The Problem With Sight-Reading | The Millennial Edit

Hands up if you are good at sight-reading!

My experiences of sight-reading have been very varied depending on where I have been. So you needn’t feel alone if you didn’t mentally stick your hand straight in the air.

Training to be a musician means honing a very complex group of skills and perhaps it is the style of teaching with a big emphasis on guilt for the things that we can’t do that can lead us to feel inadequate in our abilities.

A feeling that is especially present when it is at something that we feel we cannot see the path to improvement for. I think that a lot of the way that serious musical training is structured is very rigid and unfortunately follows outdated paths that some of us can barely improve in.

Sight-reading is one of those things. You are either good at it, or not so good at it.

It is perhaps true that the difference in our ability comes from our early exposure to it. For instance, those of us who did not practise a lot in our early years of having lessons may find that we are better than most at sight-reading purely because we produced a necessity for the skill by being inherently lazy.

Similarly, those of us who require sight-reading in our career, be it in orchestral positions, playing a lot of chamber music, or working with composers, may require sight-reading and therefore attain a level that we can work with.

But aside from the niche ability to prove that you are good at this one very specific and totally avoidable thing, there is no reason to feel so down about lack of ability.

The remedy to not being a great side reader is to remember that outside of university courses, there will be no need for us to prove this ability. We will most likely use this skill to show off, but for nothing else.

And that comes from somebody who can sight-read pretty proficiently, it’s always been my favourite subject, and I still think it’s unnecessary!

So go forth and use your dedication to your instrument, your memorisation skills, or just preparation to bring you closer to better playing, rather than a skill that you can’t master anyway!

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