My least favorite part of September, I told my students in rehearsal tonight, is all the sight reading.
Sure, we’re reading music all year long. But the balance of reading and polishing evolves over the course of the year, and in the beginning, it’s much more reading than polishing.
It’s no one’s favorite part of rehearsals, and it’s the type of rehearsal setting with the most downtime: as one voice part or another is learning notes, the other parts are free to lose focus. I much prefer (maybe to my students’ chagrin) spending 45 minutes honing a single four-bar phrase.
Even so, the early rehearsals are full of energy and potential. And the sooner we can get through these reading-heavy rehearsals and into polishing, the happier everyone is.