Joy of Sightreading

I can lose myself for hours playing and singing through new-to-me music. As a child, when I visited my grandparents I’d disappear to the basement and plop myself down at the old upright piano after digging through the treasure chest of old songs in the wobbly wooden piano bench—Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust”, Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House”, Stuart Hamblin’s “This Old House”… As a chorister, I love those first-of-the-season rehearsal sight reads through weeks of upcoming Fall and Winter repertoire or singing the new Christmas music the first week in October. I once had a church singer job at an orthodox Christian church in Denver where the pro choir of 12 singers would rehearse a classical mass (Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, von Weber…) at 8am on Sunday and then sing the movements at the appropriate time in the liturgy—a new sung mass every week from the organ loft perched like an invisible angel choir behind the congregation. In San Francisco and Chicago I recorded choral demos for various publishers. Twelve SATB singers would arrive at a recording studio, receive a stack of choral octavos or pre-print galleys, sightread through a song for markings and sound levels, then start recording! It usually took about an hour per anthem to record and layers two or three perfect takes to sound like a choir of 24 or 36 singers. That was really intense and really fun! I’m mostly digital these days, but I used to return from every music conference with a stack of print books and spend hours reading through the repertoire anthologies. I’m a bit out of practice these days, but nothing lifts my mood like grabbing a random book from the shelf and sight reading just for fun. There are no expectations about singing it perfectly or for an audience. The joy is in the doing and mistakes are part of the process and dopamine rush. Sightreading, for me, is temporary, spontaneous, and liberating. Like a “table read” in theater, sightreading is also a precursor for the practice, repetition, ensemble, and memorization needed to prepare for performance. Take a moment to enjoy that first read before worrying about the finished product!