**Learning to see the forest *and* the trees**

Two reading skills and how to use them.

We’re in our ✨music-reading era✨

So many students are making their transition into Piano Safari Level 2 this fall! This is such an exciting time. Students will start learning their first unabridged classical music, expand their music reading skills, and dive into even more interesting harmonies, textures, and forms through longer, more substantial repertoire. I can hardly wait!

Since we’re on the cusp of a music-reading boom, it’s the perfect time to talk about exactly how students will expand their reading skills. But first, I have to give my speech about using mnemonic devices to name notes and why I don’t consider it best practice.

The limitations of Traditional Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonics like Every Good Boy Does Fine or All Cows Eat Grass (see below) are a quick way to identify the letter name of a note, but they don’t allow us to read music—they allow us to decode music. Reading and decoding are very different processes.

It’s not unlike the scene in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses the decoder pin to reveal Little Orphan Annie’s Secret Message. Decoding required so many steps! Ralphie had to remember where to set the pin and write down the string of numbers to be translated, then translate each number to a letter (only to find the secret message was just an Ovaltine ad! Ha!).

Similarly, trying to use a mnemonic device to decode music requires too many steps. We have to remember the mnemonic device itself, which clef it belongs to, which line or space it should start on, then we have to count up the staff, name the letter of that line or space (which has the secondary requirement of being able to spell the words of the mnemonic!), locate it on the keys…and then we have to start this process over again for the next note, overlooking the relationship between pitches entirely. For such a detailed and complicated way to address notes on the staff, traditional mnemonics lack a lot:

they don’t address ledger notes (very high or low notes that fall above or below the staff) or give us a framework for reading them
they treat the treble and bass clefs as a dichotomy, as though they’ll never have to be read together simultaneously
they assume that knowing just the letter name of a note is enough
they don’t really give us a way to associate sound with what we see

Another flaw of mnemonics is that they can make it appear to students and parents as though reading music has been “mastered” sooner than it has, when in reality becoming a fluent music reader is a years-long process. Too often, I see claims of students “reading music!” after only one or two piano lessons, and while that might not be outright false, it is a bit disingenuous. Like most good things, learning to read music well takes time. And it’s worth it to take the time to lay a solid foundation that will empower students to be capable, independent music readers.

As a child, I learned to name notes using mnemonic devices, and piano parents who know how to read music probably learned this way, too. Just know that I am being forthright about the limitations of outdated methods with absolutely no judgement or condescension toward whatever way piano parents learned to read music.

The Forest and the Trees

So, I’ve admitted that I don’t like mnemonic devices. But that doesn’t mean that individual note recognition doesn’t have its place! My students and I have nicknamed individual note identification as “Tree” Reading and the big-picture, intervallic approach to reading as “Forest” Reading. It’s stuck so well that there’s even a poster of this concept on the studio bulletin board. We use Tree Reading to figure out where to start, and Forest Reading to travel from that point.

Tree Reading is important because it prevents us from having to go back to the beginning of a piece each time we need to start fresh during practice. We can simply choose a starting point and go! This is really helpful in longer pieces. Tree Reading also helps us place written music in the correct octave on the keyboard. We use Tree Reading only a small portion of the time.

To this point, students have been seeing landmark notes (easily memorizable notes on the staff) as the starting note of most reading pieces. As students advance, our reading pieces may start on unfamiliar notes instead of landmark notes—this is where Tree Reading will come in handy!

Forest Reading is important because it allows us to see and think of music in phrases, or musical sentences. We don’t read individual letters when we read a book; we read words that make up sentences. Reading music is similar. We look at a broader level for the distance between notes (intervals), the contour, or shape, of the phrase, any patterns that we see or feel under our fingers. We use Forest Reading most of the time.

As students expand their understanding of larger intervals, Forest Reading will help them to read intervals quickly, just as they read whole words and sentences in books.

activities to boost “forest” reading

Always do Pencil Work first. Trace the contour of the melody, label the different intervals, mark repeated notes. Take the time to spot any patterns and soak in the music notation before making any sounds.
- Students are already accustomed to finding patterns anywhere and everywhere because we’ve spent a sufficient amount of time learning music by rote!
Create a story to follow the shape of the melody. Maybe you hike up or down a mountain. Maybe you’re playing leap frog and skip over one key to get to the next. How far does the melody travel from the “home” note? What’s happening in the story when notes or patterns repeat?
Transpose a piece to as many different keys as you can.
Sight-read in alto or tenor clef (this one is for during our lessons with teacher guidance).
Practice interval flashcards (sorted by interval in the Studio Resources Google Drive folder) by simply sorting the interval into like piles.
- Practice a thinking routine as you do this. For example, “I know this is an interval of a fifth because it moves from line to line, skipping one line in between” or “I know this is an interval of a third because it moves from one line to the very next line.” Don’t worry about note names yet.

Preparatory Activities for “Tree” Reading

I’ve been sneakily preparing students for Tree Reading for some time now! This spring, many of us discovered that there was a Skips Alphabet by decorating the piano keyboard with letter tiles and removing every other one. The letters F, A, C, E, G, B, and D remain! There’s a word hidden in that pattern: “face.” The other letters don’t spell anything—we simply call them GBD (gi-buh-dee), which is silly enough to remember on its own. Students like to see how quickly they can say “GBD!” The Skips Alphabet can be spelled “FACEGBD” or “GBDFACE” and it will help us immensely with Tree Reading. To help prepare:

Get to know the Steps Alphabet (ABCDEFG) extremely well, both forwards and backwards (most students are at this point already).

Get to know the skips alphabet in both its iterations (FACEGBD or GBDFACE) extremely well, both forwards and backwards.
- Try using the Spin the Wheel app that we use in lessons to choose a random letter, then recite the skips alphabet up or down from that letter. Try playing the skips alphabet up or down from that letter on the keys, too.

When it’s time to dive deeper into Tree Reading, I’ll create a guide with more in-depth activities to do.

If you’d like to read more about the approaches I take to teaching students to read music, the Mini Essays written by the authors of the Piano Safari method are wonderful!