Tips for Improving Choral Sight-Singing

A singer recently asked me if I had any tips to help improve sight-singing skills (‘apart from just practising’, he added, so that’s the easy answer gone). My reply was that that sounded like a blog post waiting to happen and I have spent the intervening time realising that I’d now have to do some thinking about it.

Because of course, practising is the key thing. You only get good at doing a thing by doing that thing. But the question remains as to what activities to include in your practice. Are there ways we can leverage the time to usefully hone specific aspects of the skill in ways that produce a more useful improvement than just ploughing through lots of music?

The two big challenges that sight-singing presents are, in my experience, keeping a handle on pitch, and staying with the tempo. For both, climbing back into the music when you fall out of it is central to success. Because we are all likely to make mistakes (see under ‘human beings’, and especially subcategory ‘human beings who want to get better at something’). The key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful sight-reading is less about the mistakes themselves than about the recovery from them.

So, let’s isolate each of these and devise focused exercises to target them. For pitch, a useful practice exercise is to mark through a line in a tempo you can manage while only actually singing the tonic note of its key out loud. (Assuming tonal music; sight-singing atonal music is a whole other ballgame and one that isn’t often needed in regular choral contexts.) The point of this is to develop your homing instincts: whatever other nonsense you might come out with, if you can find doh you can get back on track.

When you start getting comfortable with this, you can escalate either by increasing the tempo, or by also singing the 3rd and 5th of the tonic triad. Only escalate in one dimension at once though, so as to focus your attention on one or other aspect of the challenge.

For tempo, a useful exercise is to set a manageable pulse and then only sing the first note of each bar. Again, the aim is to establish anchor points to help you stay with the music. Escalation again can involve adding in more content, e.g. first and last beats of each bar, or increasing tempo.

Another thought I had about practising sight-singing is to use the amenities of 21st-century technological infrastructure to support you. Sight-reading along with a recording of a piece gives you the kind of unforgiving tempo that real-life choral sight-singing entails while also offering the rich musical context of harmonic and rhythmic cues that serve to help keep you on track in real life. It is thus both easier and harder than just singing through your line by itself, and in ways that are usefully similar to the challenges of doing it for real.

And, unlike real-life choral sight-singing (where you have to match the pace of the group as a whole), you can change the tempo of playback to a level that optimises your learning. You want to go at a tempo at which you can just about succeed if you concentrate in order to exercise your recovery skills intensively. Too fast and you’ll just flail about, too slow and you won’t stretch yourself.

The other thing of course for making sight-singing practice really fun is to go old-school and have some friends round for a madrigal party. Or a motet party, or contemporary a cappella party, or – even better – a musical potluck at which everyone brings something to sight-sing together.