Reading Melody
Most people who say they are bad at reading music can read notes fine. Give them one note and they name it in a second. The problem is that they do that trick a hundred times in a row, and that wall does not come down by doing more of the same.
- 5 building blocks
- contour first
- look ahead
Where you run into this
- Every instrument
- Ensemble playing
- Choir
- Teaching
In short
Spelling means: see a notehead, work out its line or space, translate that to a name, translate the name to a finger. Four steps per note. That is fine for half notes in a slow chorale and hopeless for sixteenths at speed, for a simple reason: the bill arrives faster than you can pay it.
So what do you read instead? A fairly small set of recurring figures. Western melodies are strikingly predictable in their building blocks, and that predictability is exactly what makes sight reading possible. Scale fragments of three to eight notes, broken chords, repeated notes, neighbour figures and stepwise returns cover most of what you will meet.
How it works
Contour comes before detail. Before you identify a single pitch you can see whether the line goes up, comes down or stays put, and how far. Anchor notes help as well: pick a few landmarks you know instantly and read the notes around them relative to those, rather than counting lines from the bottom every time.
Where you run into this
- A player who reads a familiar style fluently and a strange one slowly
- A phrase recognised as a scale fragment instead of six separate notes
- Sight reading that improves by reading easy music, not hard music
Our own examples
A line that keeps running underneath you, so the skill you practise is continuing rather than being told to continue. Play it once and let the wrong notes go.
Keep going
Everything in reading music
- The Staff and Clefs
- Reading Melody
- Transposing