Reviews

FABER MUSIC
Play at Sight - The Essential Sight
Reading course for Elementary Pianists
by Christine Brown £7.95

Christine Brown, an EPTA member from its very beginning 30 years ago, has always been a great advocate of helping pupils to enjoy their practice through being efficient and proficient sight-readers. Play at Sight was first published forty-five years ago in four separate volumes and has now been reprinted by Faber in one larger volume with a most helpful Introduction, full of common sense. It is this Introduction which is so important for teachers and pupils to read and consolidate. As the author points out - very few students are good at sight-reading and as no-one enjoys doing something they are not good at, they do even less thus creating a vicious circle of bad readers. Christine Brown has boiled this complex problem down to five basic essentials: every student MUST have a good knowledge of notation and of the instrument, being able to play in any key without looking at the hands; they MUST have adequate technique for the music in front of them as well as the ability to grasp time-patterns in a given pulse along with a reasonable short-term memory capable of grasping a couple of bars at a time.

The original separate books constitute the four sections of this new volume with very few alterations, the main bonus being the sensible extra advice at the top of each new component. Christine Brown advises the pupil to place all the fingers in position over the starting notes and suggests stroking the black keys in order to have a good feel for that particular key. All the older tests in 3/8 time have been re-written in 3/4 time to avoid confusion at this early stage. The first part contains many exercises within the five-finger hand position in the keys of C, G and F while the second part introduces extensions to one octave as well as dotted time-values before the third section returns to the smaller range but with hands together. The last section introduces more complex rhythmic patterns with a more extensive range as well as phrasing and expression marks for more musical reading. With 264 tests in all, and with every page containing a week's supply with one per day, the student cannot avoid finally overcoming this reading hurdle which stunts so many of our pupils in their musical development. This book is so well laid out that students will become proficient sight readers with minimum effort and realisation.

Reviewed by Nadia Lasserson