Reading Notes: Identifying location points
Found in: Reading
Unmani U., Australia
I need some reading advice please. Ellen has been with me for 7 years – a hardworking teenager. Getting started in a reading piece is the issue. Once she’s off and running, she gets all the reading strategies she’s been taught in an applied way. The problem is: for her brain, reading middle C’s placement in particular is VERY confusing when she sees, say, two bass clefs or two treble clefs as in Watching Things Run or Gray, because in her brain, she locked down my initial presentation of this with the treble clef and bass clef underneath. For her we needed to turn it sideways a lot to get the symmetry too.
Despite her wonderful resilience, this is affecting her reading morale because she can’t get started. Last night at her shared lesson when I noticed (finally) that this issue is a big reading problem, I photocopied the pieces she is on and cut each line up horizontally into the bass and treble so she would only look at a single clef line at a time. With her father this week she will use them as flash cards for 10 minutes a night. I told her to write on them and do whatever is necessary, because she is very visual.
Maybe some of you ‘get’ this issue better than I do and have some excellent suggestions. Thanks to this challenge, I now have a deeper understanding of people for whom reading has been a mystery and maybe seen as a bogeyman.
Laurie Richards, Nebraska
I think your flash cards with single clefs is brilliant. A few more thoughts:
1) Drill the explanations of location points, e.g. Where is Low C on the staff? 2 leger lines below bass clef. Where is Treble C on the staff? 2nd space from the top of treble clef. AND on the keyboard: Where is High C on the keyboard? 2 octaves above middle C.
I drill these a lot so they can instantly recall when looking at a piece of music – look at the clef, recall the location points. It seems this might take the emotion out of it because it is very analytical – look at the clef sign, apply the appropriate description, locate the note.
2) I created 3 manuscript templates: one with standard treble on top/bass on bottom, one with 2 treble clefs, and one with 2 bass clefs (each only 1/3 of a page which I cut apart). For the very reason you wrote about. Sometimes I’ll pass random ones out and call out location points for them to write wherever appropriate on the staves they have. If I say “bass C” and someone has the manuscript with 2 bass clefs, they write it on both staves. Or, regardless of which one they have, ask them to write the 3 location points on each staff.
Some students just need more practice applying their knowledge from different perspectives. Much like in the Accompaniment program, sometimes a student can play Danny Boy Db flawlessly, but when randomly drilling chords and asked to play a Db, Gb, or Ab chord in a different context, they can’t recall it. We go back to the major chord shapes at the beginning of their Accompaniment book. They just need practice applying the same concept in different environments.
Lyndel K., Australia
From the very beginning I teach that middle C is the mirror line. From there the Treble C and the Bass C fall two spaces in from the edge of the staff and High/Low C are two lines out from the edge of the staff. They only have to remember 2 things: 2 spaces in, 2 lines out. The mirror doubles their knowledge!