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Accurate sightreading is not a technique developed purely by chance, but rather the result of an awareness of specific reading procedures which must be nurtured through careful practice. The object of these etudes is to acquaint the student with these procedures.

One etude should be chosen for each pracgtice period and practiced as follows. Before starting, the student should skim through the entire etude visually and take note of the following salient points:

• A. Key signature(s)
• B. Time signature(s)
• C. Tempo (Phrases)
• D. Breathing places
• E. Dynamics and articulation
• F. Accidentals or other unusual notations

Later on Perrini writes:

Once the etude has been started, the student should make every effort to play it through to the end. The mistakes should be examined after playing the etude, and not when they occur; the eyes must follow the contour of the melodic line, and not look back to check errors.

Norman Barker writes the following in his book: Sight Reading and Technique for Students, Teachers and Performers on Trumpet; French <sic> Horn; Cornet; flugel Horn; tenor Horn; Euphonium:

...it has been found that where quite advanced players experience difficulties with rapid passages, the root cause is almost always a reading problem rather than purely a technical one, the player not having developed the habit of reading groups of notes ahead in the contest of rhythmic pattern, and mentally programming the fingerings in advance.

I hope this helps. Good luck in your progress!

I know that I've had a couple of times when I've been able to walk into situations and read parts (not 100% but darn close) because I had 10 minutes earlier in the day to just sit down and look through the entire part. I circled important things like key changes, mutes, etc., fingered through tricky passages and made notes, and just hummed the whole thing to myself to get it in my ear.

My simple moose-like suggestion is to SING the passage first, then look away from the passage and play it on your horn. If you can't do that, then buzz the passage on your mouthpiece. If you can't buzz the passage, then practice until you CAN!

Then put the chunks together and play the passage.

After all, transcending the mechanical aspects of the instrument is what we are eventually practicing to do, right?

Eventually, you ought to be pretty much oblivious that a horn is even involved.

Just a dumb, moose-like speculation.

How to overcome this ordeal ?
Very simple, indeed. But much too late for most professionals with sight reading problems.

Play through everykind of available music in a manner, that no severe accident takes place. We called this "notenfressen" in Vienna. (devour music notes). How is this possible ? Yeah, enough etudes during the study, enough technical training, developing an excellent playing skill - I said SKILL - so eyes & fingers plus lips work in an automatic circuit, where the brain has nothing elso to do as "character (music notes) recognition". The transition into finger & lipcommands must work instantly. If you still have fingering problems, you will be lost anyway.

How to avoid these fingering problems ? USE THE REGULAR FINGERINGS ONLY !!!! Correct intonation by the lips or the right hand. But this again requires a WELL trained EAR plus LISTENING to the other players. I say this here, as we should talk about sight reading while in the orchestra. Sight reading during your practise session ? Well, thatīs not a problem, as you can stop playing anywhere, without getting lost.

But prepare yourself in your practise sessions through "notenfressen". Go through all possible excerpt books from top to end & backwards & from first horn to eight horn, go through & again go through all parts. Play through even pieces you might never encounter in the orchestra as they are out of repertoire. Anyway a good exercise.

Learn to read in advance. Learn to read music while humming it or singing it through. This will save your lip power. When playing high stuff, do extreme low stuff the following half hour to relaxe.

How about transposing ? Go back to Kopprasch & do all the exercises in the several keys as indicated. But do it FAST, not in tempo, but in progressing from one exercise to the next, do all the variations. Avoid studying every single note. It is not necessary. Do not practise things you can do well allready. Kopprasch boring ? Well, this depends on how YOU play these etudes not only upon the written text. Get this technique programmed into your brain. Get a knowledge how the music line should be to make yourself able to ANTICIPATE.

Do not get stuck with one piece for a much too long time. Learn to study quickly. Not HAMMERING everything into your brain or into your embouchure or your fingers. If you need too long for a particular piece, blame your teacher as he or she has given you a task for which you are not matured (horn technique wise) enough seemingly.

To illustrate, how I made up my sight reading skill, Iīll come back soon with a longer email, describing the Viennese study plan during Stieglerīs & von Freiberg`s time, just my own study plan or Roland Bergerīs study plan.

A word, which will not please everybody:
didnīt you notice that those horn players who have studied a stringed instrument first or the same time as studying the horn, have a much better sight reading ability ???

More emphasis on sight singing could only help Western musicians--horn players included.

IMHO. Flame suit on.

I have no argument with that, they have way too many notes - chords even (input overload makes my brain hurt, I don't even get near a piano). It my case it has come down to experience that comes with years of playing. Generally speaking, with any new material, it's not that its that new, it's just different. I've played all the rhythms before, as well as the notes several times before, it's just that they have been rearranged. Now, throw in transposing (H basso), bass clef, and stopped, I lock up and have to reboot :-)......Paul, don't touch my reset button.

You're right Carlberg, I was a very frustrated viola player. I could hardly get a good forte outta that thing.

Seriously, playing a stringed instrument helps a lot. You don't miss notes the same way horn players do, by hitting a different note; you miss them by a smidgen and have to use your knowledge and ear to make the corrections. After a while you develop a sense of where your fingers should go more from where you think it will produce the right pitch rather than by mechanics.

On the lighter side, I had a deal with the conductor when I was a grad student and didn't have to play in the orchestra. He wanted a horn player, so we made a deal that I could play viola in whatever pieces they did that didn't have horn parts.

I had just picked up the viola. The first concert we played a Bach orchestral suite. One of my profs said the funniest thing he ever saw was the confused look on my face as I tried to scrub away on that thing and get as many of the notes I could figure out as the piece raced by.

The rest of the year every single piece they played had horn parts. Coincidence?

There are elite music venues in which the participants do not consider themselves involved in a competitive sport.

Of course it is desirable to sight read well because the ability to read and understand written notation nearly instantly is correlated strongly with the musical insight necessary to perform the music well. But the purpose of sight reading isn't to win competitions.

I've been reading the ongoing posts about tryouts for "All State" and whatever, and I've always found the attitude unsettling. Competitiveness gets in the way of making music -- competitiveness is not what music is about. I think even the competitive pressure of auditioning constantly for this or that chair may be harmful to winning one, or to executing a position successfully after winning it.

I'm just thinking, but perhaps the educational establishment has set up a competitive system that is well-intentioned but ultimately works against what it is trying to achieve.

Winning an audition is competitive, and so is getting into med school. But I wouldn't want a doctor with the competitive attitude of many young musicians. (Hey, I removed a gall-bladder faster and higher than you did! And I sight-read the operation -- first time I ever did one!) I want one who is professional and dedicated to the task. I want to play with musicians who are dedicated and accomplished. This isn't quite the same thing as competitiveness.

If you want a blood sport, try out for football or join the Marines.
(But not the Marine Band -- those guys are musicians.)

And to comfort Steve, IMHO All-State competition isn't quite as competitive as you may think. I can't think of any time I went in thinking "hey, I want to play higher/faster/louder/better than X person." Instead, I went in with the attitude of wanting to make State -- how others did was inconsequential. As such, it's really more a "competition" with yourself -- personal improvement and achievement over "beating" the next guy. I didn't feel like I was in competition with the other folks trying out, and from the friendly and supportive attitude everyone had there, I don't think they did either. In fact, I think the comparison to med school is a good one. People are trying to get in. As long as they do so, that's all that matters. If everyone who tried out was accepted into State, they'd all be just as happy as if everyone who applied to med school made it in. At that level, chair ranking per se loses a lot of its meaning, so interpersonal competition is not very common. Again, all this is IMHO. If anyone in Texas state didn't feel that way, I'd be interested in hearing it.

My School was completely opposite, ALL emphesis was on marching band. You can ask my old instructor Howard Hilliard, cuz he complained about it all through the fall! LoL. Anyways, we did do well, tied for 7th in State, our concert band....well =) Actually it wasn't too bad, but then again it wasn't too good either.

I am not saying that all competition is healthy. When a nameless person cements someones valves down because they are getting too close to their first chair spot....that is just sick (to me). But healthy competition in many ways aids the young player. Gets them motivated to practice...etc etc.

Go at it listers. *grin*

As one who has fought hard to improve her (fairly poor) sight reading skills for 25 years, I think there are some very important things to be learned from those of us who *don't* do it well.

Because I went to a very small school (we graduated about 50 seniors each year), our school, perhaps inevitably, had an extremely poor band (and no orchestra, of course). The sight reading practice offered by participation in that group was negligible, and for years, I thought that was the reason I was so far behind my fellow college musicians when it came to my sight reading abilities.

But recently, as I have begun to think more deeply about the issue (as I said, I've battled *hard* for 25 years to 'catch up') I've come to realize that it's all more complex than that. For instance, while it is true that I didn't have much in the way of challenging sight reading experience in my early years, it is also true, that, despite the fact that I was far and away the best musician that small school had (and, in fact, the best they have had to date), there were many in even that band who were better sight readers than I! Throughout my 'career' (such as it is, as I've always been an amateur) as a horn player, I've frequently found *much* less accomplished horn players to be much better sight readers.

There is something, either 'hard-wired' into the human brain, or perhaps in the way people 'route the task' through their brain, that makes some people better sight readers than others.

In 25 years, I have been able to change myself from 'terrible sight reader' to 'not a bad sight reader.' I'd be bitter about it, if it weren't for the realization that *most* horn playing skills came much more easily to me than to most - good quality tone, intonation, 'musicality', lip flexibility and accuracy were skills that seemed to (comparatively speaking) fall into my lap.

In my case, the discrepancy between my technical horn-playing abilities and my ability to sight-read was so pronounced, that I know my horn professor thought I might have some sort of brain dysfunction.

I'd be interested in a discussion, if anyone has any insights to offer, into how the brain processes the music the eye reads, and the path this information takes on it's way from the brain to the horn.

Further information on my particular "case" :

I have equal difficulty sight-reading piano music, although I play piano fairly well. (For example, I can play Debussy's 2nd Arabesque, but have extreme difficulty reading a simple, four part hymn.)

I can type nearly 90 wpm, despite the fact that I haven't worked nearly so hard on typing as I have on sight-reading!! (so I don't think it's a 'hand/eye' coordination thing.)

I read and comprehend text *extremely* quickly and accurately, but sometimes have difficulty (stumble over words) when trying to read aloud.

I am unable to quickly distinguish "left" from "right". (In other words, if you tell me "Turn right here!", I will have to stop and think which way that is. It's not instinctual like "up" and "down" for me. However, if you say "first base" or "third base", I'll immediately look in the correct direction. The same is true for "Treble Clef" and "Bass Clef" - as a piano player, I instinctively know which hand you're talking about!)

There do seem to be times when something seems to 'click' inside my head, and I find my sight-reading ability becomes suddenly *much* more accurate and easy. This phenomenon usually lasts for the remainder of that particular playing /practice session, and disappears by the next time I play.

I have also noticed that if I go directly from an extremely analytical 'left-brain' oriented task to playing my horn, I sometimes have difficulty playing well (musically speaking - by this I mean my interpretation becomes very wooden, stodgy, and labored) but my sight reading ability seems perhaps a little better.

I know when my husband did his Master's Thesis on music and learning styles (which covered the way the brain processes music) he found very little research other than the Rauscher ("Mozart Effect") stuff. Has anyone out there found more information, or do you have any anecdotal observations from your own life as a musician?

I find all that interesting. I'm curious: how good are you at mathematics, particularly, how well did you do in geometry in high school, and was there a difference between your geometry ability and your algebra ability?

I am the opposite type of player from you; I can sight read almost as well as I can play, and sometimes practicing a piece actually makes me play it worse. I can sight read any single line of music, such as violin or horn, but I'm awful at sightreading piano or classical guitar music, i.e., music with several lines going at once. Although I think that could improve with the right kind of practice (learning to recognize printed chords, all of them) I haven't been motivated to put in the time.

As for the math thread, I got A's all the way through calculus and differential equations. To me, these courses were all about the ability to recognize patterns and know which type of solution fit the problem. With sight reading, a lot of it has to do with patterns also -- scale, arpeggio, and rhythm patterns. A good ear is essential.

I have a couple of friends who are good horn players, but they have different problems with sight reading. One can't find the pitches but plays the piece well once he figures out what it sounds like, and the other can get the pitches but gets lost in the notes and loses the rhythm. Listening to the two of them trying to sight read a duet can be interesting.

Recently I heard string players in audition for our regional orchestra. Two of them played really nicely, and did some quite challenging concerto movements. When we presented them with sight reading, they floundered horribly. They almost could not sight read AT ALL. I was quite surprised, based on their technical skills. We learned later that they had been trained in Suzuki method. This method has been updated from its original form because students often achieved good technique at advanced levels all by 'rote'. Sometimes they never learned to sight read at any age, and had skill 'voids' in sight-reading. I continue to notice people remarking on this disadvantage of the Suzuki method even now that they introduce reading much sooner. I'm not knocking the method, but I wonder if has shown us anything of the nature of learning to sight read.

My usual advice to students is to play slower but with absolute continuity-- never stopping for mistakes. Managing to find material to sight read in true 'first sight' contexts is helpful too, but hard to structure in practice. Finding material that is at good 'challenge' level is important too. Chamber music sight reading is great, and I get my students together often to read quartets and the like.

Avoid stopping at every little crack and fault. I have had some students that were so constipated by years of doing this that they often simply stopped in the middle of a passage even though a mistake had not yet taken place.

If anybody has some really effective methods to teach sight reading, I'm very interested. I really believe that sight reading can be improved tremendously over a period of time, but it takes a lot of discipline and consistent practice.