Ed Potter asked for advice:

>I have a problem.  I am a pianist, having played the piano for the past
>10 years.  However, recently (i.e.  in the past 2 years or so) I have
>developed a sort of "stammer" when sight-reading - I seem to have the urge
>to play each chord or bar at least 3 times before moving on to the next
>passage.  I also seem unable to stop this from happening, no matter how
>much I tell myself to "play the next bit without repeating".  This problem
>is extremely annoying - I am currently preparing for grade 7 (UK) and
>learning Handel's Allemande is proving very difficult and time-consuming.
>I also play percussion and tuba, and curiously, I don't experience the
>"stutter" when sight-reading on either tuba or any percussion instrument -
>only piano.

The reason you 'stammer' at the keyboard but not at your other instruments
is probably because piano music is more complex.  You've got several voices
going which you've got to inflect differently, you have to voice the
harmonies logically, you've got the pedal to think about, etc, and all this
often at great speed.

My suggestion if your 'stammer' relates specifically to learning notes:

Read the piece away from the keyboard.  Don't see individual notes, but
group the music into patterns of notes, harmonic patterns, melodic phrases.
Build little musical chunks and when you're familiar with those see how
they combine into bigger chunks.  In something like the Bach allemande,
play the voices separately and play different combinations of voices.

If you do this regularly, your sight-reading should also get better because
you get used to seeing musical patterns and formulae.  It's like reading a
book:  you'll never be a fluent reader if you have to spell out words from
one letter to the next, or sentences from one word to the next.

(Of course you also have to work out a secure fingering - that's something
you have to experiment with at the keyboard.)

I'd say I'm a pretty good sight-reader, but more generally I also suffer
from this 'stammer':  I often find my concentration wanders and I've not
properly heard what I've just played (especially when I have to control
several voices at once) or I've lost physical control, or I've forgotten
some musical point I wanted to make.  So I go back and repeat and repeat
without much progress, and drive my whole family crazy.  What I've started
to do now was recommended by Hofmann and others:  you need, again away from
the piano, to imagine yourself playing the passage in question.  You need
to work out exactly what kinds of sounds you want to hear - you need
actually to hear them in your head, not just to formulate them in words -
and imagine yourself producing them at the piano.  Do that until you can
imagine playing the piece in real time as you want it to sound, and you'll
feel much more secure on the keyboard itself.  (And you can also 'stammer'
as much as you like in your head without disturbing anyone else).

Felix Delbruck
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