A Primer on Sight-reading music

In my experience of choirs and choral singing, men and particularly the tenors, were notoriously bad at sight-reading! Many of us, given a piece of music with the notation written in the bass clef simply fell to pieces, causing the sopranos to give us withering looks.

And now, I'm struggling to come to grips with the plethora of Gregorian chant antiphons and hymn tunes we have to learn for the daily sung Office. Being a cantor puts me under considerable pressure to learn to read neums expertly and so I'm pleased to draw your attention to Bernard Brandt's post 'On Reading Music'.

I think he offers sensible and useful advice for people in my situation and others who may need to read neums and other choral music frequently and fluently. Definitely worth a read!

We talk often of choral music and chant on this blog but not everyone is an expert musician or sight-reader so here's a primer to help us improve our music reading skills and hopefully enable us to sing beautiful church music accurately!