Peggy,
You make a good point that students with "potential" (is this word PC on this
list??? :)) sometimes need "remedial" work because of the lack of music
education in the schools in recent years. this implies that the student
would work to catch up on skills like sight singing. however, this is
different from what some have said here, that sight singing is not really
that necessary a skill for a singer if they can pick up their part from
recordings and so on.
Merry
In a message dated 01-05-12 15:44:39 EDT, you write:
>
> I see it a little differently. I'm a good sightsinger, so
> naturally I think that's a valuable skill to have. And for
> anyone young and a student, definitely they should work as
> hard as possible to develop this very useful skill.
>
> But I think one shold also realize that, because of the
> awful things that happened to much public school music
> education in this country over the past 30 years or so,
> there are many people who are coming to music performance
> later in life. When they may be just learning to read music,
> just learning to enjoy some of the more serious music art
> forms, starting to study classical voice, starting to sing
> in a chorus. I would not want to discourage any of these
> people from taking up music because they think they "must"
> sight-sing to feel like they can participate. People who
> don't sight read will need to put more time in away from a
> chorus rehearsal than those who do sight read. But if a
> singer puts in the time and effort, he or she can make up
> for any deficiency in this particular skill. Other skills,
> like good rhythm, are more important that sight-reading in
> my opinion. Of course, developing those other skills also
> helps one to be a better sight-reader in the long run.
>
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