The Evolution of the Method of Teaching Playing at Sight in Piano Classes

Abstract

The ability of a piano pupil to read from sight, to perform compositions that are new for him is considered to be an extremely important skill of a musician. The first guidebooks for musical pedagogy appeared in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, however reading from sight had not been singled out as a separate issue. The active search for the most effective ways of teaching sight-reading in the piano class began from the mid-20th century. Since the 1970s there have appeared works of musician scholars who comprehended theoretically the process of reading from sight. In them the essence of this skill is revealed with a reliance on psychophysical regular occurrences, which are examined also from the positions of the level of the preparation of the pupils. What becomes characteristic is the activization of the integral process of perception and sounding out of sight-reading in non-traditional creative forms. Among these are classes in small groups, in which special conditions are created for effective consolidation of skills. They make it possible for a pedagogue to apply interactive methods of instruction, including didactic games. Innovative forms of ensemble sight-reading on the basis of semantic structures of the composer’s musical text developed at the Laboratory for Musical Semantics of the Ufa Institute for the Arts present a system of methods of non-traditional ensemble musicmaking, where reading musical texts in piano classes is done on the basis of role playing with the use of keyboard synthesizers. Keywords: piano, reading the musical score text, sight-reading, the creative methods of musical education, intonation etude, Laboratory of Musical Semantics.