This article is the second in a two-part series about sight-reading for choirs. If you have not read the first installment yet, I highly recommend doing so before diving into this article. The previous installment outlines some foundational principles of sight-reading that we will be expanding upon in this article, such as what sight-reading actually is, what its purpose is, and some of the guiding principles choir singers should keep in mind as they are engaging in the process of sight-reading.

In this installment, we’re going to get into some of what I like to call “Ellen’s Ninja Sight-Reading Tips” – in other words, things I’ve discovered help me to sight-read accurately and excellently, and to synthesize what I’m reading so that I can make informed, meaningful musical decisions as soon as possible in the learning process.

If you found this series particularly helpful, I invite you to check out the many other articles I’ve written on my Substack about choral singing, about topics ranging from vocal technique to ensemble skills to rehearsal etiquette. If you’d like access to those articles, I invite you to become a paid subscriber, which gives you unlimited access to everything I’ve written on this platform. You subscribe or upgrade your subscription with the button below.

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I mentioned at the beginning of the last post that I’ve always been an excellent sight-reader. I guess I would amend this statement slightly by saying that I’ve always been an accurate sight-reader. Some might equate “accurate” with “excellent.” I know I did, for a very long time. This was partly because, given the general lack of good sight-reading skills among singers these days, simply being accurate automatically puts you in like, the 99th percentile for this skill.

But now, with many years’ worth of experience behind me, I’d say that excellent sight-reading is not just about singing accurately; it’s about being able to read as accurately as possible while synthesizing the entire musical context – having an understanding of what’s unfolding right before your eyes and ears, absorbing what’s happening, and knowing exactly what the musical context demands from you.

While I was never deficient in this skill of musical synthesis – my reading was good, after all, as was/is my music theory – it took many years of experience for me to reach the point where my accuracy while reading was so automated that my brain was freed up enough to look and listen for other things during the reading process. The musical fluency I have since developed, for which I had always had the building blocks, required some time to steep in order for me to discover all the ways in which it could really work for me. In my younger years (middle school, high school, college, even early adulthood), it would take 2-3 read-throughs of something for this level of absorption to occur, even though I could read with near-if-not-100% accuracy. Granted, I was still able to piece things together pretty quickly after the fact; but now, with most music I read, the absorption and synthesis happens more or less immediately.

This is to illustrate what I think is one of the most important things to keep in mind whenever you are working to develop a very difficult musical skill: excellence does not happen overnight, no matter how talented you are, what your musical background is, or even how hard you work. Some things just take time. And reps. Time and reps – that, combined with a robust musical skill set, is what will make you a good sight-reader.

(This, I believe, is why many instrumentalists-turned-singers – such as myself – who started studying their instruments when they were very young, have much stronger sight-reading skills as singers than their vocalist-only counterparts do. Instrumentalists usually begin studying their instruments very early on in life, and learning and internalizing basic musical building blocks is often inherent to the process. For singers, many of whom do not start formal study until they are pre-teens, at the youngest, this is often not the case. I expand more upon this idea in this article.)

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Sight-reading is also one of those “use it or lose it” skills. While good-to-excellent sight-readers will likely never lose this skill completely, it can atrophy somewhat without consistent use. I learned this the hard way coming out of the pandemic. I’d been singing regularly during the lockdown days, but not reading and synthesizing a lot of music under the kind of pressure inherent to a choir rehearsal, for example, and when I jumped back into a heavy choral singing schedule after things began to open up in late 2021, I felt overwhelmed and very rusty. I found myself making mistakes while sight-reading that I never would have made in the pre-covid days, and wondering if I was ever going to be that good again. I did eventually regain my footing, but it took a few months of frustration and feeling like I was drinking from a musical firehose to get my skills back to where they’d been previously.

So, I suppose those are my first two “tips:” give it time and reps; and do it consistently. They’re not nitty-gritty musical tips (we will get to some of those, I promise), but they’re important.

While we’re talking about non-musical sight-reading tips, here’s another one: stay calm. Sight-reading – that moment when you are engaging with a brand-new-to-you piece of music for the first time – is really just a big discovery process. In order for this process to be as successful as possible, you have to approach it with a mindset of curiosity and exploration, rather than one of anxiety and fear. Your brain can’t explore and discover cool new things if you’re in fight-or-flight mode, so don’t let yourself get there. Instead of approaching the process of sight-reading like engaging in battle with some enemy that ardently desires your demise, approach it while asking yourself, “What does this piece of music have to teach me today? What can I discover? What can I learn from it?” You’ll be able to learn and synthesize a lot more successfully without an unduly heightened nervous system that is tricking your brain into thinking your very life is being threatened. It’s just music, okay?!

So, after acknowledging all that stuff, how do you actually get good at sight-reading?

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Step One: Focus on the Macro First

First, you have to understand the macro elements of music before you can understand the nitty-gritty details. This is something that most beginning sight-readers get backward. Don’t get it backward.

So what are music’s macro elements? In essence, I believe they boil down to two overall things: Rhythm and meter; and tonal context (keys, modes, key areas, etc.).

Inside each of those categories, there are a subset of fundamental skills that need to be built in order to understand the music in front of you. Let’s talk a bit about each one.

Rhythm and Meter

Not only do you need to know what various rhythms look like when they’re printed on a page, but you must also know how to execute them in context. This means that you must also have an understanding of the meter or time signature of the piece you’re reading, and especially of what the beat unit is. By “beat unit,” I mean whether the quarter note, half note, eighth note, or some other note gets the beat. This will give you the foundation for understanding not only the rhythmic gestures and motives present in the piece, but also the “feel” of the piece.

Related to this, you must understand how the meter is being conducted, so that you know where the downbeats are at all times, both in the conductor’s beat pattern (which is hopefully visually discernable, but I make no guarantees), and in the score you are reading. If you at least know where the downbeats are, you can follow in your score and keep up visually, even if the notes in between the downbeats are getting lost.

You must also have a good internal sense of tempo that will allow you to stay consistent, rather than slow down or rush ahead. You should also be actively counting during every long note you sing and every rest, rather than simply following and listening to what the other parts are doing. Listening is key, to be sure, but if you’re listening instead of actively counting and taking personal responsibility for the beat and the tempo, the rhythmic cohesion in the ensemble will suffer, and you may find yourself being influenced (i.e., led astray) by other singers’ mistakes.

Having a good working knowledge of rhythm and meter is ultimately what is going to keep you from getting hopelessly lost. You can’t begin to think about pitch accuracy until the rhythmic context is mostly secured, so if you’re not yet at the point in your sight-reading skill-development journey where you can balance both pitch and rhythm, then prioritize rhythm.

Tonality

You must have a super strong understanding of tonality, including keys, key signatures, key relationships, and key areas. Everything to do with keys. And by “understanding,” I mean that you must know these things intimately, so well that this information becomes second nature to you. If you can get to this point, you will have no trouble navigating music that modulates a lot, or that is full of secondary dominants, or travels to a new key area every other bar (hello, Bach fugues).

In order to develop this level of understanding, the best advice I have for you is to learn how to play all 24 major and minor scales on the piano. This does not mean you have to spend hours practicing the piano, or reach the level of concert pianist. It does not even mean that you need to take piano lessons. You can learn how to do this on your own, with free resources available on the Internet. Spending some time at the keyboard drilling your scales, such that the sharps and flats in each become internalized, will help you to see how different keys are related to each other and how interval relationships function in a tonal context.

Side note: can you gain this understanding using an instrument other than piano? Sure, it’s entirely possible. However, if you don’t have facility or experience with any instruments other than your own voice right now, then piano is likely your best bet for developing these skills. Why? Because you can see all the notes laid out for you in a linear, patterned fashion, which is often not the case with other instruments. A keyboard instrument also enables you to understand and experience chords and multiple clefs in a way that most other instruments do not. Keyboard instruments also have a much lower barrier of entry, in general, than woodwind, brass, or string instruments do, because you do not have to learn how to properly hold, handle, or tune a piano like you would a violin or a clarinet, in order to play it; you do not even need to develop good piano technique, really, in order to plunk out the notes of a scale for the purposes of learning key signatures and key relationships. (You do not even need an actual piano, or even a keyboard. You can download a keyboard app on your phone or tablet, for free, and play around with that. Much cheaper and simpler than trying to get your hands on a cello or a trumpet.)

But, no matter how you learn these skills, you should ideally reach the point where if someone ever came up to you and said, “Quick! What’s IV in F major?” (the Roman numeral referring to the scale degree), you’d be able to answer almost without thinking. (Someone did this to me once, because he, as a jazz musician, believed that most classical musicians’ knowledge of keys and modes was comparatively deficient. He must have fired off half a dozen of these questions, with me answering them accurately and without hesitation each time, before he was forced to admit that maybe some classical musicians know their music theory, after all.)

Additionally, you should learn to think about these things in whatever terms work best for your brain. If scale degree numbers don’t do it for you, then you could use terms like “subdominant.” You could also use solfege syllables. Ideally, you should learn all of these vocabularies, to the point that they become interchangeable in your brain.

(Some musicians will interject here and ask, “What about understanding modes?” While I’m all for studying and understanding as much music theory as you possibly can to help you sight-read, I think that choir singers, in particular, should prioritize deep familiarity with tonality before modes – partly because most “traditional” choir music is tonal, not modal; and I also believe that knowledge of diatonic tonality is easily transferable to modes and will actually help musicians understand modes better, rather than the other way around. So, learn the modes, if you want, especially if you already have a good grasp on tonality and/or are singing a lot of modal music; but if you’re starting from zero or close to it, then don’t worry about modes at first. Focus on tonality.)

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Step Two: Move From Macro to Micro

Once you’ve learned all the musical vocabulary you possibly can, and understand how to apply it, the next step is to get to the point where you no longer need to assign something a word or syllable to understand what it is. You should just be able to look at it and recognize the concept or gesture or detail that you see, and know instinctually what to do about it. Think about it in terms of learning to read a language: as children, we learn the building blocks of written language by sounding out words and learning our language’s phonetics. Then, we eventually progress to the point where we no longer need to sound out words, because we can recognize them at sight. This is, ideally, the point you want to get to with your musical fluency in order to be a good sight-reader. You may, similar to when you encounter a big, fancy, complex word in your native tongue for the first time, need to “sound things out” from time to time, but this should be the exception, not the rule.

This is where the automation begins to happen: when you can read music in “words” as opposed to “letters;” when your brain can finally process things in meaningful chunks, rather than merely as little microunits strung together. Automating the macro is what is going to enable you to read the micro stuff with accuracy.

This is where I think intervallic reading enters the chat. Presumably, at this point, you understand how interval relationships work in a tonal context; so from there, you can extrapolate a bit and also begin to understand how they work in isolation – which comes in really handy for pitch accuracy when the tonal context is murky or even non-existent. I like interval reading because it’s purely objective: a perfect fourth is always a perfect fourth, whether you are singing the orderly music of Bach or utterly unpredictable modern atonal music.

If you can master all of this, you can become a pretty good sight-reader. And considering the lower-than-they-should-be sight-reading standards of today’s classical singing industry, “pretty good” will get you pretty far.

But if you want to take things to the next level and become excellent, then read on.

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What To Do If You Make a Mistake

So, just to get it out of the way: you WILL make mistakes when you sight-read. Even musicians who can read some things with 100% accuracy DO make mistakes from time to time. The goal of being a good sight-reader is not necessarily to get to the point where you can read mistake-free (although, if you do get to that point, then props to you), but to know what to do about your mistakes such that you can learn from them.

So, first of all, when you make a mistake, you should pick up your pencil, circle the thing you messed up, then move the heck on in the reading process. Do not try to dissect what went wrong in the moment. If you let that mistake live rent-free in your brain while you’re trying to sight-read the rest of the piece, you’ll be distracted and mess up even more.

That is the first rule of mistake management in sight-reading: do not let your mistakes derail you, nor allow them to set off some domino effect that ruins your ability to execute for the rest of the phrase/page/piece/what have you.

HOWEVER. I believe it IS important to look at those mistakes you circled in your part after the fact, and determine why your brain interpreted those passages the way it did. Where, exactly, did you trip up, and why? Was it because of an unexpected rhythm? Was it pitch-related? Was there an interval you didn’t expect? Was there a modulation you didn’t see coming? Was there something you didn’t completely understand about the tonal context? Pinpoint what it is, exactly. Get curious about it and treat it like a puzzle, or a scavenger hunt, rather than as a moment of negative self-judgment.

This kind of problem-solving, or perhaps troubleshooting, is one of the most underrated skills when it comes to sight-reading. You will make mistakes, so you should have a process by which you determine why you made those mistakes, as well as how you will fix them. Understanding what information your brain, eyes, or ears need in order to execute a tricky passage correctly will enable you to look up and down and all around in the score for whatever cues, helps, or clues you can grab onto, either aurally or visually, in order to help you do the thing right. (See more on this idea below.)

Also, know this: you are responsible for recognizing, owning, and fixing your own mistakes, as soon as possible. Most conductors will forgive mistakes on a first or sometimes even second read-through, but if certain inaccuracies persist beyond that point, he, and some of your fellow choristers, may start to get a little cranky and impatient. I wouldn’t necessarily think of this as a character flaw, and they probably don’t have anything against you personally – they are simply trying to work as efficiently as possible.

If you don’t feel like you have the tools to fix the mistake in rehearsal and need to work it out at home, then try dropping out momentarily during that passage and listen to what your fellow choristers are doing. If they’re doing it right, then you’ve got some valuable information to go on; if they’re also doing it wrong, you at least won’t be contributing to the wrong. Just jump back in as soon as you reach a phrase where you know what’s going on, and make a note to yourself to fix that mysterious mistake when you’re practicing your music at home.

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Next-Level Ninja Tips

I spent a good deal of time here talking about the basics of rhythms and pitches, because those are the elements that need to be in place first, in order to really excel at sight-reading. But if you have those elements pretty solidly in place, here are a few more things to do and consider that will take your sight-reading – and your musical synthesis – to the next level:

Look it over. Before you even sing a new piece, glance through it to give yourself an understanding of its basic components: tempo, meter, text, key, mode, etc. Take a look also at the structure: are there any repeats (da capos, codas, etc.) that will require weird page-turns? Get a sense for the tessitura, too, so that you know what kind of vocal color/register/quality you might choose.

Harmonic structures. Sometimes it’s helpful to think in terms of what role your part is playing in the overall harmonic context. “I have the root of an F major chord here” or “this is a Piccardy third” can be helpful synthesizing tools. Even a general recognition such as, “this section seems to have e minor vibes” can make a big difference.

Conventions of style (if there are any). By this, I mean those signature musical things that occur over and over again in certain musical styles or certain composers’ works. Singing a lot of Bach? Then you know when he’s approaching a cadence. (Usually. Sometimes he tricks you.) Renaissance polyphony? Look for counterpoint or duetting between voices and crucial internal cadential moments. Handel? He loves his sequences, especially for Messiah-style melismas. Recognizing and anticipating these conventions of style is one of the things that will allow your brain to process things in chunks, thus making the mental load feel a little lighter.

(As a side note, I didn’t realize how much I relied on conventions of style when I sight-read until I started singing with an ensemble that only sang new music. Most of it wasn’t tonal and there were no conventions of style, really, unless you count excessive use of the time signature ⅞. This is a perfect example of why you need tons of brain flexibility and a variety of ways of thinking about music – because you’re inevitably going to encounter something where the things you tend to rely on most are completely absent.)

Reading vertically. When you’re singing in a choir, you’re lucky, because you’ve often got the whole score right in front of you. You can see everyone’s part. Take advantage of that. Look at what clues or hints you might draw from other voice parts to help you do the thing. Circle helpful or necessary cues present in other parts. Draw arrows to reinforce connections you find between voices. Look anywhere and everywhere for information you can use.

Read ahead. You need to be thinking at least a couple beats ahead when you’re reading. If you’re processing things in time, you’re late. If you’re processing things early, you’ll be in time. Note that processing is different from executing. You don’t want to execute earlier than is necessary. You want the processing and executing to run on parallel tracks in your brain, with the processing always a few units ahead of the executing.

This is especially true when it comes to page-turns. Turn as early as you reasonably can. Don’t wait til the last minute, because otherwise you’re playing catch-up when you get to the top of the next page.

Cutoffs. Put the cutoffs and final consonants in the right place when you are reading. Typically, for notes followed by rests, final consonants occur on the beat after the end of the full note value. This is choral singing 101, but you’d be surprised how many singers don’t do this consistently. Furthermore, you should treat the cutoff as its own beat. This will ensure that notoriously obvious consonant sounds like “s” don’t hang over into beats where they don’t belong.

(Yes, there are a handful of situations where you would place cutoffs differently. Use common sense, or just do what your conductor tells you in those cases.)

Initial consonants before the beat. In order for the tempo not to drag, you need to place the vowel on the beat, not the first consonant. Consonant clusters like “spr,” “str,” “cr,” or “cl,” etc. take time to spit out, and need to precede the beat so that we hear the vowel in time. Otherwise, things start to feel behind. Treat those initial consonant clusters as their own mini beat-units, just like you would a final cutoff.

The previous two things being said, prioritize notes and rhythms over text. This is a hard shift for many singers to make, because we are a word-centered people who care about clarity of expression, but it’s the truth: when you’re sight-reading, text is a lower-order concern. If you come across a word you don’t know how to pronounce, don’t allow yourself to get tripped up or preoccupied with it, because you’ve got bigger fish to fry. You can look it up or ask about it later.

Start being musical as soon as possible. This means adhering to all the expressive markings in the score (dynamics, articulation, etc.), but also more implicit things like phrasing. Don’t wait for the conductor to tell you to do these things, and don’t be afraid to make some reasonable proactive interpretive choices, especially if both the musical style and the conductor’s usual preferences are familiar to you. In some cases, this will actually help you learn the music more quickly.

Don’t get too wrapped up in vocal technique. Accept the fact that sight-reading can be mentally and vocally fatiguing. As long as you can figure out what to do technically on subsequent run-throughs, you’ll be okay.

Don’t get complacent. Expect to encounter something unexpected. Conventions of style, for example, are wonderful to rely on, but as we’ve discussed, they’re not consistent or present all of the time. This is, again, why we need more than one way of doing this.

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Practice, Practice, Practice

Thank you for reading this lengthy piece. If you found it helpful, I would encourage you to save it, so you can read through it again and again throughout your journey; additionally, I’d be greatly appreciative if you shared it with someone (or several someones) whom you know would benefit from these insights. Choral singing is an important part of my life, as I know it is for many, and because of that, I believe in doing it with as much excellence as we can each personally muster – which means we can all keep getting better and better at this gorgeous, necessary art form, no matter where we are in our journey or where the art form takes us.

I have several other articles about choral singing on my Substack, discussing topics ranging from vocal technique to ensemble skills to rehearsal etiquette. If you’d like access to those archives, I invite you to become a paid subscriber, which gives you unlimited access to every article I’ve written here.

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Happy Choir New Year, everyone!

I’ve always been an excellent sight-reader.

I don’t remember ever really being “taught” how to do it. I was taught how to solfege; I was taught to recognize intervals both aurally and visually; and a lifetime of music lessons had certainly taught me how to read, feel, and execute rhythms – but I was never actually taught how to sight-read. Nobody, at any point in my musical journey, ever sat me down and said, “Okay, today we’re going to learn to sight-read. Here’s how you do it.”

I don’t say this to make myself out to be some kind of unicorn. Although sight-reading is a skill at which I certainly excel, I am definitely not some kind of prodigy, nor am I an anomaly. I’ve worked with many excellent sight-readers over the course of my career as a vocalist.

But I’ve also worked with many, many singers who are deficient in this skill – singers who have degrees, training, and performance experience very similar to mine; singers who supposedly passed all their aural skills classes in college; who supposedly have the requisite level of musicianship to learn and synthesize a piece of music on their own, without help from a teacher or a coach. And yet, these singers are not good sight-readers.

What gives? Why is it that two singers with the same degrees, experience, and training have very different levels of ability when it comes to sight-reading?

The answer is multi-faceted, and I address some of the elements in this article, which, if you are someone who has always wondered why instrumentalists generally seem to have stronger musical skill sets than singers, you should definitely read. As an instrumentalist-turned-singer myself, I can speak to musical training in both worlds, as well as the results I see of this kind of training on the regular in my professional life.

However, for now, I want to offer a hot take as an answer to this question:

I don’t think college and conservatory music theory and aural skills classes are actually very good at teaching singers how to sight-read.

This is not because the folks teaching these classes at these institutions are bad teachers or unskilled musicians. I’m sure they are neither.

Rather, it has to do with the way this skill is framed and taught in these classes.

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Thinking back to my own experience, my ear training classes in college taught us how to do the following things:

• Solfege, in treble, bass, and the occasional alto clef. We read short exercises out of a textbook, where most of the examples were 8-16 bars, utterly tonal, and never modulated. So we were taught this skill in a very limited and simple context.

• Visual and aural interval recognition, usually in isolation (i.e., not in an actual musical context)

• Melodic dictation (i.e. transcribing a melody that you hear). Most of the time, there was just one voice. Occasionally we were asked for two-voice dictation.

• Harmonic recognition – usually of common cadences (such as a IV-V-I, plagal cadences, or deceptive cadences), or “color chords” like Neapolitan or augmented 6 chords embedded in a brief tonal context

All of these are valuable, necessary skills. I continue to draw on all of these skills, and more, in my life as a professional musician, every single day.

The issue, for the purposes of our sight-reading discussion, however, is that none of these skills actually taught us how to be good sight-readers. “Sight-reading” was just equated with the “solfege” part of class, was approached in isolation, and was never applied to anything more harmonically complex than a hymn in the context of our class. “Sight-reading” was never defined in a broader, more applicable way; nor were we ever told what the skill of sight-reading is actually for.

I know that my experience is not unique, in part from many conversations with fellow singers about their college experiences; but mostly from seeing the evidence of it in the professional world again and again. After well over a decade of choral singing, church gigging, and ringer work, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been one of the better, if not the best, sight-readers in the room. I’ve observed, over and over, the disconnect between the way this skill is taught and the level at which it needs to be developed to get consistent, professional-level results in the real music world. I’ve noticed, time and again, the gaps in singers’ training in this area that, despite their hard work and discipline with their studies, manifest ever so clearly and inconveniently in an actual professional setting.

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Let’s Define Sight-Reading, For Real

When most singers think of the term “sight-reading,” they think of choral auditions where they are handed a short excerpt of music they’ve never seen before, that they then must sing on the spot. In other words, most singers equate “sight-reading” with a sense of pressure to execute.

This is certainly one context in which sight-reading occurs. But I’d like to broaden the definition a bit, both to make it sound less scary and to help us think about why this skill is important, and what it is actually oriented toward.

Very simply put, sight-reading is what you are doing when you look at any piece of music for the first time.

More specifically, sight-reading is the start of the process of musical synthesis that begins the moment you look at any piece of music for the first time, regardless of context.

(Note that this applies to visual encounters with music – i.e., reading actual notes and rhythms in sheet music. It’s called sight-reading for a reason. Learning a piece purely by listening to it is, in itself, a valuable skill, but a different one.)

When you look at a piece of music for the first time, and begin to put all of its elements together, you are sight-reading – whether you are in an audition, a rehearsal, or by yourself in a practice room. The thing that makes each of these contexts feel different is the amount or degree of perceived pressure present in each situation.

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Now Let’s Talk About What Sight-Reading is Actually For

Let’s remember, first and foremost, that sight-reading is a skill. It is a tool, and tools are always for something. Skills are oriented toward something. As musicians, we don’t amass a toolbox of skills for nothing. They all have a point.

And that point, at least in the case of any musicianship-based skills like sight-reading, is musical synthesis.

Musical synthesis implies something much more holistic than simply learning notes, rhythms, and entrances. It is something that encompasses all of that, and more: that is, absorbing the total context in which those things exist.

This means that, when you’re sight-reading, in addition to accurate pitches and rhythms, you’re also aiming for:

• An understanding of the harmonic context in which your part is functioning. This is true whether it’s in a choral piece, an art song, or an opera aria. Vocal lines almost never function in pure isolation.

• And understanding of the macro structure of the piece – i.e., the format.

• An understanding of the musical style, and the conventions commonly found within that style

• An understanding of the recurring musical motives in the piece – rhythmic gestures, sequences, themes, subjects, etc.

• An understanding of the tempo and feel of the piece, informed by the indicated meter

• An understanding of how your vocal line is functioning, musically, at each moment.

• An understanding of how all of the musical markings in the score (dynamics, articulation, phrasing, expressive markings) can be observed and implemented in a way that is appropriate for the context

• An understanding of what kind of vocal tone quality/color is necessary, based on all of the above information

After you’ve read through a piece for the first time, your reaction should not simply be “Phew, I got through it!” It should ideally be, “Okay, I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on here.”

This does not mean you will not make mistakes when you sight-read. Most people do. Obviously we want to get to the point where mistakes are kept to a minimum and won’t derail you, but missteps are permitted during that first encounter – provided you are still able to synthesize as much as you can. Even if you make mistakes, you should still finish that first read-through with a pretty good idea of what just happened, and where things should go next.

This is musical synthesis – using every tool you have as a musician to glean everything you can from a piece on your first encounter with it. And this is what the skill of sight-reading is oriented toward.

The difference between engaging in this process by yourself in a practice room and in a choir rehearsal is the speed at which this needs to occur.

So, I like to say that sight-reading in a choir rehearsal, where the goal is not simply to learn the notes but to progress quickly to the point where the choir can make meaningful music together, the goal of sight-reading is musical synthesis at speed.

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Why Most Academic Models Are Flawed

Given all of this, you can see that sight-reading is about much more than solfege and counting rhythms.

Looking at how sight-reading is taught in most conservatory aural skills classes, however, you wouldn’t know this. There seems to be an outsized emphasis placed on pitch-accuracy systems and methods like solfege, numbers, interval reading, etc., and every music educator seems to have his own preferred method and a defense of why that method is better than every other method out there.

Now, to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any of these systems. I think that every musician should learn solfege, the number system, and how to read by interval. Each has their merits, and the more skills a musician can amass, in my opinion, the better.

The problem is that students in music school are typically taught only, or predominantly, one of these methods when it comes to learning to read music. They are graded on their ability to use the method, rather than on the results that the method is designed to achieve.

Take moveable do solfege, for instance – which seems to be the most popular way to teach young music students to sight-read. Students are taught to assign syllables to diatonic scale degrees, and then taught a handful of other syllables for when things get a little chromatic.

As pretty much any professional musician will tell you, this method, and others like it, loses its usefulness pretty quickly, once you start sight-reading actual music. In real-world situations, not only are you often not able to sing on solfege syllables (instead, you’re singing whatever text is provided in the music), but real music – of virtually any era – modulates a lot, rendering solfege more of an encumbrance than a help. I mean, can you imagine trying to solfege your way through something like Bach’s B Minor Mass, through phrase after phrase that changes key area with every bar? I don’t know about you, but that would fry my brain.

What this example illustrates is that, when it comes to sight-reading real music in the professional world, any one system is going to have its limitations. Whether it’s numbers or solfege or intervals, you need more than just one way of looking at music if you’re going to be a successful real-world sight-reader.

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What It Actually Takes to Be a Good Sight-reader

This is because sight-reading, while it is a skill in its own right, is actually a reflection of an entire toolbox of skills that a musician has amassed over the course of their training.

If you want to be a good sight-reader, you need to develop not just one or two ways of reading music that will help you with pitch accuracy, but a whole arsenal of skills to draw upon that will help you synthesize with speed.

Think of it like arrows in a quiver, or a set of golf clubs. Each arrow, or club, will help you accomplish a specific task. You cannot use a putter when you should be using a driver. They’re oriented toward different, specific results. You cannot – I repeat, simply cannot – rely on just one musical tool the entire time and expect to sight-read well in every circumstance.

Not only do you need to have all of these musical tools in your possession, but you must also know how and when to deploy them. You need to develop a sense of which tools are going to help you get the result – which, again, is musical synthesis, sometimes at speed – at any given time.

This means that you need to be able to switch back and forth and among tools with ease, speed, and fluidity. It is like being fluent in a language. You know the language’s individual building blocks – parts of speech, sentence structures, idioms, verb conjugations, etc. – but you don’t consciously think about those things when you’re speaking, or even when you’re writing. Instead, you’re thinking about how they all work together synergistically to create a unified whole that conveys a communicable, salient point.

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There are a couple reasons this is so important:

The first is that real-world music is highly varied. No one single system or method is going to work for everything you will ever sight-read – especially if your chosen system for pitch accuracy, for example, is wedded to the diatonic scale somehow. Solfege and numbers will not help you if the music isn’t tonal.

The second is that, when you’re sight-reading, you’re multitasking, so you want to make things as easy as possible for your brain. You want to reduce your mental load by automating as many skills and musical elements as you can. And being constantly, consciously preoccupied with what tools you are using and how you are using them and then getting tangled in a giant web – that is, objectively, too much work for your poor brain, and thus will prevent the automation that will ultimately make this endeavor a success. You need to develop enough acuity with your tools so that you can implement them without having to think about the fact that you’re implementing them. Think, again, of the language-learning analogy. Our brains automate language, so that they don’t become hopelessly mentally fatigued. Our brains can automate musical tasks, too – and this kind of musical fluency needs to be the goal.

Remember, the whole point is not just to execute accurately – it’s to synthesize your part within a musical context. You should use whatever tools and skills you have that are going to help you to do that in each moment, rather than just sticking with one system the whole time.

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The Most Underrated Sight-Reading Hack: Listening

It should also have become obvious to you at this point that although it’s called sight-reading, this process of musical synthesis involves listening and observing, as well. Absorbing a total context means looking at the blueprint of that context, visually, in the score; but it also means listening to and observing what you see and hear happening around you.

I’ve seen a lot of singers sight-read with relatively high amounts of accuracy, but they appear to do so in a vacuum. They read their line as if in isolation, seeming to perhaps grab a cue here or there from another voice part, but generally just focusing on their own.

How do I know? They often sing too loud, or they rush. They’re confident, after all, so I guess this makes sense, on a human nature level.

But this is not the vibe, choir friends. We can do much, much better than this.

If you are a person who can already read with high levels of accuracy, I challenge and encourage you to take it to the next level. Can you be accurate while also being musical? Can you sing all the right notes, while also listening to your section mates so you can blend and balance with them? Can you get all your entrances while also experimenting and being flexible with your vocal colors, according to the style of the music? Can you sing with accuracy while also making interesting, proactive musical choices; adhering to all the dynamics and articulation without the conductor pointing them out; and making it sound classy and excellent all at once?

If you can do all that, then congratulations: you’ve reached expert-level sight-reading.

If you can read accurately but struggle with these kinds of details, see if you can start folding them into your sight-reading process one by one. Spend a rehearsal focusing on one particular artistic element alongside your musical accuracy, until that skill becomes as automated as your pitches and rhythms.

In the next article, I’m going to dive a bit more into my musical background and explain how I not only became an excellent reader, but an excellent musical synthesizer, AND offer some super-cool ninja sight-reading tips that you can use in your own sight-reading, particularly if you, like me, do a lot of choral singing.

For now, I wish you all a happy choir new year, and happy sight-reading!

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Today, I’ve launched a new way for us to connect on Substack: the Subscriber Chat!

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way and share recent articles and newsletters, and you can jump into the discussion and we can get to …

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This is a picture of the basilica of Sacre Coeur, located at Montmartre, in Paris, France. I had the opportunity to visit this beautiful church two years ago, in June 2024, on a pilgrimage trip to France. (You can read about my visit to the D-Day beaches at Normandy, which occurred on the same trip, here.)

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Sometimes, the texts of the Mass propers blow right by me, as I’m too focused on singing the notes to absorb the meaning of the words. (My Latin comprehension is also not that good. Those two years of high school Latin were a loooong time ago.)

But I took one look at this one and knew immediately what it was. Because one does not celebrate the feast o…

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Because, let’s be honest — in a real-world music-making situation, especially if you work in the industry, the artistic results are what matters most. Let’s orient our practicing toward being able achieve results — whether that’s on our own, or when we’re collaborating with other musicians.

I go live every Tuesday at 11 AM ET here on Substack to discuss many more topics like this!

(Please note: the next one, May 26, will be at 2 PM ET, not the normal 11 AM time.)

Hope to see you tuning in some time!

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I have never really liked typing, honestly – of any kind. This is probably because, like many other humans out there, there are several aspects of who I am that don’t fit neatly…

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