Reading Music, part 5 - Fluency

Recognizing the symbols and understanding their meaning in relation to playing the cello isn't all there is to reading music. The next step in reading music is gaining enough knowledge, skills, experience and flexibility to put it all together so that the skills are executed easily. This yields fluency.

Just as we learn to speak and read language fluently, we learn to read and play music fluently. This only comes from...you guessed it, lots of practice. This aspect of music reading is perhaps a little bit more nebulous, little less clear. We can clearly see and evaluate understanding of note names, rhythm and symbols. But fluency? Putting it all together and getting beautiful sounding music from the page? How much practice does it take? Who knows exactly but it's a lot of frequent and sustained practice over a long period of time.

But it also develops from properly scaffolding music reading. Trying to read music in Suzuki Book 2 even if you are at a book 2 level is simply too hard. Go back to the basics. Practice reading Suzuki Book 1 level music even if you are in Book 3. Again, to make a comparison to reading language, although children can speak fairly complicated sentences with mastery of grammar and inflection, reading those same sentences is challenging. Even when I first introduce the symbols that make up music, we start from the basics even though children have quite a lot of experience playing the cello already. Of course they know where the D string is and how to play it, but recognizing what it looks like, picking it out and playing the correct note is a different story. Same with rhythm. Then we have to put everything together - rhythm, notes, symbols - to make a song! It's a lot.

Even though students know the early pieces, they've likely never seen them before so it's a totally new experience much like reading a book for the first time that you've heard read to you many, many times. You know the story but the experience of reading the words off the page involves completely new skills and experiences. But a totally necessary experience - it helps connect a lot of dots. Music is no different.

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The whole music-reading process switches from learning to read, to reading to learn. This all boils down to experience. Over time, students will have had plenty of varied music reading experiences, each one building on their current and substantial background knowledge. And each time a student reads a piece of music, they get better and better at reading the information, digesting the information, producing the information on the instrument accurately and adding musical inflection that makes listening to music enjoyable. It all becomes more automatic, which is our goal. But this doesn't happen at first. There is simply way too much information on a given page for students to take in all at once in the very beginning. When all the skills become easier, then more attention can be devoted to dynamics, bowings, etc.

But again, like learning to read words and read words fluently, this is a complex process. Fluency and automaticity varies from student to student. Some students 'get it' almost instantly, others struggle and slowly chip away at it and then others struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle until *ding!* it all clicks. And once music reading has started, we don't stop. We will read everything! And I will challenge your child to read and learn more and more pieces from the music rather than 'spoon feeding' every note or musical phrase. This helps build the knowledge and skills needed to be a fluent music reader.

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Frequent practice of music reading is necessary to developing fluent music reading. It helps strengthen the brain circuitry that governs these processes and further solidify the skills of reading music and executing it on the instrument. A lot of dots of information need to be connected in order for all this knowledge to be readily accessible, usable and applicable. Students need to be able to take in a lot of information, translate it to meaningful knowledge and use that knowledge to produce sound. This means juggling, sorting through and interpreting a lot of information. For example, the page will be a note on the staff and a finger number, which students need to figure out what that pitch is and where it lives on the instrument. Also, students will have a sound concept in mind of what that pitch should sound like, much like singing a tune in your head. Then there's a physical skill attached to make the sound happen that involves placing the indicated finger down in the right spot, on the right string and hearing whether or not that is the correct pitch.

But again, there are many skills involved in developing fluent readers and if any one of those skills are flawed, the whole reading process is compromised. Reading may be a slow process but I'd rather it be a slow process and make sure we cover all the bases and fully develop knowledge than zip through it all and miss a couple of steps along the way only to discover it later when tackling a much more challenging aspect of music. What feels like slow-going is really just fastidious development, so enjoy the ride. :)