- Home >
- Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum (Complete)
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum (Complete)
Bundle comprising all four parts of an sight-reading curriculum for advanced pianists which provides a structured approach to improving sight-reading with detailed instructions, annotated pieces and exercises.
Formats: Online Content with PDF Downloads
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 1
Sight-reading begins with sight. Before the inner ear can begin to imagine the sound of a score, before the mind can start to decode the patterns it detects, and before the body can translate these sounds and patterns into physical gestures that transform written notes into music, the eyes must take in all the information that is presented to them. We therefore begin our Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum with several modules that help train the eyes to move more efficiently and consciously as we play music at sight.
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 2
To give an interpretation of a piece we have never seen before requires flexibility and demands a willingness to accept wrong notes, technical stumbles, and botched details, in the greater interest of maintaining rhythmic cohesion, following the broad outlines of the score. The second part of our Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum is comprised of a set of modules to help you recognise patterns, see harmonic progressions, improvise where necessary and keep going in difficult passages.
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 4
Rhythm is perhaps the most important element in sight-reading and is the subject of the fourth (next) part of our Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum. Using simple, effective practice methods and carefully-selected pieces with annotations and guidelines, we work on keeping a regular pulse while tackling challenges such as recognising underlying rhythmic structures, subdividing the pulse accurately, handling polyrhythms and negotiating the sometimes confusing visual impression given by different kinds of meters.
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 3
Although playing by ear might seem to be the opposite of sight-reading, we read with our ears as much as with our eyes. The inner ear helps us to navigate a new score, predict what is coming and improvise when the eyes haven’t had enough time to absorb everything. The third part of our Advanced Sight-Reading curriculum serves to strengthen the role of the ear by developing skills ranging from playing by ear, filling in harmony intuitively, reading open scores and improvising.
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum
The Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum is derived from nearly twenty years of experience teaching the freshman sight-reading class for piano majors at the Peabody Conservatory. It consists of an extensive collection of annotated scores dealing with every aspect of sight-reading, together with detailed suggestions on how to practice. It covers everything from training the eyes to read more efficiently, to recognizing patterns, playing by ear, improvising, simplifying complex textures, mastering difficult rhythms and rare key signatures, and much more. It includes music of all kinds, from nearly all periods, by dozens of composers, both the well-known and the neglected. This curriculum is at once an exploration of music, of musicianship, and of the individual musician who works through it. For it is through exploration that we discover ourselves: our musical tastes and preferences, aptitudes and challenges.
Author
Ken Johansen
Ken Johansen is a pianist, teacher, and writer based in Baltimore, where he teaches at the Peabody Conservatory. His projects include the iPad sight-reading app Read Ahead, a keyboard harmony textbook Harmony at the Piano, the From the Ground Up series and an advanced sight-reading curriculum.
Author profile >>