I’ve struggled with sight-reading all my life until now. I’m sure I’m not the only person whose first encounter with the term “sight-reading” was in preparation for my first ever piano exam. My teacher would plonk a book in front of me, full of sample sight-reading pieces, and give me ten seconds to look at eight bars of some dreary, uninspired tune before having me play it. My aim in that exercise was to get it all right. Of course, being so caught up in playing every note accurately, I was far too tense and worried to actually achieve that, and ended up focusing on only individual notes at a time. This approach, sadly, stuck with me for years, and I had no success with my sight-reading until a wonderful little incident yesterday.

I had arrived at my parents’ house for the Christmas holidays the day before, and in my room I found two drawers full of sheet music. It was a mixture of music I had learned two or more years previously, and music I had bought but never played. Feeling somewhat nostalgic in the spirit of the season, I grabbed the two paper piles and started playing through them. Having a well-developed memory for music, I had little trouble reading through the pieces I had learned before. But when I opened up an organ voluntary that I had neither played nor heard before, the last thing I expected was to be able to play through it just as smoothly. Yet, that’s exactly what happened! Feeling sudden confidence, I went on to read though the slow movement of a concerto I had been working on and, combined with my ability to memorize, I had almost finished learning it by the fourth read-through.

My sight-reading improved instantly because I simply changed my approach. Last night, reading music was not a test to be passed, and mistakes were not to be punished by starting over again. Reading is now, for me, the first step to enjoying new music and revising old favourites. It’s just taking that sheet music and translating it into the sounds that the composer imagined, as is the purpose of reading a novel. Within a couple of minutes, sight-reading has become my new hobby, and it’s improving dramatically. My career has just had a boost, and I now have a new way of enjoying music. Onwards and upwards!

To all you lovers of choral music, if you’re ever in Cork look out for the wonderful Cork Chamber Choir. The choir was set up five years ago and has approximately twenty members from around Cork. Winners of the Sacred Music Competition at the 2010 Cork International Choral Festival, amongst other achievements, this is a vocal group well worth hearing. Here is a somewhat poor quality video of their winning performance at this year’s Cork International Choral Festival.  Cork Chamber Choir, Cork Choral Fest. 2010

This week I experienced the joy of playing this 1872 organ in a church in Swindon, near Wolverhampton. I intend to get more information on the instrument when I next visit, and hopefully some decent photos once I get my camera fixed. In the meantime, here is my attempt to capture some of the beautiful artwork on this instrument.