Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2020-09-12 23:24
seabreeze wrote:
> They also recommend Joe Viola's Chord exercise book, which
> forces you to read endless series of double flats and double
> sharps. (The better your "ear" is the more you can play these
> "by ear.")
Not being a studio musician, I confess that slews of double sharps and double flats seem less relevant to me when I'm sight-reading in an ensemble situation, even professional (paid) gigs. I've always viewed those double chromatics, if they happen more than occasionally in a given composer's music, as the composer's showing off his prowess as a harmony theorist or as artifacts of digital transposition that should be edited. In my experience most music handed out at pickup sessions is reasonably conventional, or it should have been provided to the musicians in advance.
> Sight reading is never really "on sight"; it is always a matter
> of applying, recognizing, (or, at a level of greater
> difficulty, altering) patterns you already know. The process
> would more aptly be called "recognize and play" rather than
> "sight read."
This is very much to the point, IMO. The bigger your recognized "vocabulary" of musical patterns - diatonic scales, arpeggios, scales in thirds and other intervals and chromatic scales, the better your ability to decode longer note groupings that are mostly based on them.
> If you don't know the
> Baermann and Stark material (whether you learned it from those
> books or in some other way), then you will not be able to
> "sight read" it. When confronted with such patterns in a piece
> of music you will have to stop and take the time to learn it on
> the spot.
>
Because then you aren't recognizing groupings, you're reading the notes one at a time. It's analogous to reading written verbal language letter by letter and "sounding out" each word. And by the time you manage an entire word, you may not remember the context in which that word is being used.
> Oliver Nelson has some patterns in his Patterns for
> Improvisation book that most clarinetists would never think of
> playing. Fred Lipsius' book Reading Key Jazz Rhythms is
> compendium of rhythms you might not expect to see but you can
> bet they will turn up somewhere. If you know them, you will be
> able to "sight read" when you meet them on the road.
>
I suspect this kind of material is beyond what SunnyDaze has in mind That said, I would ask, how good a bet is it, really, that you'll ever see those patterns if they're so unusual? Improv is different - you're playing sounds you've imagined without the intermediate step of having to read them (and no real penalty if you reproduce them inaccurately - "there are no mistakes in jazz"). You may get some really good ideas from exercises like that, and maybe broadened horizons for your improvisations, but are you really likely ever to have to read them (much less remember them if you do run across one)?
Karl
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