Sight-reading and harmony

Do you struggle in sight-reading organ music and not looking at the fingers?

Let me ask you this: How are your harmony skills?

​The reason I'm asking this is because they are related to sight-reading skills as well.

With time, if you continue to sight-read organ music, the ability to not look at the keyboard and still play the right notes will become better. But it's a process.

Besides that, having proficiency in harmony will help you understand the music that you play, even the music that you sight-read. Not only you will think in patterns, but you will also know what they mean.

It's like learning a foreign language. You can learn how to pronounce the words in that language and even native speaker can understand you but without knowing what individual words or phrases mean - it will be automatic memorization - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I hope this analogy makes sense.

Besides having a decent technique, harmony and analytical skills are a single biggest factor of success in organ playing in general and in sight-reading in particular.

So if you study harmony in parallel to sight-reading, you know you're on the right path.

[HT to Dominique]

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Ausra's Harmony Exercise:

Practice ascending diatonic sequence in G minor. The chords: V6-V65-I (see video example below):

Do you have a question for Ausra about harmony? You can reach her by email.

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