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Teaching & Developing Sight-Reading Skills
Sight-reading an interesting piece of music is like meeting an interesting person. We enjoy the pleasure of a new encounter, sense perhaps a mutual affinity, and look forward to a deeper acquaintance. This series of articles provides exercises and music aimed at developing confidence in playing at sight and enhancing one's overall enjoyment of the piano.
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ReadAhead
Read Ahead is a comprehensive sight-reading curriculum based on high-quality music, carefully graded and supplemented with a wide variety of exercises to help instil the habits essential for fluent reading.
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Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 3
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/184-advanced-sight-reading-curriculum-part-3?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">Playing by Ear</a></h3>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... Read >>
Mastering Polyrhythms
A polyrhythm (sometimes referred to as a cross rhythm) is the effect produced when two conflicting rhythms are played together and can prove very challenging indeed! This series of articles will help you tackle them in various ratios, starting with the simplest: two-against-three (2:3) or three-against-two (3:2).... Read >>
The Body - Wiser than the Mind?
When we make music we experience fascinating integration of body and mind. As essential as it is to master certain well-defined skills (just as athletes do) there can also be moments when we manage to "get out of our own way" – and everything seems to fall into place beautifully.... Read >>
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 1
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/132-advanced-sight-reading-curriculum-part-1?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">Eye Training</a></h3>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... Read >>
An Overview of the Practice Tools
This series of articles serves as an introduction to Graham Fitch’s practice tools, including how to approach a new piece and the Three Ss.... Read >>
Advanced Sight-Reading Curriculum - Part 2
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/144-advanced-sight-reading-curriculum-part-2?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">Flexibility</a></h3>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... Read >>
Practice Strategies & Approaches
Introductory videos on how to approach and organise your practising for more productive and rewarding sessions.... Read >>
Read Ahead - Level 3
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/27-read-ahead-level-3?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">Sightreading for the Modern Musician</a></h3>Read Ahead is an exciting new program that helps piano students to improve their sight-reading ability. This unique curriculum is based on an extensive collection of carefully ordered compositions with related exercises and quizzes that help students develop the mental and tactile skills necessary for fluent sight-reading. This section features Level... Read >>
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... Read >>
Read Ahead - Level 1
Read Ahead is an exciting new program that helps piano students to improve their sight-reading ability. This unique curriculum is based on an extensive collection of carefully ordered compositions with related exercises and quizzes that help students develop the mental and tactile skills necessary for fluent sight-reading. This section features Level... Read >>
Quarantine-Spots
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you have spots in your pieces that regularly break down you’re going to need to identify them and isolate these sections so you can do some quality, systematic practice on them. This process I call quarantining, and each extract... Read >>
Making Friends With the Notes
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/240-making-friends-with-the-notes?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">A Two-Stage Practice Process</a></h3>William Westney presents a common-sense practising approach for achieving an underlying feeling of physical comfort and security at the piano. This powerful, proven strategy is easy to implement and frees us to play ANY piece of music freely, expressively and spontaneously. It can also lead to technical breakthroughs by thoroughly... Read >>
Separate Practice
Learning a complex piece each hand alone before putting the hands together is a strategy favoured by the majority of piano teachers. While it is of course possible to practise a fugue hands separately, this misses the point. Rather than working hands separately, I advocate strands separately (playing each line... Read >>
Practising for Long-Term Results
In this video, William Westney demonstrates a remarkably easy technique for mind and body to truly “digest” (and remember) what we’ve practised.... Read >>
Warm-Ups Revisited
<h3> <a href="/content/pages/164-warm-ups-revisited?bundle_url=online-academy&last_viewed=true">A Body / Mind Approach</a></h3>In this two-part video lecture, William Westney re-thinks warm-ups and demonstrates an effortless process that takes only a few minutes to ensure successful daily practice.... Read >>
Slow Practice
If you’re serious about playing the piano, there’s no getting away from slow practice. It is a cornerstone of our work from the beginner stages right through to the advanced level, and a practice tool also used by professional pianists and seasoned virtuosos all the time. In this section, ... Read >>