Sight-reading one line a day, and why I hated it for three months
Fifteen months in, I could play about six pieces decently and could not read a new piece of music at anything like the speed I could read a sentence. Each new piece meant two weeks of decoding before any actual practicing began, and I was starting to memorize pieces as a way of avoiding the page. Everyone I asked said the same thing: sight-read every day, easy material, never repeat it. So I started in July with a graded sight-reading book and a rule: one line, roughly eight measures, once through, then turn the page and never look at it again.
The first month was miserable in a way I did not expect. The lines were trivially easy, children’s exercises, five notes in each hand, and I still stumbled through them. I timed the first week: about four minutes per eight-measure line, including the half minute I spent staring at it before starting. Four minutes to read eight measures that a ten-year-old with two years of lessons would play on sight. It felt like being handed a book and discovering you could only spell.
What I did, and kept doing even when it seemed useless: say the key and time signature out loud. Find the first note of each hand and place the fingers. Count two measures of the pulse aloud. Then play, and this was the hard rule, without stopping for mistakes. A wrong note gets left behind. Stopping to fix it is practicing, not reading. The metronome stayed off for the first six weeks because it only made me panic.
By the end of August the lines took about two and a half minutes. By early October, around a minute and a half, with the metronome on at a slow setting, and I had moved one level up in the book. The change was not in my hands but in my eyes. I stopped seeing individual notes and started seeing shapes: a third, a scale going up, a chord I already knew. The intervals became what I read, and the note names became something I looked up only when the shape was unfamiliar.
The clearest proof came last week. I opened a new piece, a Schumann melody from the Album for the Young, and played it through, slowly and with mistakes, in one sitting. In June that would have taken a week of decoding. One line a day, about five minutes, for a hundred days. I still do not enjoy it. I do not intend to stop.