Interview with Russell Steinberg
I interview my friend and former music teacher, Russell Steinberg, about sight-reading
Russell Steinberg is a composer and conductor based in Los Angeles. I first met him in high school: he conducted my chamber ensemble and taught my AP music theory class. We’ve remained in touch over the years, in part because my mother worked as the administrative director for his Los Angeles Youth Orchestra during the final years of her life, and he has become a family friend.
Russell played a formative role in my development as a musician and a human being. Although I had played the violin since I was four years old, he was the first person to show me that music can be fascinating on an intellectual level. He also helped me to understand the structural similarities between music and literature– If not for him I certainly would never have cited Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in my dissertation on classical Arabic poetry! And if not for him, I would not have a relationship with music that would allow me to conceive of this sight-reading project.
In addition to being a virtuosic composer and performer and a brilliant teacher, Russell is also an inspiring sight-reader. I still remember watching in awe as he sight-read an orchestral score on the piano.
For all these reasons, I am thrilled that he agreed to be interviewed here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Some of the sections are more technical than others, but I’ve provided sub-headings: if you aren’t a musician and you find that the discussion is becoming too technical to follow, you might try skipping forward to the next section.
Background and High-Level Principles
RS: I wanted to talk to you about my perspective on sight reading because I had the same question you did when I was in graduate school. I thought I was a pretty good musician, and then I started to realize I couldn't sight-read, and I got very depressed. I couldn't understand: how did I get into my 20s, and I couldn't sight read? It didn't make any sense to me, because I understood music. From that point, it took me about 3-4 years to learn to sight-read at a level that I think was really proficient. And I'm very good at it now.
EC: You are very good at it.
RS But it wasn't natural, is what I'm saying. It wasn't natural, and I had the same frustration you did. I couldn't find any teacher or book that really talked about it. I mean, it's like trying to find a book on practicing, to be honest. People write a lot about practicing, but usually the books are filled with extremely unuseful encomiums and generalizations. They don't really break things down in a way that's helpful for me.
My discovery was that sight reading is a lot like driving a manual shift car.
EC: I don't know how to drive a manual shift car! But in what way is it similar to that?
RS: When you see someone doing it, you think, ‘That's impossible. How can all of these actions be done at the same time?’ There's a foot that goes between a brake, an accelerator, and a clutch– so there's 3 different pedals you have to work with your feet, but then one hand is on a steering wheel, and the other hand is on a clutch that can move in all these different geometric patterns. Those patterns determine whether you engage the driveshaft in gears 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, reverse, or neutral. So there's all these different patterns going on, which seems to be a completely different type of motion. And then the feet are doing something totally different, but if they're not coordinated the right way, then all you do is lurch, and the car just stalls. And in fact, that's what happens when you first learn to drive with a clutch. It’s hard to even imagine: how does one coordinate all of those different actions?
Typing is another analogy. We don't even think about how complicated it was when we first began typing, how to be able to coordinate our hands. One hand might be higher, another one might be lower, and then you've got to deal with the thumbs that are doing something different, or if you were like me and you grew up in the paleolithic era, you had a carriage return, and you had to get the hands there.
So, I guess the first thing to say about sight reading is that it's not a simple act. It's a complicated combination of many small motions. A big part of it is allowing the brain to have time to build the neural pathways that allow you to clump discrete tasks into a single routine. When you go to type ‘the’, all you have to do is think ‘the’, and your fingers know what to do. And when you're driving a manual shift car, you just think, ‘I'm going forward’, and that automatically just means I'm going to go into first, engage the clutch, and then second, then third or fourth or whatever you're doing. You don't have to think about every step. It becomes a single routine at some point, and then you don't have to think about it: you only think about it as one thing rather than as half a dozen things.
This process of clumping is innate, of course, to any learned skill. But we forget that sight reading also requires that. You know when you learned the viola or violin, you had to do that. You went through such pain to figure out how you were going to coordinate the bow, and the left hand, and even to hold the instrument, let alone do all the billion things you do. But we forget that sight-reading also involves many different pieces that have to be learned. That was the first thing that I think is important to realize, because if you aren’t kind to yourself, you can just be constantly frustrated and upset.
And then the second thing is: when you learn something complex, you want to limit the number of variables you're dealing with at one time. To get back to the car analogy, when you’re first learning to drive a stick shift, you don't drive in open traffic! You practice in a vacant lot somewhere where you can make lots of mistakes, and you don't have to focus on doing everything at once. The first thing you might want to actually focus on is getting used to the hand movements while your foot’s on the clutch. And then you gradually start to combine things.
Sight-reading is the same way. With piano, it's obvious: you work on one hand at a time on piano. For me, that's what really opened the door. I used Bach. I still think Bach is the best for sight reading because you can find simple pieces by Bach, but his patterns are always changing, and that pattern recognition is one of the skills you want to build. Bach pieces are never intuitive to me –they never go where you think they're going to go, and there's always something a little different–so you have to focus and pay attention. For me, on the keyboard, the Anna Magdalena Notebook was a fantastic way to start. Bach wrote these pieces for his second wife, who was a singer and a very accomplished musician, but was not a keyboard player. The idea was to help her with keyboard playing.
So I just started first playing with just the right hand alone, going through the book, and then left hand alone. One of the variables you want to control first is regularity of time, so you want to find a tempo that’s slow enough that you can play the piece without changing it. Obviously you don't have to do the whole piece, just sections and phrases.
I think that for viola you want the same kind of thing. You want to find something to play that will limit the variables. Perhaps for the first sight-reading exercise you want to pick something that doesn’t have lots of string crossings, for instance, or something that stays within first position, without changing. You’re looking for something that's limited so that you have fewer things to focus on as you're going.
Practicing Chunking with Kreutzer Etudes
EC: I've recently started trying to read through the Kreutzer etudes as transcribed for viola. I've been thinking a lot about this point you raised about chunking. That idea corresponds, by the way, with what I've been reading about how learning happens. It seems pretty clear to me that I'm looking at too small a set of notes, and that I want to develop the ability to look at a larger passage and comprehend the whole thing at once, so that my attention is freed up. I don't know whether you're familiar with Kreutzer in particular– it’s a book of exercises written for violin.
RS: No, I'm not, actually. Share one of them with me!
EC: It's got arpeggios in different keys. It sounds musical, but it reminds me of rhythmic passages in a piece that aren’t the melody. It does similar things in a lot of different keys, and then it shifts to doing a different thing. It starts pretty simple, and then it starts getting more complicated and introduces one idea at a time. It's usually used to build technique. I don't think it's generally used for sight-reading, but it seems like it could be useful for exactly this thing that you're describing.
RS: Well, the beautiful thing about sight reading is that you can use anything. But an etude would be an example of limiting variables, right? Because it usually is focusing on a specific technique. And so the next step after that is just what you were talking about – being able to chunk things in your mind. That's where you want to get to. The end goal is to be able to look at a piece of music and be able to envision it completely before you play it. That's how you're staying ahead, when you're sight-reading, so you're not reading note by note. Can I share screen here?
EC: Sure!
RS: [pulls up the first etude in the Kreutzer book on screen-share]. So this is a Kreutzer etude, right?
EC: Yes!
RS: Okay! So this would be the next thing to work on: A good sight reader is able to just clump together instantly what's going on in a line. And then a really, really good sight reader can actually see an entire page, which is very, very cool to do.
What do you see when you look at this? And this isn't a test, by the way, I just want to know what it is you're seeing.
EC: I did read this a couple of days ago, so I don't know whether that is unfair… but I see a bar-length figure here that repeats several times, and then another one here, which also repeats. It looks like the figure goes down by a third, and then by a third again? I didn’t notice that part when I read this through the first time. So I guess I’m already doing some chunking here, but I hope that if I could practice more of these, I would be able to pick up more of the patterns. I like the fact that it does the same pattern in different keys. I hope that will help me to train my mind to see the whole pattern as it occurs in different keys.
RS: Good! So before playing, it's a really good idea to take a minute or two to really look at a piece before you even try to play anything. The problem with beginners is they go note to note, and as you say, chunking's really important. When I look at this page, I just look at the whole thing like a painting, so to speak. What I see is: this piece is about arpeggios and scales. It starts out all arpeggios, and now here, it looks like it's starting scales. And scales are one of the most basic forms of chunking we have in music, right? So that’s scales, and then if my eyes go down here, I start to notice these accidentals, and I start to see now that we're having some other patterns here. It's getting a little bit more complicated. But otherwise, it's pretty regular.
Sight-Reading, Reading Comprehension, and Music Theory
EC: Interesting! This strategy that you described, where you look at the whole piece and try to detect big arcs, is also something that teachers of reading comprehension encourage students to do when they're looking at a whole text. Teachers encourage the students to look at subheadings, for instance, and anticipate major themes and shifts you expect to see in the text before you actually start reading, so that you have an idea about where you’re going before you start.
RS: You bring up something really important, and this, I think, is a real key to sight reading: 90% of music is predictable. You want to be able to focus on the remaining 10%. A little theory can be helpful here. It’s important to know that this piece is in F major. Then I see each arpeggio as a chord. F major, D minor– like you said, going down a third, Bb major, then back up to D. In other words, each chord is stretched out like an accordion, but I’m seeing chords as I go.
If you just look at this first pattern, in the first measure, which is basically the motive of the piece– it's just a triad, right? It's an F major triad – the notes F A C. That part of it is extremely formulaic. This is like having an anchor. Once you see that it's FAC, you can imagine on the viola: FAC, with second finger on the D string, open A, and for second finger on the A string. Everything else is just commentary.
It’s extremely helpful to see that. And then the next line, everything here is just… it's just DFA, it's just a D minor triad. And again, everything else is commentary.
It almost doesn't matter exactly what you're playing; as long as you're playing the right chord, you're getting most of the information. With sight reading, you're not looking for 100% accuracy anyway. You're looking to capture the gestalt. And of course, in order to capture the gestalt, you need to understand what is important, which requires some amount of comprehension of the thing that you are reading.
That takes time to knit that in your brain. It took me a lot of time, because when you're doing it, everything's equally important. That's why you want to spend time looking at a piece before you start, because instead of just a sea of notes, it becomes something that is intellectually much simpler. And the simpler it is, in your apprehension, the easier it is to play.
EC: one thing I've been thinking about is that it would be probably useful to improve my reading comprehension by focusing on a little bit of music theory. If I were going to pick one thing to focus on, what should it be?
Would it be worth practicing looking at a key signature, knowing what key it is, and then being able to recognize the different chords based on their role in that key, with the tonic and dominant and so forth?
RS: Nope, I don’t think that’s critical for sight-reading. I mean, it can be helpful to, but I don’t think it’s the top priority. Just be able to recognize what the chord is. For instance, recognize that these notes are part of an F major chord– F-A-C. Knowing what chord you’re playing will give you such a firm anchor when you're playing. It'll give you a confidence that you know where you're going.
Practicing Rhythmic Sight-Reading
EC: Of course, in addition to the correct harmony, the other essential thing is for the beat is to be in the right place.
RS: Yep.
EC: I notice that I struggle with transitions between different kinds of rhythms, especially when the note values are very different. I worry that Kreutzer won’t help me with that. Do you have any advice about that?
RS: I do, but it gets back to what I said about limiting variables. In the Kreutzer, the rhythmic variable isn't even in the piece, right? Every note is equal, so there’s no rhythmic thing going on in this piece. That’s good, because then you can focus on shapes and chords. Your instinct to do that is good. But then it would be also be good to focus on rhythm where the music isn’t too complicated. That controls the opposite variable.
I thought we did this in Music Theory. You learn a vocal technique for talking about the beats. For quarter notes it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, For eighth notes it’s 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. And then 16th notes are 1 ee and a 2 ee and a 3 ee and a 4 ee and a. This trains you to feel the grid inside your body. You can find rhythm exercises online. Doing them without the instrument is also really helpful: you can just clap the rhythms at first.
EC: I was wondering whether it might be valuable for me to do something that focuses just on pitch, and then to do clapping stuff, and then to try to integrate them. Is that similar to your practicing first the left hand, and then the right hand, and then putting them together?
RS: Well, you said it so beautifully. I mean, that was what I was describing about my analogy with learning to drive a manual car. There's nothing complicated. It's just when you try to do it all at once, that it suddenly seems to be so complicated. That's why I think limiting the variables really helps you to focus on that.
This reminds me of something I learned something I learned from a teacher in graduate school, Malcolm Cole. He told me that if you see a lot of fast notes on the page, you can just make the assumption that all the other variables are very simple.
In other words, if you see lots of notes going like crazy, assume the harmony must be super simple to hold all that together. And vice versa: if you see something on the page that's very open and easy, assume it probably has some very difficult harmonic variables. I have found that to be true.
Stopping and Rereading
The last thing I wanted to mention was that people told me, ‘You should never, never go back. Once you sight-read something, you have to keep sight-reading new things’. And I found that to be completely untrue. With the Anna Magdalena Notebook, I sucked at it. I mean, I really sucked with just even right and left hand alone…and so I just did it all over again.
I don't mean that you should stop while you're playing, but just keep doing the same piece. Do that same Kreutzer etude for a couple of months until it feels comfortable, because I guarantee you, what you're doing is knitting all the neural circuitry that you need, and that will apply then to another piece that you don't know. Because music is all based on the same patterns. So do one etude at a time, and do it a few times until it feels smoother, and then go on to the next one.. I think that's a good idea.
We're not trying to be perfect, but trying to get closer. What I found for myself was that I did get better each time, and after a couple weeks, then I said, okay, I'm ready to go on the left hand. And then after a couple weeks, I thought, OK, now I can try hands together.
EC: Do you think that if I mess up it's better to just try to keep on going and maintain a steady beat, and then do it all over again, rather than stopping and fixing it in the moment? Or if I find myself making mistakes too often, should I be slowing down?
RS: Both. The whole point of sight reading is training yourself not to stop. To be honest, that's probably 99% of it. It’s really important. So no, you don't want to practice stopping. You want to practice not stopping. And then, when you're done, engage your mind. Look at it, and silently think about it. Analyze it, think about it, then do it again without stopping. And if you still can't play it without making lots of mistakes, slow the rhythm, and if it's something you still can't play, then you need an easier piece to sight-read. And there’s no shame in that.
What will start to happen is that you'll eventually get more and more fluid, because more and more of the stuff you've been practicing comes up in each new piece. Especially if you're doing tonal music, the same patterns constantly recur. And you'll start to chunk more and more. Your eyes will see, the F Minor melodic scale, and just like when you type, you don't even have to look at the individual notes, and your eye is already moving ahead to the next thing.
And then, of course, that's where you want to get to next, where your eyes are always anticipating the next moment, so you're always playing in the past. That's what makes really great sight-reading, right?
What To Do When You Get Lost
EC: This is not mostly a piano question, but you also play viola. So when you're playing viola, when you get off from other people who are playing with you, what strategies do you use to find them? Supposing you don’t have the score in front of you?
RS: That's really, really hard. It's about being aware. I always look for cadences, where new things start.
Because if I get lost, I'll stop playing, and I'll wait till they hit what looks like is a cadence. Then I’ll know we’re probably together, and I can start again. It doesn't always work, but that's… that's a pretty effective way. I find the most difficult part of playing chamber music is the rests. And {our mutual friend} was the one who showed me to silently press the beats with the left hand on your fingerboard. Each measure got a finger. And I found that was incredibly helpful for not getting lost.
Maintaining Focused Attention While Sight-Reading
EC: I feel like my sight reading is wildly inconsistent from one occasion to another based largely on my mood. I wonder whether you have any theories about how to maintain a state of mind while sight reading that allows for ideal focus on the task at hand.
RS: You're getting now to a different sphere that's even, in many ways, more important, which is, how do you maintain perfect attention? It really gets into meditation. How do you be present? I've been exploring that idea seriously the last few years because I've started mindful meditation. Your mind is going to wander, okay? That's just what the mind does. Musicians have all had that experience. So the question is, how do you gently bring it back before you've reached a crisis stage? Have you done meditation yourself?
EC: I’ve participated in various meditation exercises in situations when told to do so. I’ve put a good faith effort into it in those situations, and I wouldn’t say it had no effect, but I’ve never felt able to make meditation authentically my own.
RS: There are many different tools people have in meditation to be able to gently stay in the moment. What you learn in meditation is just to become aware when your mind is distracted. And then you just try to guide it back.
The answer for me in music was to create a musical narrative, so when I'm performing something, I always have an idea of what I'm trying to express. That is my own idea, so I know what the next moment is. I create a sequence that engages my mind, like when you're watching a film, so that my attention is engaged and my fingers are not just mindlessly playing. And I think you have to discover the same thing in sight reading.