Sight-Reading: Have We Lost Sight of Its Value?

Professionally, having sight-reading as an integral part of my music education has given me opportunity, confidence and reliable ability. In 2022, when another harpsichordist fell ill with COVID-19, I received thirty-six hours’ notice to perform Handel’s Messiah, a complex Baroque work of over two hours’ duration. (The original is over three hours, but the work is frequently abridged to make it more accessible.) This was a potential minefield that I was able to navigate with confidence and ease, all thanks to the guidance and tuition I received in my teens from my private piano teacher, Isobel Grigor. It has been my experience that I am seen as having an unusual talent when it comes to sight-reading, but I have recently been reading about Ernst von Dohnányi and it is his view that sight-reading is no talent at all but a learned skill. With thanks to a detailed and wonderful biography, Ernst von Dohnányi: A Song of Life (2002) by Dohnányi’s wife, Ilona, I now know a lot more about this Hungarian composer and his teaching philosophy.

As a pianist, I have been acquainted with Dohnányi since I encountered his Essential Finger Exercises in my teens. After that, I discovered his Piano Quintet No. 1, Op. 1. From then, I was hooked. To my amazement, I recently learned from a colleague that the Queensland Conservatorium of Music rejected Dohnányi as their potential director in the late 1940s. I cannot help but think of this as a missed opportunity on the part of the conservatorium. Dohnányi was brilliant on every level; he excelled as pianist, composer and conductor. While my interest in his music was already strong, learning of this missed opportunity motivated me to learn more about the man behind the music. It is interesting to note that Ilona von Dohnányi wrote A Song of Life as more than an account of her husband’s life and career—she wrote it to dispel rumours and beliefs that Dohnányi was a Nazi sympathiser.

A Song of Life contains many articles and letters and, to my joy, a lecture on sight-reading that Dohnányi gave at Ohio University. For any readers who may be wondering what sight-reading is, it is the reading and playing of music at first sight, without preparation and played only once. Dohnányi begins by pointing out that very few musicians realise the necessity of good sight-reading. This attitude is still pervasive today. Sight-reading is simply tacked onto the end of a formal music exam as if it were an afterthought. In fact, there are exams where sight-reading is an optional extra. The Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) removed sight-reading completely from their diploma level exams some years ago. In most cases, including at tertiary level, the importance placed on sight-reading comes down to who one’s teacher is and whether or not that teacher discerns the value and need for sight-reading. Dohnányi deemed sight-reading of the utmost importance and his reasons can be applied more broadly to the need for higher standards in music and music education.

In my youth I sat AMEB piano exams, and as an adult and a professional I have guided many students through AMEB exams as part of their education. Undeniably, music exams are excellent in terms of the feedback one receives as well as the motivation they provide in working to polish one’s playing for performance. What disappoints me is the watering down of standards over the past thirty years. The AMEB used to provide only “Comprehensive” exams; as the years have progressed, they have added a “For Leisure” syllabus and a “Repertoire” syllabus. The argument can be made that these syllabuses have their place as they provide less serious students with an opportunity to sit an exam. The standard of the level remains the same but the requirements are less. For example, in the For Leisure syllabus, the student gets to choose between sight-reading and aural tests; in the Repertoire syllabus, the choice is removed entirely, and there is no requirement for sight-reading, aural tests or general knowledge. Again, many believe that these exams have their place as they provide an examination opportunity for more students of varying levels of capability. If we accept this as a good thing, one would then expect that the Comprehensive syllabus would stay intact, and uphold the highest of standards; this is the syllabus that sets students on the pathway to greater refinement and a career in music. Sadly, this is not the case. As time has passed, the Comprehensive syllabus has become less and less rigorous. The number of scales and arpeggios in the technical section has decreased. In the diploma level exams, aural tests and sight-reading have been completely removed.

Similarly, in senior secondary music in Queensland, standards have been lowered beyond recognition. Most significantly, Year 12 Extension Music does little or nothing to extend the student. Certainly, it does not extend the advanced student. I took this subject myself in 1998. I had to give a thirty-minute performance of contrasting works and other assessments including, among other things, numerous aural tests. For the last seven years, I have been helping advanced students prepare their three-minute recitals for Extension Music assessments. This is absurd, to say the least. Most recently, I had AMusA students taking Extension Music. Some classroom music teachers would allow the students to play entire works—such as Ravel’s “La vallée des cloches” (“The Valley of Bells”) or the first movement sinfonia from Bach’s Second Keyboard Partita—and then would select a three-minute portion of the work to assess. But, no matter which way one looks at it, it is insufficient. How, in three minutes, can one demonstrate the full scope of one’s musical understanding and ability? Which three-minute classical pieces demonstrate the full gamut of musical expression? It would seem that these three-minute recitals are there to be inclusive of those students who like to sing pop songs. And whilst the singing of pop songs might require some knowledge of vocal technique, it rarely comes with the foundation in aural skills and music theory that is necessary to enhance the classical music student’s musical understanding and performance ability. Arguably, this particular subject disadvantages the advanced music student so that the lesser student who, in all likelihood, has no desire to study music at a tertiary level, can have a go.

When it comes to aural skills, I discovered their true value as a tertiary student. The late Robert Boughen OBE was performing a Baroque organ concerto (I forget precisely which) with the Queensland Youth Symphony and John Curro AM MBE, who was conducting, could not find the continuo part among the scores; it had been lost. I received a phone call from Curro, asking me to come and play the continuo but adding that he would be giving me a bass part and, for the first rehearsal, I would have to listen and dictate figures before I could rehearse and play normally. With the removal of aural skills from almost every music institution and curriculum, who will be left to complete such tasks when the need arises?

Sight-reading is frequently viewed as a special talent which is divinely gifted to a select few. Dohnányi’s first emphasis is that this is not the case and that sight-reading is “a matter of mere practice and can be acquired by anyone who has musical sense”. Interestingly, he points out that better sight-readers are regularly to be found among amateur musicians who, in their desire for variety, play through many pieces for their own private enjoyment, as opposed to diligently spending hours polishing a program of fewer pieces in preparation for the concert hall. This can mean that an amateur, albeit less refined in their own playing, can have a broader knowledge of repertoire.

This brings Dohnányi to his main point: that the literature is so vast that it is simply not possible to get to know the “standard” works without sight-reading because there just is not the time for refining such a volume of music. He anticipates the argument that listening to recordings achieves the same breadth of knowledge and he concedes that this works in part but insists that it is no substitute. He posits that listening is “not an equivalent” because it is passive, as opposed to active, and that one is always more attentive when playing. He also points out that unless one listens to a variety of recording artists and interpretations, one runs the risk of becoming “accustomed to the interpretation of one artist, who may be not always the best”.

This brings Dohnányi to his second point, that knowledge of the literature informs one’s interpretation and that, in turn, leads to musical growth. Dohnányi states that, to be able “to play one Beethoven sonata well you have to be familiar with the style of Beethoven; this is impossible by knowing only that one sonata”. In this way, I have been fortunate in my musical education. In my teens, my teacher, Isobel Grigor, a gifted pianist, advised me to buy a volume of Beethoven piano sonatas expressly for the purpose of sight-reading. I was, at the time, sure that she was asking more of me than I was capable of. I had heard the Beethoven sonatas and did not think they sounded like works that could be sight-read with any kind of finesse. But I bought a volume of Beethoven sonatas and set about sight-reading them.

Miss Grigor certainly knew what she was doing. She never crammed sight-reading into the final handful of lessons that led up to an AMEB exam. Rather, she had me sight-read every lesson. She regularly put songs by Schubert or Tchaikovsky in front of me and would sing the vocal lines, deliberately making rhythmic errors or employing an abnormal sense of rubato, a ploy to see if I was listening and following as I accompanied her. I imagine Dohnányi would have approved of Miss Grigor’s methods, for he lays out clear guidance for how sight-reading “should be done” and states that “the best school for sight-reading is the ensemble, playing with others, when you strictly have to observe the beat, otherwise the executants get in a mess of discords and have to stop”.

Dohnányi highly recommends every aspiring pianist play “chamber music sonatas with violin, violoncello, trios, quartets, etc.” and I am reminded of another conversation I once had with John Curro. It was Curro’s idea that every first-year tertiary string student be paired with an appropriate and matching first-year piano student and that the duo would progress through their degrees performing recitals together. This is a marvellous and intelligent idea that would benefit string player and pianist alike.

An individual teacher can often determine a great deal of a student’s outcomes. This is to be expected and is a credit to the best teachers. But I am now left wondering what the impact would be if that teacher were the director of an institution. Is it possible to implement, across a whole curriculum, the bespoke and highly refined standards and practices that usually only make an individual teacher great? What if the Queensland Conservatorium of Music had appointed Dohnányi as its director? What impact would that have had for students and, more broadly, music in Queensland? One can only speculate.

Catherine Broadstock is an Australian concert pianist. She wrote “A Proposal for a Genuine Australian Music Month” in the November issue