Is your sightreading stuck in slow gear?

When I was growing up, I used to love riding the bumper cars at the amusement park. You remember those tiny little cars where you actually try to crash into everyone else and there are no rules? My brother and I would zoom around the rink, aiming for each other, but usually one of us would have a faster car than the other. It was so frustrating to have...

Do you memorize instead of reading the notes?

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If so, you’re not alone. Many people do this believing it is easier, at least for them, to learn the notes for a specific piece rather than learn to read them in general.

If you are one of these people, you are probably aware that you do it and that...

Ear training is a subject that makes people either shrug their shoulders or shudder. The many different approaches breed confusion and the methods inspire fear.

I should know. I taught ear training at the Curtis Institute for 19 years. I was the mean solfège harpy that made Catholic school nuns look like Mary Poppins. Ok, not really.

But ear training is no student’s favorite...

If you can sing it, you can play it. Well, maybe not quite, but it is true that singing is the best way to develop some key musical skills.During the years I taught ear training at Curtis, I noticed a pattern. Among the students without perfect pitch, those who had choral experience almost always found ear training easier than the students who had never sung in a chorus.

One obvious...

What if all the tuners and tuner apps disappeared tomorrow? Could you tune your harp?

Of course, the tuners will not all disappear. In fact, tuners and tuner apps are everywhere and easier to use than ever.

But could you tune your harp without one if you had to? Have you developed your ear to “hear” intonation instead of merely “see” it on your tuner?

It’s funny...

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In Step 1, you learned the essential pattern for key signatures – movement by perfect fifth. And you are now able to recite the major and minor key signatures in order, as well as the sharps and flats that form key signatures.

If all you wanted to do was to memorize the key signatures, you wouldn’t need to do more. In fact that’s where most...

At some point in every music student’s life comes the moment when she must learn all the key signatures. And at some point for every teacher comes the question from that same student: “Why do I have to know them?”

There are some easy reasons that we all give our students. They may need to learn them  for an exam. Or we can...

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If you are a monster sightreader and have perfect pitch, don’t read this article! Everyone else, read on…

After my last article on becoming a speedier reader, I received some interesting comments and questions, mostly about why and how we should be practicing reading notes. Let me try to address those issues here.

The “why” is...

Sometimes we need a vacation to refresh our outlook on our work.  Last summer, I got the same benefit from someone else’s vacation.  That summer I was teaching Sara, an Italian harp student taking lessons from me while she was visiting relatives in Delaware, and she helped me rediscover some important truths about the way we practice.

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