Reading Aloud

The latest adventure that Michael and I have had in our Four Seasons Book Club (we meet during all four seasons, in the living room, and generally after lunch) is reading the Odyssey out loud, swapping readers whenever there is a break in the text. Michael has read and taught the poem (in various translations) dozens of times, and this was my maiden voyage. What a tremendous experience it was to play the parts of both poet and audience in this re-enactment of such an important oral/aural tradition. It helped to really enjoy the work itself.

The act of reading out loud is quite different from the act of reading without speaking. Our eyes need to scan far ahead in order to make sense of the words we are reading. And when the lines I am reading are lines of poetry in translation, I find that I have to pay a different kind of attention to context, because the flow of the text is not necessarily predictable or natural. If the text is rhythmic and has a rhyme scheme, it is far easier to allow the words to trip off the tongue.

When we sightread music we are always preparing in our inner ears for what is ahead. Music set in regular rhythmic and harmonic patterns is far easier to sightread than music with irregular rhythmic patterns, and it is far easier to sightread a piece or passage when we can understand, by the experience of having played similar music, its harmonic logic.

I was thinking about this the other day while teaching a student who found herself tripping over otherwise straightforward notes in a passage. I took out a book and asked her to read a sentence or two. (She prefaced her reading with saying that she was horrible at reading aloud, but I found that she was perfectly good at it.) I asked her to observe the way her eyes and ears worked when she was reading aloud. Then we went back to the musical passage in question, and she found that she could expand her field of vision and inner ear the same way when reading music.

(For today's meeting of the reading club--after lunch, in the living room--we are going back to silent reading. And Balzac is on the menu.)