A singer recently asked me if I had any tips to help improve sight-singing skills (‘apart from just practising’, he added, so that’s the easy answer gone). My reply was that that sounded like a blog post waiting to happen and I have spent the intervening time realising that I’d now have to do some thinking about it.
Because of course, practising is the key thing. You only get good at doing a thing by doing that thing. But the question remains as to what activities to include in your practice. Are there ways we can leverage the time to usefully hone specific aspects of the skill in ways that produce a more useful improvement than just ploughing through lots of music?
The two big challenges that sight-singing presents are, in my experience, keeping a handle on pitch, and staying with the tempo. For both, climbing back into the music when you fall out of it is central to success. Because we are all likely to make mistakes (see under ‘human beings’, and especially subcategory ‘human beings who want to get better at something’). The key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful sight-reading is less about the mistakes themselves than about the recovery from them.
