Try it again

I spent nearly six years studying and practicing the piano at school; that’s to say, four years playing scales and arpeggios, then eighteen months let loose on actual pieces of music.

My teacher, Mr. Pearson, was the sort of person who though that anyone who didn’t have perfect pitch was educationally subnormal and as for pupils – like me – who had difficulty in reading music and never really began to master sight-reading, well, there was really no hope in life.

Looking back, I can see that he was not particularly modern or enlightened in his approach. There were weekly tests along the lines of: “How many flats are there in the key of A flat major?” “How were Bach’s ideas on melody, harmony and counterpoint significant?” “What was the opus number of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?” and lots of unanswerable questions about bass clefs and treble clefs, etc. Still, we persevered together for those six years, despite my numerous handicaps. For a start, my sense of rhythm – especially for anything syncopated – was virtually non-existent. “How many beats in the bar, Haskins?” “Three, sir.”

“Then kindly stop trying to squeeze in five.”

Then being so small, neither of my hands could span a full octave which meant that keys were rarely struck by the finger recommended and that, particularly on the black notes, the little finger fell short of expectations. “Is there normally a B flat in a B major chord, Haskins?” “No, sir.”

“Right, then spare us it, will you?”

It wasn’t that I didn’t try. On the contrary, I had visions of one day performing in concerts and recitals, if not as a soloist, at least accompanying guest singers and instrumentalists. Somehow, the visions became fainter and fainter. “I think if Beethoven had wanted a minor chord just there, Haskins, he would have written one. Don’t you?”

So the years went on, endless variations on a single theme, dozens of arrangements of one basic tune, which I swear he composed himself. I must admit there were times when I thought of changing instruments – going back to the woodwind class, where I had bitten through three oboe reeds in one session, or the strings department, where I kept dropping the viola bow, or the percussion wing, where I had snapped two drumsticks inside ten minutes, or the brass class, where I had nearly swallowed a trumpet mouthpiece. But I didn’t. I stayed with Mr. Pearson and his finger exercises, the wrong notes, the missed entrances, the “Try it agains.” I suppose I was lucky that you can’t play the piano out of tune. I’m sure if it was possible to play flat, I would have done. “What’s the difference between an F sharp and an F natural, Haskins?” A semitone, sir.”

“Correct. Now, if you could remember that while you’re playing, you might not make such a pig’s ear out of one of the most beautiful melodies Brahms ever composed. Try it again.”

Books and libraries

Text 1

HOW TO READ FASTER

The flow of information in all fields of knowledge is steadily growing. At present fast reading is one of the available means of absorbing a great amount of information. A special method of fast reading has been worked out. It's based on the research done by Soviet psychologists and linguists. People who were taught fast reading speed nearly twelve times. They learned to read the text at the rate of 150 words per minute. It should be mentioned that not only the eyes and the brain function when a person is reading. Even though a man reads in silence a speech process is taking place. Reading speed depends precisely on how quickly a person speaks.

Strange as it may seem one has to break the person's habit of speaking the text to make it possible for him to grasp more quickly the meaning of what he sees. Psychologists have shown that when we read the words may be replaced by a single short word which generates the sentence's meaning.

Now let's consider how one must learn to read faster. It is a two stage task: one has to stop speaking the text and learn to absorb it with one's eyes only. The second stage is to develop the person's habits to grasp the lines in large blocks. A person trained to read faster manages to see several and not just a single word each time his eyes stop.

Text 2