SIGHT READING

 

I did my Grade 1 piano exam when I was five, almost six.

 

I was small for my age; I had waist-length fair hair which went almost blonde in the summer months.  I was very quiet and shy but I loved music.  I’d just started dance lessons too, and was starting to daydream about being a ballerina when I grew up.

 

Yes.  I was one of those children who, if not lost in a book, was probably trying to stand on one leg or attempting valiantly to play some scales.

 

Anyway, when I trotted nervously into the room to do my Grade 1 piano, I kind of remember the examiner looking at me as if to say, ‘Are you serious?  I’m a proper, Associated Board Examiner, I’ll have you know, and you’ve sent me in this... this... this infant?!’

 

I remember being so nervous that I felt as if my hands wouldn’t find any of the notes I’d practised, but I passed.  Not with any great flamboyance, but still.  I was finishing Primary 1 with Grade 1 piano.  I stumbled my way through my three pieces and my scales (I liked scales).  Then it came.  The awful thing.  The thing I couldn’t do.

 

The sight reading.

 

Sight reading, if you’ve never taken music lessons or done music exams, is hell on earth if you’re a nervous almost-six-year-old.  They present you with a piece of music you’ve never seen before, pitched at roughly the correct standard for the grade you’re doing.  You have a few minutes to look at it, and then you have to play it.

 

I remember my Grade 1 sight reading.  I mean, I played lots of notes.  I’m sure some of them were in the piece propped up in front of me.  I played some quavers, some crotchets, some chords.  I used both hands at the same time.  I finished with notes that sounded halfway all right together.  But I don’t think my faltering attempts bore much resemblance to what the Very Important Examiner expected to hear, and I remember turning around afterwards, ready to face the aural tests, and him just looking at me as if to say, ‘How strange.’

 

I also remember what he wrote on the feedback sheet, though I don’t remember the mark (though I do remember it was low).  He wrote two words.  An epigram.  ‘Rather vague’.

 

I got better at sight reading as the years progressed, and once I’d reached Grade 7 (when I was about 15) and Grade 8 (in my second-last year at school), I actually enjoyed it.  Much as I enjoyed the unseen poem challenge in English Literature exams, I enjoyed making sense of sight reading.  I enjoyed finding the melody, the themes, the chords.  When I actually liked what I discovered, it made me really happy.  At home, in the school holidays, I sight-read my way through sonatas and exam pieces from other years, imagining I could play them, hearing what they should sound like in my mind, even though my far-from-perfect playing never quite translated that way on the keys in front of me.

 

I've made just one New Year’s Resolution for 2021.  I want to learn to play the piano again.  I never quite gave up, but my playing has grown worse and worse over the years, through lack of opportunity or time to practise.  I’ve decided to put that right this year, a little at a time.  Even if I get to play only a couple of times during the working week, I’m going to keep trying.  Encouraged by a music teacher friend, I’m rediscovering the joy that playing used to bring me, even when I was only just gaining a pass in my various grades.  Of all the things I tried to excel at while growing up, it was one of the skills I was worst at; perversely, it was one of the things I enjoyed the most... perhaps because the expectations of my parents and my teacher remained reassuringly low. 

 

When you pick up music again after many years’ break, though, playing even familiar pieces feels like sight reading again.  You stumble.  You stop.  You find yourself peering at the score, and stopping to pick out a chord.  Setting up the metronome to recover your sense of tempo.  Playing scales and scales and scales as a kind of repetitive physiotherapy for your hands, which are aching almost unbearably from all the typing and scrolling and stylus wielding involved in months of working from home. 

 

And all of that is like sight reading as well.

 

I never want to hear or see phrases like ‘the new normal’ or ‘in these unprecedented times’ or ‘keeping positive, and testing negative!’ again, for however long I live.  But like every cliché in the world, they’re based on truth.  The time is out of joint.  I’m sight reading my way through ‘wfh’.  A sense of work-life balance is almost impossible when your home life and your working life are merged.  I’m trying to find the melody of online lessons that make sense, the harmony of a way of working that my students find acceptable, the chord sequences of maintained good relationships with colleagues, the rhythm of a working day which doesn’t last all night.

 

And I’m fumbling. Playing so many wrong notes.  Hitting so many accidental discords.  Getting my key signatures mixed up, and leaving too many cadences interrupted.

 

And the thing is:  it’s the same for everyone. 

 

Whether you’re a teacher, mostly working from home and being vilified online for your cowardice; a nurse or doctor, applauded from doorsteps but not offered a pay rise; a care worker, taking daily risks without a vaccine; working in essential retail, argued with by shoppers who won’t wear masks; an overburdened undertaker, an exhausted delivery driver or an exasperated Police Officer… you’re sight reading.  All the time.  You’re trying to make sense of the symbols in front of you.  The notes are shifting before your eyes and the fingering on the score is tying you in knots…

 

The thing that scares me most, though, is that the people who are supposed to be guiding us through all this look as if they’re sight reading as well.  They increasingly look haunted; dishevelled; ill.  It’s as if they know there is no proper melodic theme.  They know the key changes are jarring; that all the chords are discords and the rhythm is all wrong.

 

Here’s how it feels to me. 

 

The small child is doing Grade 1 sight reading forever.  But not even the Examiner can work out how it should sound.