There is a common problem many organists face when playing from three-stave notation - that's moving with their eyes from the end of one stave to the beginning of the next stave. Usually the people who experience this problem have quite limited sight-reading abilities.
I have observed the same trait in the playing of some of my students. The people who get mixed-up usually don't have a lot of experience of playing fluently from the unfamiliar score and/or their music theory skills are very limited. It's like when you read a book in a foreign language where don't know the meaning of the words, it's easy to skip a line or two all of a sudden. However, this usually doesn't happen when you read a book in your native language. Please note that I'm not talking about the cases when people have special vision conditions - just usual situation when you can't find the right stave quickly and easily when playing organ music. If you are experiencing similar problems when jumping from one stave to another, this video might be helpful for you to watch.
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Although I have written quite a bit about sight-reading in the past, created my most popular coaching program to master this vital skill where more than 50 students have benefited from it so far, but because lots of people have asked me to give them some additional advice on sight-reading lately, I decided to talk about it today.
Another reason for sharing this video with you today is that one of the greatest weaknesses in the vast majority of my students of any kind (ear training, organ, piano) is their inability to read music well. Because of this they get discouraged to pursue music studies or ear training classes start to become too difficult, writing dictations becomes too hard etc. They could attempt so much more in music and they could have so much bigger dreams if they only practiced-sight-reading regularly. There is an amazing correlation between the value of regular reading of books to the development of the person and the value of sight-reading music pieces to the development of the complete musician. Maybe one or two books won't do the miracle for you yet, but read 100 books and you will become completely different person. The same is with music sight-reading. I discovered in my students, that whenever they learn sight-reading systematically, their progress is much faster. And I can testify this myself - whenever I regularly sight-read unfamiliar organ pieces, my ability to read new music is much greater and I can prepare for organ recitals much faster that normal. That's why having excellent sight-reading skills is so important to have because you can simply read your music during the recital. No, you don't have to really open the unfamiliar organ score at the time of your recital or performance in public, such as church service (unless you are up to this challenge), but the time required to prepare this music can be reduced to weeks and days, instead of months and years. So here is how it works. A couple of days ago one of my students in my Organ Sight-Reading Master Course asked me a question about the frustrating situation he is in. I thought I would share it with you because perhaps more people are facing the same challenges similar to this student.
The thing is he is starting to practice two-voice exercises and is finding that he is making many more mistakes than in single voice exercises. So he is wondering if he is doing something wrong. I wrote to him that he needs an extremely slow tempo when doing these two-part exercises because the texture is begining to look much more polyphonic. Normally people understand the necessity of the slow practice and start my course really slow which is a good thing. As the single voice exercises progress, often they are starting to feel that they are advancing their skills and so they make very few mistakes. So after some weeks into this course they can sight-read one voice melody fairly well. And then two-part exercises begin to appear and it becomes really hard for some of my students. I think that many of them even didn't notice their tremendous progress and they naturally began to play a little faster with single voice exercises. And so they started two-part exercises with the same mindset and tempo which is obviously too fast. So the only thing they need to do in order for the exercises to begin to feel quite easy again is to slow down the tempo so much that they could play the exercises rhythmically and melodically correct. This means extremely slow but rhythmically stable practice. If you ever encounter such difficulties when learning to sight-read on the organ, try to apply this tip and you might be surprised and how easy the exercise or the piece might become for you. Church organists very often have to provide organ accompaniments to choir pieces and anthems every week. In other words, the organist has to be able to sight-read an unfamiliar organ score really well and to do it fluently during the public performance such as church service.
In order to be able to play organ accompaniments every week without stress and anxiety, you have to be able to sight-read really well so my first recommendation is to develop your organ sight-reading skills. The best way to achieve fluency in sight-reading is to practice playing new pieces regularly. However, remember that you have to be systematic about sight-reading. Otherwise this practice will not work and you will not develop the skills that you need to play organ accompaniments easily. Take a collection of organ music that you love and start playing one page a day. Don't play all the parts and voices right away because most likely that will be too difficult for you. What you have to do is to try to play just one single line and do this for the entire collection for a few weeks. When this will become easy, go back to the beginning of this collection and start playing another line or part. So little by little you will be able to play the entire organ collection by playing just one line. The next step would be to play two parts or voices at the time and later three voices and finally the entire four-part texture. Remember to proceed to the next step only when the previous step will become easy. Do this in your every-day practice for 15 minutes a day and in short nine months you will easily achieve the level when you can play any organ accompaniment during your church service fluently and without stress. Sight-reading is a very important skill any organist must develop because it helps you to play an unfamiliar organ music with fluency and ease. Some people believe that this skill is difficult to develop and only geniuses would succeed in playing new pieces fluently. In this article, I will share with you some tips which will help you to understand that systematic approach to sight-reading is possible and it provides wonderful results.
My first recommendation for you is to find an organ collection that you like and start playing it one page a day. However, do not attempt to play the entire for-part texture with hands and feet combined right away. The best way to go about practicing sight-reading is to play solo parts first. This means playing the soprano part separately, the alto part, the tenor and finally the bass part separately in the entire collection. After you do that, go back at the beginning of the collection and start practicing two-voice combinations. Make sure you are covering every single one of them without missing any of these steps. Every step and combination is just a little bit more difficult than the previous one and leads to the next step. The following step would be to practice three-voice combinations from the beginning of the collection. Again, try not to skip any combination of three voices and aim for your playing to be fluent and free of mistakes. This may mean that your practice tempo should be much slower than the concert tempo. This systematic step-by-step approach allows you to progressively advance in sight-reading and be able to play with four parts together later on. By the way, you can make an experiment which will prove to you how effective this system is. Here is what you have to do. Before practicing your sight-reading, try to play all parts together of your first piece right away. You will soon discover how difficult it is and you will make many mistakes. Make a mental note of exactely how many mistakes you have made in one page of music. However, repeat the same exercise after you complete this training and you will discover who much further you have progressed with this systematic step-by-step approach. If you want to become competent in organ sight-reading, try to practice it every day. If you skip one day without practice, only you will notice it. If you spend two days without practice, your teacher will notice it and if you skip three days without practice, then everybody else will notice it. Sight-reading is one of the areas for organists that they should be spending more time on. Practicing regularly playing unfamiliar organ music systematically with time produces incredible results. However, a lot of people struggle to advance in sight-reading and see the results they want fast. In this article, I will share with you how to develop adequate sight-reading skills at the organ.
1) Practice regularly. If there is one rule for sight-reading, this is it - the more you do it, the better you will become. However, it's not good to practice rarely but in huge time chunks, like 5 or more hours. Instead, it's much better to spend 15-30 minutes a day with sight-reading but do it every day. 2) The level of difficulty. The pieces should be much easier than what you can play currently. For example, if you can practice and master a 3-voice piece in a month, then your sight-reading pieces should not have more than 2 voices at present. In fact, it's better to start so simple, like with 1 voice that you should feel enjoyment and think that it's too easy. 3) Practice tempo. Normally it is very good if you can practice very slowly. But if the texture is very easy and you can do it at a concert speed without mistakes - then it's even better. However, always be aware of how many mistakes you are making and try to eliminate them. 4) Number of voices. It is best to start your sight-reading practice with something simple and easy. This means playing one melodic line at a time. From your polyphonic organ piece choose the soprano alone, then the alto, the tenor and the bass in the same manner. When this practice becomes easy, add a second and a third voice etc. Do this repeatedly for some time and eventually you will be able to sight-read all 4 parts with fluency and ease. Apply these tips in your sight-reading routine regularly and you will develop adequate sight-reading skills at the organ. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my Organ Practice Guide. When we practice sight-reading, we sometimes encounter difficulties with the change in texture in treble and bass notes. That's a normal feeling.
You see, if the musical composition goes for a while in one texture or mode, we are getting used to that texture or mode. After practicing for some time, it becomes less difficult to play. But when the texture changes we have some problems again because at the time of change we have to get accustomed to the change. And sometimes where the clefs change is also a difficult place. The time issue with the systematic method is not a big deal - it only takes about 15 minutes a day of regular sight-reading practice to begin to see some tremendous changes in your skills. But you have to be very methodical about that - increase the difficulty level just one step at a time and practice in ascending numbers of accidentals etc. After you perfect your sight-reading skills, it's fascinating how much faster the entire learning process of new music becomes. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. If you have ever tried to practice sight-reading regularly on the organ, you undoubtedly have discovered the tricky question of fingering and pedaling. More specifically: when you play unfamiliar organ music at sight, how do you know which fingers and pedalings to use?
Here is the thing: if you play a normal organ piece which you practice for a long time, you would most likely figure out the fingering and pedaling in advance. Of course, you can write in all your fingering and pedaling in advance OR you could write in them only in specific spots as you are progressing through the piece OR you could mentally fingure out fingerings and pedalings without writing them down. Not taking the time to figure out fingerings and pedalings would be counter-productive because you would be making unpredictable and inefficient choices which would result in a sloppy performance. Whatever the case might be, you might have a difficult time sight-reading organ music precisely because of this issue - there are no fingering and pedaling indications in the score. So the question is this - how can you play a new score, if you don't have the time to figure out the fingering and pedaling? Is it even conceivable to hope to be able to play an unfamiliar organ music and figure out fingering and pedaling as you are playing? My answer is yes, if you practice sight-reading wisely and systematically. First of all, you should pick the music for sight-reading very methodically. You should assess your level of accomplishment very strictly and choose a collection to sight-read which is FAR EASIER than you would normally be able to practice. Second, don't attempt to play all voices at once. Start with playing solo parts. After a while, graduate to 2-voice combinations, 3-voice combinations and so on. Third, since the tempo should be slow, choose a convenient fingering but avoid finger substitutions in an early music piece which are not suited for this type of composition. Finally, the feeling of choosing the right fingering and pedaling for the Romantic and modern music comes from an extensive training in playing scales, arpeggios, and chords because in every passage you can recognize a pattern from these technical exercises. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. I know that many people struggle with music reading on the organ, and it can take literally many months to learn some organ piece until they are ready for public performance.
This is really frustrating. Many of them even can't wait that long and quit practicing long before they start to see the results of their labors. We all want to be able to sight-read organ compositions well, without mistakes, fluently, seemingly effortless. Bach was said to have such ability at his time. Imagine if you only developed one tenth of his skills, would it still be worth it? I think it would. So how about trying out 50 day organ sight-reading challenge? Here is what you do: Play at a slow practice tempo one piece from Bach's Orgelbüchlein every day for 50 days from the beginning until the end without stopping. Since there are 46 chorale preludes in this collection and some of them have more than one verse, it would take almost 50 days to complete the challenge. Start today - the pieces are only one or two pages long - it takes only 5-10 minutes to complete every day's assignment (and yes, you can practice during TV commercials if you don't have much time available in your day). By the way, do you want to master sight-reading on the organ? If so, check out my Organ Sight-Reading Master Course. How to Sight-Read A Hymn On the Organ With Many Text Lines Inserted Between the Two Staves?5/30/2012 Many organists with little experience in hymn playing or sight-reading struggle while playing an unfamiliar hymn with many text lines inserted between the two staves. With so much text between the music, the staves become so widely separated which makes it very difficult to play such a hymn at sight fluently and without mistakes. In this article, I will give you my personal recommendations which will help you to overcome the problems in sight-reading hymns on the organ.
First of all, let me point out that it is really a rather difficult task for people who have not much experience in hymn playing. Playing a hymn with 2-3 lines of text between the staves is usually fine but when the space between the notes increases it really becomes similar to open score reading. The only difference from playing from an open score and a hymn written in this way is that in open score notation you have at least 4 staves with 4 parts and in hymn playing you have 2 staves. By the way, perhaps practicing this way hymn playing is even more similar to reading open score because even in open score reading you are supposed to master solo parts, two parts at a time and various combinations of three parts before progressing to the complete four-part texture. There are a few things which help me to play hymns written in this complicated way. This techniques may be useful to you as well: 1) My ability to harmonize the soprano line. You see, when I look at the hymn melody, in my mind I see the right chords which go well with the soprano part. In other words, I see the various chords (Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant, their inversions, seventh chords of various kinds etc.) which fit well with the melody. The skill at harmonization the melody allows me to naturally guess what notes will be written in the lower stave. Obviously there are usually many options available in harmonizing each particular measure but in many places, the most straightforward solution is the most common. 2) If I don't need to sing each verse while playing (this sometimes can be required, too), usually I just take a mental note of which verse I am playing without actually following the text. In this case I can concentrate on playing the music only. 3) Wise practice and experience also helps to overcome problems in hymn playing. I have a few hymnals at home which I have used to practice hymn playing earlier. I can say that after sight-reading about 100 hymns written this way, it gets easier and easier. I also recommend sight-reading hymns on a regular basis. Remember that you don't need to play all 4 parts right away. This may well be what makes sight-reading a hymn a rather difficult task. If playing solo voices is too easy, practice (sight-read) in various combinations of 2 voices, 3 voices in a slow tempo. Only then play all the parts together. Unless you struggle in note-reading, sight-reading separate parts might be a bit too easy because it is a simple chordal texture (except for the bass part in pedals). However, if you want to be really systematic like I am, you can play separate parts of these hymns as well. Use the above tips today, open your hymnal and start practicing hymn playing the right way. Do this for only 15 minutes a day for some time regularly and you will start to notice some tremendous changes in your abilities. By the way, if you really want to develop unbeatable sight-reading skills, check out my systematic Organ Sight-Reading Master Course which is intended for organists who want to perfect such seemingly supernatural abilities as playing fugues or any other advanced organ composition at sight. To successfully complete the practice material of this course will only take 15 minutes a day of regular and wise practice but you will learn to fluently sight-read any piece of organ music effortlessly. |
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Drs. Vidas Pinkevicius and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene Organists of Vilnius University , creators of Secrets of Organ Playing. Our Hauptwerk Setup:
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