Sight Reading: Rhythms & Rests

PRACTICE RHYTHMS
Jazz is a very rhythmic music and many rhythmic figures appear repeatedly in published charts. Many jazz “conception” etude books focus on the basic rhythms found in jazz and these are a good source for building a vocabulary of rhythms.

Whereas notes (musical pitches) are associated with vibrations at frequencies in the aural range (approximately 50 Hz to 20 kHz), rhythms deal with “vibrations” in the range of physical (mechanical) perception – i.e. you feel rhythms in your body. This is why tapping a foot to the beat helps you stay aligned with the metric pulse. Practicing rhythms by involving the body in physical motion (hand clapping or foot stomping) can help embed a rhythmic vocabulary in your memory. I suggest tapping a foot (or both feet), while simultaneously clapping and speaking the rhythmic figure being practiced. Use of a metronome is also indispensable here.

COUNT THE RESTS
Music, like fine art and effective graphic design, is composed of positive and negative space: sound and silence. The boundary between the positive and negative space defines contours and gives shape to the image (visual or aural).
Larry Liberson, Assistant Principle Clarinetist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, once told me the number one mistake made by candidates auditioning for a position with this world-class orchestra is a failure to count the rests. While practicing or playing a piece of music unaccompanied, the general rule is to count out all rests with a duration of two measures or less. If the measures are “short” (e.g. cut time) or if a fast tempo is indicated, count rests up to four measures in length. When playing in an ensemble, especially when sight-reading, count all multi-measure rests carefully – do not assume that your next entrance will occur at a “predictable” place or that the conductor will cue you.

The meaning of a musical rest is not “relax”, but rather “be silent”. Give as much attention to playing the rests as you do to playing the notes. Most people are not naturally comfortable with silence – we instinctively want to fill the empty space with sound. John Cage took this idea to an extreme with his composition 4’33”.

John Cage’s 4’33”

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TACET

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Another Installment on Sight-Reading

You can apply the following tips for improving your sight-reading equally to any genre of music but I have endeavored to address some of the challenges specific to jazz.

PRACTICE READING

The best way to gain a skill is to practice it. Make sight-reading a regular part of your practice routine. Collect music of all kinds as sources for your sight-reading practice – especially if it looks too difficult for your current skill level. Good sources of music for sight-reading (and practice in general) are the many jazz etude books that are now available.

Be on the lookout for alternate sources of music for sight-reading. When I began playing the baritone saxophone, I discovered that the instrument’s range is identical to that of the cello. Since E-flat transposing instruments can read concert-pitch bass clef as treble clef with a modification of the key signature, the whole repertoire of unaccompanied cello solos became available to me for sight-reading.

SCALES, PATTERNS, AND IDIOMS

The easiest music to read by sight is music you already know. Most music, and especially jazz, is constructed from fundamental building blocks of scales and patterns. Learn to play and, most importantly, to recognize these scales and patterns, and you already “know” a significant amount of music. Sight-reading then becomes an exercise in recognizing and executing larger chunks of music instead of reacting to a string of individual notes. This is analogous to how we learn to read words. When a child first learns to read, he sees the individual letters and “sounds out” each new word. After developing a vocabulary of recognized patterns of letters (words), reading becomes more spontaneous and fluid. When you begin seeing musical patterns that are part of your musical vocabulary, your mental effort is redirected away from merely playing the notes and toward a deeper musical comprehension.

Learn as many scales as you can. Start with the 12 major and 12 (melodic) minor scales but do not stop there. Learn the harmonic minors, natural and other modal minors, augmented (whole-tone) scales, diminished, pentatonic, blues – the list is endless! Also, learn the “chord” for each scale – the arpeggiation of the chord tones. It is
important not only to learn to play the scales and chords but to recognize them when they appear within a piece of music.

Patterns, idioms, or riffs, are the clichés of music. Some of these clichés are instrument-specific and involve the use of special techniques. Many patterns are formulaic rearrangements of the
notes that make up a scale or chord. There are many books on the market that focus on patterns of various types. Learning to recognize and play these patterns is “expanding your vocabulary”. The more patterns you know, the less often your brain has to stop during sight-reading to “look up” an unfamiliar pattern.

Sight Reading

The following is an excerpt from an article I am writing about the importance of learing to read music by sight.

I learned the importance of developing excellent sight reading skills very early in my musical education. When I was a sophomore in high school, I auditioned for a position in the Oakland Youth Symphony. In addition to performing a prepared solo and being able to play any of the twelve major and twelve melodic minor scales on command, I was expected to read at sight a piece of music with which I was completely unfamiliar. This was to be my first real test of my sight-reading skills and I was terrified. (And, as I recall, I was all the more nervous knowing that the sole judge of my audition was the Symphony’s director, Irv Monroe – principle flutist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra).

The page put before me was the opening theme of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, consisting of a syncopated rhythmic figure in 6/8 time. Is it in six or in two? How fast? And how does that rhythm go, anyway? I thought I performed terribly and was prepared to be humiliated by rejection. I was surprised to learn that not only was I accepted but I was awarded the position of principle clarinet, a chair usually reserved for a senior.

Figure 1 – Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, Clarinet I

My tutors had often touted the importance of reading by sight and they often had me sight-read a portion of the next week’s lesson. It was this first nerve-racking experience that convinced me they were right and provided the motivation for me to develop and hone the skill. The payoff was the confidence to play anything put before me, whether as an unaccompanied soloist or as a member of a large ensemble.