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Sight-reading is the musical art whereby a musician is able to play music they have never heard or seen before, instantly, reading from the sheet music with great fluency.

There are many stories of the legendary abilities of the great composers, and today we will show you several hair-raising examples that will have you running to the practice rooms to hone your sight-reading and related abilities. Or perhaps you will collapse in frustration. Read on.

Mozart was said to be able to read and play any music instantly. No practicing, no rehearsing. Not only that, he could, for example, write out the four separate parts of a string quartet BEFORE he had written out the complete score. This means that he had a perfect mental impression of every note in a piece he had never played, and never heard.

Beethoven once had to play one of his piano concertos on a piano that was a half step out of tune. With no time to tune the instrument, there was only one choice: play the concerto not in the key of C, but in the key of B, instantly, which he did with not a single wrong note, to the utter astonishment of the orchestra.

To put this in perspective, in case you don't know what musical "keys" are, it is like an actor who, five seconds before taking the stage as Hamlet, is told suddenly, "Oh, by the way, please do the part in Swedish." No problem, said Ludwig, and did it straightaway.

Liszt was legendary for his technical flights of fancy. Once the composer Grieg brought the great master his A minor piano concerto, which he humbly showed to Liszt in a handwritten manuscript. It was a very messy manuscript, indeed, for by Grieg's own account it was full of scratched out passages and terrible music handwriting.

But Franz Liszt was not deterred by the tattered condition of the score. He calmly opened it, looked at it for a moment and then played it perfectly and with gusto in front of the dumbfounded composer. All the while Liszt missed not a note, mind you, keeping up an erudite and witty commentary on the orchestra parts, which he played as well, along with the solo piano part.

Liszt was in fact encyclopedic in his knowledge of all the music published in his lifetime. He is said to have played every known piece in history, perfectly, in his weekly master classes. And this included not only piano music, but any music, operas, symphonies, concertos, popular music. Anything.

In a spirit of encouragement, remember that even Liszt had to develop this breathtaking musical craft. When he first came to Paris as a teen aged firebrand, he was a gawky Hungarian boy and needed polish in order to become the first genuine superstar of classical music.

Now go back and practice.

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com to see the fun PIANO BY NUMBER method for kids.

John Aschenbrenner is a leading children's music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous fun piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER for kids. You can see the PIANO BY NUMBER series of books at http://www.pianoiseasy.com

Betika are an eight piece band from Bournemouth, who have been going for quite some time now - adding and subtracting members around a core lineup as theyve gone on. The band is fronted by two singers, called… (in post Betika from Indie MP3 - Keeping C86 Alive!. )

Some things just never go out of style. Blue jeans and T-shirts. They’ve changed very little over the past 50 years. Sure, they endure phases ranging between menacingly large and precariously scant, but for the most part they are a staple of modern day attire and are a pretty safe bet.

Be warned that most fashion is not this way. It is commonly known that one should never chuck yesterday’s styles in the bin. This is because the universe, extraordinarily goofy as it is, has created the mystic fashion-recycling program, known to seers as “Trend Reincarnation.” This perplexing phenomenon manifests itself in the miraculous reappearance of such cosmic foibles as platform shoes, tie-dyed shirts and (shudder) powder blue polyester bellbottom tuxedos.

The catch is you have to hold on to these garments for 20-30 years until they are supernaturally reinstated to popular acceptance.

Shucks. If only I knew this tidbit at the tender and impressionable age of six, I would have stored my Star Wars pyjamas and Scooby Doo underoos in a cryogenic vault for successful and stretched reappearance in my late twenties. Alas. I do have a few pairs of my mom’s old hip-hugger bellbottoms from the early-seventies, along with an original “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” T-shirt, circa 1967. And though those charming antiques are older than I, remarkably they are the height of current fashion!

My MTV generation, “Gen-X,” has seen fashions come and go as fast as a radio jockey can change a record. Or is that reel-to-reel? Tape? 8-track? CD? DVD? MP3? Blue-Ray? Sheesh, in my short 29 years on this planet I have gone through more than eight playback mediums!

I can unflinchingly confess to a simpler time when we'd drive our olive green leaded gas "boat-mobile" with artificial snakeskin trim to the beach listening to the fresh sounds of Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Madonna, Michael Jackson and other 80’s greats. Soon enough MTV had new replacements on the top forty and we moved on.

I was driving my new non-snakeskin foreign import SUV along the other day when some familiar sounds came through the car speakers. There was my old pal, Stevie, singing about love lost with a … what’s that? Techno beat!?!

It seems a new fad is to take old 80’s tracks and spruce them up with heavy techno beats and booming bass. My goodness, anyone from ABBA to Elvis have been recycled by techno geeks! Elvis didn’t die, they just stuck him in the blue bin!

Then there are comebacks I never would have expected in a million years. Purple-haired, gum-smacking 80's icon Cindy Lauper has recently been recycled with a new album of sultry jazz covers. On the idea of recycling music, the now-50-year-old artist said, "a song is like a dress... you try it on, you can’t wear that dress sometimes because we’re not all built the same so you have to take it in here, let it out there." Sage wisdom from the girl who just wanted to have fun back in '84.

My mother realised she was getting old when she heard “Stairway to Heaven” on an easy listening station. Just recently I heard a real heavy punk tune from my childhood on a tame CBC Sunday afternoon program and simultaneously my life flashed before my eyes.

In any event, I can safely say that there are some classic bands that will never go out of style. Maybe they’re not on the top-40, but they’re still tops in our collective musical consciousness. The symbolic “T-shirts” of pop music culture, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, are just as hip, groovy, and totally bitchin’ now as they were back when those words actually meant something.

What’s next, you ask? Well, it won’t be something I haven’t heard already!

**Rhiannon Schmitt (nee Nachbaur) is a professional violinist and music teacher who has enjoyed creative writing for years.

She currently writes columns for two Canadian publications and has been featured in Australia's "Music Teacher Magazine." Writing allows her to teach people that the world of music is as fun as you spin it to be!

Rhiannon, age 29, has worn the hats of businesswoman, performer, events promoter, classical music radio host and school orchestra music arranger in rural British Columbia, Canada.

Her business, Fiddleheads Violin School & Shop, has won several distinguished young entrepreneur business awards for her commitment to excellence. Her shop offers beginner to professional level instruments, accessories and supplies for very reasonable prices: Visit http://www.fiddleheads.ca

Rhiannon is also Founding President of the Shuswap Violin Society which promotes violin & fiddle music and helps young musicians in need: http://www.violinsociety.ca

The newly launched Nike 1World project has been created in conjunction with select cool kids in the “sports, music, art and design fields”, presumably hand-picked for their innate panache on a global scale. The scope of 1World has been defined as 18 original shoes, which will be launched month by month via Nike's awesome AF-1 website.

Today the first three have now been revealed – from the rainbow excess of Busy P to the refelective digital camo of Gore-Texer (Nitro Microphone Underground) and finally Rasheed’s hightop with ‘Max Air’, you couldn’t find three more different AF-1s if you tried. Definitely a bright start to this project...
Just go to http://www.nikeairforce1.com and hit the 1World button - all will be revealed in due course!