by Don Smith, Ed.D.
My students initially ask the same question you may have asked when you saw the title of this article, why bother reading backwards? The three prong answer I give them should serve as an introduction. First, eye movement research has demonstrated that our eyes do not proceed as smoothly across a page as we perceive. The eyes move rapidly around the page (called saccades that occur up to 6 times per second) searching for new information before returning to the ”point of performance.” Research has shown that missing the point of performance leads to many reading errors. Most of the saccades involve looking ahead (left to right), but the eyes of weaker readers have trouble finding the point of performance (right to left). By reversing the process through reading music backwards, the eyes get more practice looking ahead for information (right to left) and utilize the more developed skills of left to right saccades when returning to the point of performance. Remarkably, when I ask students to read a line in Book 1 backwards just after they had played it forwards, the students usually respond immediately by playing the piece backwards with a similar level of accuracy to the forward reading of the same piece. I have found an increased level of awareness of notation through using this technique with minimal explanation of the underlying premises. Relax, the next points are not as complex! Most of these techniques were designed to establish good reading skills with Book 1 and Book 2 level materials. So, the second point is that familiar pieces are not familiar when played backwards, but when chosen carefully can contain the same rhythmic, and technical challenges as forward reading. In other words, you are effectively doubling the amount of material available to reinforce new notes and new rhythms immediately. The third part and perhaps the most valuable part of these initial findings was that students find it much more difficult to memorize pieces backwards. I am suspect about how much actual reading goes on after playing through some of the beginning pieces a few times. While I always thought my students were getting a lot of practice reading music while performing repetitions of pieces, I now believe that much of the data is memorized and the “reading practice” rapidly depreciates in value after the first few repetitions of a piece. Reading backwards greatly increases the amount of actual “reading practice” students get through repetitions.
I recall as a young aspiring trumpet player how desperately I wanted to become a very good sight-reader, but some days I read very well and others I didn’t. The only strategies anyone offered for becoming a better sight-reader were to practice sight-reading a lot. I did that, but some days, it just didn’t click. And, at those moments that I realized things weren’t going well, I was at a loss for what to do to get back into a good sight-reading mode. When I began teaching, my primary goal for students was to develop their reading skills so they could become independent learners. Some of them got it immediately, but others always struggled. Later I became aware of a terrific analogy with language reading while working with Frank DiVesta (a senior editor of APA, a cognitive psychology reading specialist, and in his words a frustrated piano hacker). It was his experience that no matter what “method” language reading instructors used (phonetics, SRA, etc.)—the bright kids got it and the others struggled. Clearly there was something more relevant underlying the commonly practiced methodology that needed to be addressed before we could adequately serve all of the students’ language reading needs. The analogy that seems to help make this point is a baseball bat analogy. Since the only method I knew of for becoming a better sight-reader was to sight-read a lot, I pictured a young little leaguer who spent countless hours practicing batting with an improper grip of the bat. While he may have improved a little at batting through an intense practice regimen, because of the faulty grip he would never reach his full potential. In other words, something important was missing from the “teaching students how to read” puzzle. No matter how much practice I did sight-reading music, if I was using an incorrect or insufficient strategy to become more consistent, I would never reach my full potential. Dr. DiVesta encouraged me to pursue the comparison of music and language reading through eye movement data collection in case the missing piece to the puzzle could be discovered through that unconventional means. The climate of “leave no student behind” adds even more urgency to discovering an approach to teaching. music reading and independent learning skills than ever. I realized a new strategy or series of strategies were needed to address these issues.
Research while doing my Doctorate at The Pennsylvania State University led me into the huge body of studies and literature concerning language reading. It was fascinating exploring the similarities and differences between processing/reading language data, and musical notation. I felt it was important to do this in case there was something that had been established through language reading research that would be useful in music. The study was developed and carried out about 14 years ago and I’ve been field-testing the conclusions and potential strategies with my bands, private students and guest conducting gigs ever since then. Recently via a Julia Steiny article in the Providence Journal Bulletin (Sunday, January 12, 2003 page H1) a connection was so obvious, I had to share it with you. The article, “Ten Myths of Reading Instruction” is by Sebastian Wren (SEDL Letter, Volume XIV Number 3 www.sedl.org/pubs/sedl-letter/v14n03/2.html ). While all ten myths are insightful to flaws in many educators’ expectations for language reading instruction, the first two hold particularly true in many music classrooms: Myth 1: Learning to read is a natural process and Myth 2: Children will eventually learn to read if given enough time. An excerpt from the first Myth may help clarify this point.
It has long been argued that learning to read, like learning to understand spoken language, is a natural phenomenon. It has often been suggested that children will learn to read if they are simply immersed in a literacy-rich environment and allowed to develop literacy skills in their own way. This pernicious belief that learning to read is a natural process resulting from rich text experiences is surprisingly prevalent in education-despite the fact that learning to read is not only unnatural, it is one of the most unnatural things humans do.
It has been my observation of school music programs in the Mid West while I worked in Michigan, and the northeast while working in PA and currently New England (RI), that many music teachers take learning music-reading for granted. Most ensemble directors assume that by reading new music periodically, music reading has been learned by the members of the ensemble. The range stretches from ensemble directors who believe that their students all read: 1. even though they teach primarily from modeling and rote, or 2. several students in their ensembles have learned to read previously and the rest of their sections follow them, to 3. the programs who use the strategy I was raised on, sight-read regularly during rehearsals and everyone will become a good reader. While modeling and rote teaching will remain an important component of teaching music reading, most would agree that they must not be the primary pedagogy. The second point is lacking in the “Leave No Student Behind” goals of the present. All students are capable of becoming, to some degree, independent learners. We must adjust our curricula to this end, and our assessments to measure who is actually reading and is reaching their full potential as an independent learner. However, that missing piece must first be found before we can have any confidence with the strategies that are essential for optimal music sight-reading.
Back to Wren’s article and Myth 5: Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to guess words, and good readers make many “mistakes” as they read authentic text. Wren adds that Research indicates that both of these claims are quite wrong, but both are surprisingly pervasive in reading instruction. While the initial work on miscue analysis was carried out in the 1960s by Ken Goodman and associates, much ongoing study has persisted including the more recent “whole language” approach to reading instruction. The contradictions to the assumption that readers base much of their comprehension on context and guessing, requiring only a sampling of the text to gain comprehension. With this approach, better readers need to see less of the text to gain comprehension. Much research has contradicted this hypothesis, including the results of my dissertation (article: “Visual Processing While Reading at Different Speeds,” The Pennsylvania Music Educators Journal (March, 1990) reprint in RIMER (Spring 1995). I found that the best readers saccade rate was significantly faster than the less accurate readers whether reading music or language and regardless of the speed/tempo of the reading. This clearly suggested that more accurate readers gather more data. In other words, they see more detail and this leads to a greater degree of accuracy. I was initially surprised by these results, since I had expected the saccade rate to increase and decrease with the speed of the reading task. However, there were no significant differences found between the saccade rates when tempos were changed. Suddenly, it all made sense to me! While I am sight-reading well, I have this sensation of “seeing everything on the page clearly” and when things are not going so well, things seem a bit blurry and I make poor choices that become mistakes. When I shared this with other musicians, I was relieved to discover that many others have the same experience. The obvious strategy to reading more accurately seemed to be collecting as much data as possible, seeing every note and detail on the page. This is quite contrary to strategies that I had been taught—reading in groups and figures, etc. It seems that the brain doesn’t see a C scale and respond with C D E F G A B C. The eyes see C D E F G A B C (there is enough time for each of these letters to be “seen” even in a very fast passage), recognize it as a C Scale and then I play the scale accurately. I began thinking of strategies that made me practice seeing every note, such as: slower tempos, reading smaller chunks of material and putting them back together, transposition, and a game we used to play while bored in rehearsal—we used to play easy parts correctly while positioning and reading the music upside down or sideways. Since I was interested in developing techniques for young players, reading backwards somehow was derived from that childish rehearsal strategy.
I’ll give you two quick examples and then encourage you to look through the materials you already use in combination with your imagination. Please note the attention required to negotiate rests and simple syncopation as you count and/or play these examples forwards then immediately backwards. Please note that while counting backwards beat 4 becomes beat 1, 3 becomes 2, etc. Since the purpose of this strategy is to establish good reading skills, the difficulty level of the music should be within the grasp of first to second year students. Percussion parts that include rudiment (flams, flam taps, etc.) should be played as if the rudiment was inverted while reading backwards).
Example 1
Example 2
I will be presenting this material as a portion of a session at the MENC Eastern Conference in Providence, RI on Friday, March 7th at 2:30 p.m. Please contact me with your comments at [email protected]
Remember, have fun reading music because music reading is having fun!