxuriate in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s tunes and tart them up even more.
Eat your heart out, Liberace—you had nothing on me, a tiny child in pajamas hamming it up for a gaggle of suburban moms in my living room. (I have no idea why my parents were so surprised when I eventually decided to get a music performance degree. The signs were there all along, I gave you all the clues, etc.)
It didn’t really occur to me that what I was doing was real sight-reading. I was just playing. Performing popular music on the spot was seemed like a different, unnamed activity from the careful work my piano teacher required of me.
As I got older, my casual sight-reading fell off. My piano and violin rep got more intensive, I took on more extracurricular activities, and I developed the stubborn talented-teenager refusal to practice that drives parents and music teachers alike up the wall. (Once again, the Sharon Special.)
The final nail in the coffin came when I started working with my last major teacher, who required all music in his studio to be memorized from the very start.
“If I assign you a Mozart sonata and tell you to bring it in next week,” he said, “it means you have to bring it in memorized. You won’t be allowed to play from the score in your lesson.”
And so I frantically retooled the way I learned music; to this day, when I learn a new piece, I memorize all the notes by rote first.
That first year was rough going. I brought in the Mozart sonata, painstakingly memorized, and was told that because I hadn’t memorized the articulation and dynamics, I hadn’t actually learned it. I endeavored to memorize the markings with the next piece I learned, a Schubert impromptu, and then was asked to play the simplified bass line from memory—I couldn’t, which meant I didn’t understand the harmonic structure, which meant I hadn’t actually learned it, and so on and so forth. I went into my time with this particular teacher blessed with above-average memory to begin with, and came out of it with memory so sticky that I now have different problems.
(During sound check for my San Francisco performance in June, one of the crew watched as I ran through my program and the speaking bits I’d prepared, darting around and landing in the middle of pieces or bits of speech without any sheet music or note cards. “All of that is in your brain?” he said wonderingly. Buddy, I wanted to say, you don’t know the half of it.)
All of this is to say that it is now a very strange sensation for me to play music off a score, because I do it so rarely. Any sight-reading I do is for the sake of trying out fingering or understanding the structure of a piece. Sight-reading for fun? Who’s got the time?
Well, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to get some productive practicing (of the “memorize by rote and drill baby drill” sort) done and failing miserably. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, etc. etc., except in this case I think the spirit is also pretty damn weak, forget about the flesh. I’ll think about how I’ve got all this music slated to be recorded and performed, and then look at the sheet music and the hours of drudgery it represents, and some hopeless little toddler in my brain shrieks “I don’t wanna!” and that’s it.
Can you believe I have my dream job? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it sometimes.
I took sewing back up, partially because I want a new pair of pants, and partially because my aversion to practicing was so intense that it made the drudgery of hunching over a table painstakingly pinning fabric seem downright pleasant. (You know it’s bad when you’d rather stab yourself with pins and burn yourself with an iron than, you know, play beautiful music.)
To relieve the monotony of endless pinning, I put on a bunch of my favorite Studio Ghibli movies, which reminded me: Joe Hisaishi’s music is really freaking great. Of course I had to put on the soundtracks, the symphonic suites, all those gorgeously poignant themes. And then I remembered!
I have a book of Hisaishi’s Ghibli themes for piano. And…I can play the piano!
Behold, the cure for so much of my discontent.
I read through the main themes from Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle. I played them again and again and again purely for the pleasure and satisfaction of it. And then I found myself refining them—still sight-reading but making improvements, rehearsing the little transitions so I didn’t get caught off-guard by them, getting my hands accustomed to certain chords (Hisaishi loves his quartal harmonies). It felt beyond indulgent—wasteful, even, to just sit at the piano and play “fun music” for my own pleasure and no other reason, when there were a zillion more productive things I could be doing.
I thought about the years of “sight-reading homework” I had with my childhood teacher, who just wanted me to be able to do stuff like this. I remembered how my child-self hammed it up on Phantom of the Opera for a group of appreciative moms and loved every moment of it. What is the point of having all this ability if I don’t enjoy it? Isn’t that why I took up playing the piano in the first place?
Here’s a sight-reading assignment I actually, finally, took seriously. (Sorry, Ms. M.) I know I did it right because Youtube immediately flagged it as music from the official soundtrack.
Apologies for the semi-potato audio quality; I was having too much fun to get my microphone attachment, and this was done the day before I got my piano tuned.
Playing music is fun! What a concept. I look forward to learning more painfully obvious things that a child could tell you. For now, the Joe Hisaishi sight-reading will continue until morale improves. 🎹