Bach v Handel v Scarlatti v Telemann (and so on)

My most advanced student and I sat down the other day to decide exactly which works would go into his diploma program (exam in November/December) and which would get the flick. My student had been working on the Bach C minor Partita, but as much as we both loved the Capriccio we were struggling with the notion of turning the other required movements into part of his performance program. It all just seemed so turgid, with a displeasing noise to signal ratio.

Could we get away with dispensing with this major work from his program? How would the balance of the recital be affected by taking this out of the equation? We pulled out the syllabus and thought about replacing this selection with a Prelude and Fugue. And we had no trouble identifying some Preludes on the list that would show off this student’s strengths and sensitivities to best advantage. It’s just that when we came to think about him learning a Fugue it just didn’t seem right. For him.

Now, I usually find that fugues are a bit of an IQ test – it doesn’t really matter what the personality of a student, a very clever student will find joy and beauty in a fugue. But this student is as smart as they come, and fugues simply aren’t his thing. I can see that quite clearly, even though we’ve only been working together for a couple of years. His insistence that he doesn’t like fugues is also not immaterial to this judgment.

So back to the drawing board.

A lone Handel Suite (No. 8 in F minor) sat on the list, pretty much the only alternative if we were to include a Baroque presence in the program. I pulled out the Henle collection and to our mutual delight we found that the spirit of this suite exactly suited the student. The suite still has a fugue in it, and has pretty much the same kinds of forms and movements that we’d been working on with the Bach, but the mood, the tone, the energy of the music was of a completely different nature, and we happily agreed that this was the new direction needed.

I’ve been practicing the suite since that lesson (I had only a passing familiarity with the various movements) and discovering that while there are plenty of tricky passages and technical challenges the music feels ‘easier’ – not so much easier to learn as easier to relate to. I’m kind of a Bachophile (or Bach maniac, if you will), so this discovery is challenging my sense of musical identity in a fairly substantial way.

Meantime, I’ve (finally) been reading Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes, a book that was published in 2002 and that I first came across in a massive chain bookshop in a London shopping mall in 2006 when I should have been collecting some groceries. Having gone out of my way to buy the book in unlikely circumstances (and delaying dinner for a group of 4 to boot) one might think I’d have read it without delay. Of course, it’s just this week I’ve plunged into this profound and refreshing book about playing the piano.

Right there in the first chapter Charles Rosen talks about the ‘gymnastics’ of Scarlatti. ‘Gymnastics’. Never a truer word spoken, about Scarlatti at least – his music is the absolute embodiment of the gymnastic spirit. Many a gesture in a Scarlatti sonata feels as if one is performing a complicated tumble with the ambition of landing again on the balance beam once the skillful leap is complete. I’ve always loved playing Scarlatti. His music resonates with the larrikin in me.

But if given a choice I would generally choose Telemann over Scarlatti. So very many of his keyboard works feel natural to me, like meeting someone whose sense of humour, taste in movies or political orientation exactly matches your own. Telemann moves the way I like to move, physically (the gestures required to perform the music) and harmonically/rhythmically and structurally. Scarlatti feels more like quirky friend.

Meantime, Rameau mostly seems like a complete alien*.

Bach brings tears to my eyes while Handel induces my lips to smile. I feel happy delight with both Telemann and Scarlatti, one because he does what I would do, the other because he does what I would not.

Can it all be explained by a Myers Briggs assessment? By the times in which we live? By the teachers we’ve had along the way? By our star signs?

All theories welcome…

*Disclaimer: I have not played a fair percentage of Rameau’s keyboard music, so I would be very excited to be dissuaded from this current position. Please share your Rameau favourites with me!

POST-SCRIPT: Yes, I know. I start talking about Charles Rosen’s fabulous book and then just leave it at that. I will certainly be talking about Piano Notes some more in the weeks to come.

Is the Study of Piano Declining in the United States of America?

This topic in the Tuesday afternoon line-up of MTNA Conference presentations seemed almost arcane on the page of the conference booklet, especially by way of comparison to other topics with immediate practical application in the 30 minute piano lesson. And the question seemed one of those asked-and-answered types: is the study of piano in decline? Hell, yeah. Who doesn’t know that, right?

But I’m an arcane-topic kind of chick, so I bounded with enthusiasm into this panel presentation-discussion. It was already impressive just checking out who was in the panel: Peter Jutras, who is the editor of the wonderful Clavier Companion; E.L. Lancaster, who is both Vice President and Keyboard-Editor-in-Chief of Alfred Publishing; Brian Chung, Vice President of the Kawai Corporation; Gary Ingle, CEO of MTNA; Mike Bates, Senior Member of the Institutional Solutions Group, Keyboard Division, Yamaha Corporation of America; and Sharon Girard, NCTM, a private piano teacher since 1976 in Connecticut.

To begin: college-level study (and beyond). The raw number of students taking piano as their major for the undergraduate degrees in the United States has increased significantly over the past twenty years (roughly a 25% increase), numbers for masters have increased slightly (currently around the 1000 mark)  and numbers of students enrolled in doctoral programs with a piano major have increased astronomically (currently around 1000, up from only about 400 less than ten years ago). But these raw figures don’t tell the complete story. More and more piano majors (all levels) are international students (so these figures don’t reflect piano learning activity in the US in any case); there are more options for students to choose from when selecting their music major (so students who might previously have taken piano are now specialising in some other aspect of music); there are more students studying music (so the proportion of students piano majors  in comparison to the entire student population cannot be inferred from the raw data).

What are piano teachers in the suburbs, cities and small towns noticing? An increase in adult students and in very young beginners (4 and 5 year olds) and a sharp decline in beginners aged 9 and 10. The GFC seems to have had a pronounced (negative) impact on enrollments, but further to this there seems to be a decline in the value parents in 2012 ascribe to piano lessons in the broad education of their children. From my Australian perspective I was also fascinated to learn that school teachers are drivers of enrollments in piano lessons! In Australia school teachers have absolutely no impact on the propensity of a child to begin lessons – and if anything, their neutral impact skews slightly negative. But in the US many children learn band instruments through the school, and so children can still have an instrumental education without taking private piano lessons. Apparently it’s the band teachers who promote piano to some large degree, and when those teachers don’t encourage piano lesson enrollment a sharp decline can be seen.

Next: sales of educational and classical print music. These sales have declined since 2006, but only slightly (4%), and it’s hard to see that as anything other than a ripple-on effect of the GFC. The breakdown of print music sales in the US works out at something like 19% Classical Music, 19% Christian Music and 13% piano methods, with the bulk of the remainder being taken up by pop titles. This proportion appears to have held steady. In any case, print music sales are a poor indicator of piano study, because younger siblings often use the print music older siblings used before them, and it’s entirely possible that in a climate of financial restraint parents are more likely to seek these kinds of economies.

We move on to sales of instruments: grand pianos, uprights, digital pianos and keyboards. There has been a massive decline in sales of grand pianos since 2005 – down from 35,000 then to around 12,000 now. Seeing as most new grand pianos are purchased by institutions and very rich people it’s possible to infer that the rich people are being careful and the institutions have had their budgets slashed – neither of which reflects on the current number of piano students in the US. It’s when we get to the other categories that we see some interesting trends. Upright acoustic piano sales are also consistently down, as are sales of digital pianos. The category that is doing just fine (although not increasing, particularly) is the under $200 keyboard. These instruments are purchased by parents who want to invest the bare minimum to afford their children access to music education, with the intention to trade up if their child demonstrates prolonged interest and/or aptitude. In the US roughly 1,000,000 units of this kind of keyboard has been sold every year for the past decade. Do the instruments live in the back of cupboards? Who knows! This statistic is as enigmatic as the numbers on grand piano sales in terms of establishing a trend of piano study decline in the United States (although it potentially reflects an opportunity).

Meantime, the percentage of MTNA members who teach the piano has been increasing. Again, this fact doesn’t really tell us anything: are memberships of MTNA in decline or are they increasing? Has there been a recent trend of the teachers of particular instrument families to not sign up to the Music Teachers Associations? Has the MTNA been catering very well for piano teachers of late, and dropping the ball as regards the other instruments?

One comment was made by a panelist that I found very interesting: “we live in a culture of deflection and distraction”, a comment intended to speak to a broad trend away from educational practice that engaged students in critical thinking and practical skill acquisition. I tend to take the view that gaming cultures are educationally preferable (in so very many ways) to traditional classroom practices, and I further take the view that learning the piano is much more like a game than it is like a traditional school classroom learning experience. But I suspect this comment reflects some things that are particularly true not of Western culture but of American culture.

Comments were opened to the audience, and one emerging theme (reflecting comments also made by panellists) was the tension between sport and piano in the broad culture of childhood in the US – this idea that you either play soccer or you learn the piano, the idea that promising students find themselves pressured into team sport participation that then compromises their musical education, and so forth. Implicit in this theme was the notion that parents these days just don’t get what piano lessons are for (as touched on above), that soccer and team sports are widely seen to provide benefits for children while piano lessons do not.

Another theme (again, reflecting comments already made by panelists) was that piano teachers are not very marketing savvy, and that they are not very technology savvy. Sometimes these two lacks merge into one big piano teacher fail, with piano teachers not taking advantage of the internet to reinforce community awareness of their services and not taking advantage of social media to communicate with current and prospective students. There was an implicit sense that piano teachers do not look at their teaching as being a business (much in this theme was not unpacked, but, I think, broadly understood by the audience).

A third theme was that piano teachers are often quite rigid in their idea about what they do; instead of looking at their available skill set and thinking about a range of services they can provide to the community, teachers imagine that their real job is to provide the same kind of piano lessons as those they received, last century. Some comments from the floor detailed the wide ranging activities some exception-to-the-rule teachers engage in in order to have a solid business model.

In short, I felt as if this session were the first two pages of an introduction to a 350 page book on the topic; we just began to frame the conversation when it came to an end. And as fascinating as what was said was what was not. What about socio-economics? Are there some parts of the United States where piano study is thriving? Some cities that are doing significantly better than others? [I can't imagine piano lessons are as common as they used to be in Detroit, for example.] Are language issues an impediment to piano study? [The paucity of Spanish-language piano methods, for instance, as compared to Spanish-speaking population in the US surely indicates a swathe of the population disengaged from piano study.] How about the decline of the use of the acoustic piano in churches and other worship settings? [Once upon a time many not-wealthy churches would have a good, mid-range grand piano in addition to an organ.]

The panel mentioned the rise of online, do-it-yourself-by-watching-videos-and-buying-the-book piano study, and this touches on another aspect of this topic. It could be that piano/keyboard study by volume has seen no significant decline, but there’s every chance that the national pianistic skill set is in decline.

It’s a fascinating time in the United States, a time of substantial cultural reframing and contention. The study of the piano could well be a case study for this rethinking of what it means to be an American with an education (even if you never did make it to college)….

My 3 Favourite Lines from Pedagogy Saturday, MTNA Conference 2012

“The wrong sound is much more horrible than the wrong note” – Steven Spooner

“The score is not a wall but a window” – Peter Takacs

“Some pianists have alcoholic rubato – they stop at every bar” – Peter Mack

Pedagogy Saturday at the MTNA Conference 2012

I’ve never been to an MTNA Conference before. In fact, my music education conference experiences to date have been restricted to events held in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and Malaysia. Fantastic conferences, each and every one, but each on a rather modest to cosy scale.

Walking in on the first event of Pedagogy Saturday brought home the huge difference in population base between, say, Western Australia and the whole of the United States of America. The massive Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel (capacity in theatre mode of around the 1900 mark) appeared to be half-full of teachers sitting chock-a-block, each hanging off the wonderful words and thought and insights communicated by Nelita True.

I only got to hear the tail end of the masterclass, but the ease and joyfulness with which Nelita approached her master-teacher role were an inspiration and she perfectly set the tone for the day. An understated wit and a deeply empathic approach to the preoccupations and concerns of the student made every moment in this masterclass a delight.

Many of the teachers wanted to ask Nelita questions right then and there,  but she was bustled away by a charming Irish man who assured us all we would get the chance to interrogate Ms True at the end of the day. The man was so charming, in fact, that I noted his name and decided to attend his session later in the day.

But first up I listened to Scott McBride Smith and Steven Spooner discussing issues of fingering. I’m always wary of a duo effort in a presentation – it can so easily become one person talking and the other nodding, or two people politely disagreeing with each other for the duration, or one person outshining the other despite both having equal time. This presentation was none of these things, instead being a joyous exchange of anecdote and information all feeding into a shared perspective on the rights and wrongs of  pianistic fingering praxis. There was so much great thinking in this seminar that it really deserves a blog entry of its own (forthcoming).

Next up I split my time between Marjorie Lee discussing ‘her unusual immersion-style teaching’ and a panel of piano competition organisers discussing their perspective on the capital C competition. This split between sessions was prompted by Marjorie Lee not having a lapel mic, and therefore being inaudible to the back half of the filled-to-capacity room (in which half I happened to be). After nearly 30 minutes I was desperately irritated by only catching every third sentence (if I was lucky) so I popped next door to hear the competition organisers discussing competitions from their point of view.

The difference between the piano teaching and learning cultures of the United States of America and those of Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, Canada, etc. (think former British Empire) comes down to this: competitions v exams. In the nations of the Commonwealth music learning is measured through examination-assessments where the progress of the student is described in terms of graded benchmarks; teachers strive to have their students pass with flying colours and to have them progress through these benchmarks as quickly as possible. I’m beginning to realise that in the US teachers have competitions as the primary source of validation, and so teachers strive to have their students win competitions. This is a substantial cultural difference, upon which I intend to blog further…. And if you’re a teacher from the US reading this entry and you disagree – please let me know I’m getting the wrong end of the stick here!

I then popped back in to hear Marjorie Lee wrap up (and to hear some of her students play) and with the benefit of this competition culture information from the session next door I realised that what Marjorie is doing (amongst other, different things) is fast-tracking students into this competition success by not getting hung up on that other great US educational measure of learning, the method book. I really would love to have heard her presentation again, both in the sense of being physically able to hear it and in the sense of having a better understanding of the culture in which her teaching operates.

Following this I accidentally missed most of Yoheved Kaplinksy’s masterclass (damn you, jetlag) before racing downstairs to secure a seat for Peter Mack’s charming presentation “Lower the Rear End of the Elephant Slowly Onto The Keys”: Teaching Basic Artistic Concepts By Using Colourful Imagery. What I did catch of the Yoheved Kaplinsky masterclass demonstrated an elegance of approach to the piano, a swiftness of insight and a precision of communication – ten minutes left me desperately keen to see and hear more…

Peter Mack was, in fact, the Irish man who had so intrigued and charmed at the start of the day when thanking Nelita True. His seminar was a whirlwind of ideas about communicating deep and complex truths about musical learning, how to perform music, and more specifically in the latter half of the seminar, about how to play the piano. Metaphor, imagery, narrative and lateral thinking can be magical shortcuts to understanding, and Peter Mack’s many examples were as brilliant as they were entertaining. The session could have gone on for twice as long and still have left us wanting more.

And I think I particularly liked Peter’s session because he thinks almost exactly the way I do; case in point: Julie Andrews. How many seminars have I begun by making reference to Julie Andrews when I’m talking about starting at the very beginning? So imagine my delight/surprise to see on the handout from this seminar this sentence: “Julie Andrews was wrong”. Of course, Julie Andrews wasn’t wrong about anything, it was Maria who was wrong, or even more properly Oscar Hammerstein, or even more properly the lyric Oscar Hammerstein wrote. But Peter Mack and I blithely go about our seminars announcing Julie Andrews was wrong. Snap.

Marvin Blickenstaff’s presentation on getting technique right with elementary students right from the start rounded off the day before the closing event: a panel (Nelita True, Peter Takacs and Peter Mack) answering questions from the floor. Marvin Blickenstaff is one of those truly exceptional music educators who seems able to address the technical needs of the student at the same time as he addresses their human needs. He approaches music-making as a profoundly human communicative event and process, and this session was a joy. What is amazing to me is that this was my overwhelming impression of his seminar, but when I look at my notes taken during the hour I have a succession of specific ideas and insights into developing good pianism in beginners; bullet points like “practice raising shoulders to the ears and then dropping” and “do it in the air first” and “make an O with the fingertip to the thumb” – practical ideas that don’t convey the philosophical approach to music education that underpinned this presentation.

My favourite moment of the panel that concluded the day was when Nelita True talked about the importance of students learning to support each other (rather than compete with each other) in order for them to become musicians; she shared a gorgeous story of a young student who, at the end of his years of study with her, thanked her for helping him become a charming human being.

I missed about three quarters of the scheduled events of the day (thanks to four options being scheduled for each session!) but my first ever Pedagogy Saturday was an absolute delight – so many insightful, generous and entertaining presenters, so many approaches to making beautiful, meaningful communication through the piano: such music teaching as makes the world a better place.

 

Teaching v Learning in the Piano Lesson [Part I]

One of the biggest privileges of being a piano teacher is the opportunity to become a consistent part of a student’s life. Each school week for maybe even a decade or longer the piano teacher and the piano student have time one-on-one (more or less) to explore musical puzzles, pianistic tricks, and challenges both physical and imaginative.

This is not a relationship in the knowledge-transmission model (where the teacher pours knowledge into student until student is all full up) but rather a relationship that is built on the teacher tweaking the learning experience to match the interests and accomplishments of the student. This teacher-student relationship is usually nurturing and supportive, in the sense of helping the student achieve their musical/pianistic goals and ambitions and substantially beyond. Piano teachers get to notice things about their students that can be missed in the hurly-burly of classroom activity, and piano teachers participate in building a sense of achievement in students who might otherwise never feel as if they shine….

So piano teachers are in a tremendous position to work with students who fall outside the bell curve; teaching can be modified to fit the precise needs of the student and without a class of other students to manage the teacher can organise the learning process to be perfectly timed for the individual student.

That’s the theory.

In real life, as always, it’s more complicated. And the number one thing that gets in the way of this perfectly customised learning experience is the idea (held by both parents and teachers) that the job of the teacher is to teach.

The job of the teacher is in fact not to teach but to help the student learn. And there is a massive difference between the role of ‘teaching’ and the role of ‘facilitating learning’.

When you think your job is to teach you begin with a list of all the things you want to ‘teach’ to your student, a catalogue of the things they should know or be able to do by the time you are done with them. Piano teachers who work in exam cultures (half the planet, at least) even have this big list of all the things you want to teach broken down into examinable chunks (“Last year you learned D Major? OK, this year we’ll work on E flat…”, etc.). Things that aren’t on that list are deemed either of secondary or of no importance (particularly once students start taking annual exams).

But when you begin with the idea of facilitating learning you begin with a desire to discover what makes your student tick, what intrigues them, what doesn’t, what they yearn to master, what they hanker to understand. You also, over time, begin to understand how the student sees themselves in relation to their family, their school and classmates, in relation to their future (and their past), and in relation to their culture (and this might be simple through to extremely complicated). These understandings then feed into your understanding of what drives their learning, and you can better facilitate learning.

You still have a checklist in relation to skills, vocabulary, literacy, experience, recognition, and so forth, but this list is always at the service of maximising learning, rather than the learning experience of the student serving you as you, the teacher, work your way through that checklist.

Let’s make up some examples: a very intelligent but not very socially mature 8 year old who has been learning for about a year suddenly decides to figure out how to play every single major and harmonic minor scale – all 24 of them. If you are tied to your piano teacher checklists you’ll be thinking to yourself ‘You don’t need all these scales for years yet!! Why don’t we just keep learning the pieces in your method book and we’ll come back to these scales when you’re ready?!’.

You can see the problem here plain as day: the student is ready to learn how to play all these scales – in fact, they’ve basically mastered them all just for fun while you weren’t watching! It’s not that they are not ready to learn – it’s that you are not ready to teach. Yep, this is the moment where you can choose to make the piano lesson all about you, or all about your student. Your call.

Another example: you have a 12-year-old student with a sunny disposition, learning for 4 years already, they’ve done a Preliminary exam at the end of the previous year, just started high school (Australia), they have no particular academic gifts, but they love playing the piano, and they’ve just returned after the school holidays with nine piano pieces they’ve composed since the last lesson 8 weeks ago. They begin to show you their (not-so-well notated) compositions as the minutes of the lesson begin to click over. You know how hard it was to get through that Preliminary exam at the end of last year, and you don’t want to waste a term working on ‘composing’ (which truth be told you don’t feel that comfortable dealing with) because you’d like them to do well in their Grade One exam at the end of the school year.

This is the moment where you can make the lesson all about your checklist (getting the student ready for Grade One) or you can make the lesson all about the student’s musical experiences (and learning) over the holidays. Is it going to be about them? Or about you?

Of course, there’s always that 5-15% of students who appear to have no interest in learning whatsoever, the kind who ask “Do we have to do this?”. The challenge here for teachers is how to tempt students into having a more robust appetite for learning without falling into the trap of creating new kinds of checklists (what kinds of learning the student should want to engage in). I really do regard these children (adults just don’t have this problem, in my experience) as being ‘learning anorexic’ – for some reason they feel it’s a Good Thing to restrict their learning experiences and opportunities, and it’s really, really hard to convince them otherwise.

I’ve been becoming more and more hardline on this issue the more experienced I’ve become in my teaching: once upon a time I really would have insisted on students struggling through a piece for some number of weeks rather than ‘give in’ to the student and just move on to a new piece of repertoire; once upon a time I would have politely listened to a student enthuse about this great new piece they’d discovered that they’d been trying to learn to play, and then after no more than 10 minutes (probably 4) I’d have steered the lesson back to the repertoire I had assigned; once upon a time I’d have left activities generally deemed to be ‘creative’ til the end of the lesson because we had to get the ‘real’ work done first. But all these once-upon-a-times represent woeful educational practice, and I’m ashamed of every single example of this in my teaching history.

Then we have the rare 1-4% who love to learn things in the order we plan to teach things, who practice regularly and consistently for their entire learning lives, who explore new kinds of learning in their own time, but prepare for lessons so well that we can fit nearly everything into 45 minute lessons each week, and whose parents are keen for them to have extra lessons as their learning requires. And I think (deep down in  a little part of our hearts) we piano teachers think that in an ideal world the other 96-99% of our students would just morph into this kind of  a student.

But we only think that because we (deep down in our hearts) believe our focus should be on our teaching, not on the student’s learning.

As soon as we shift into a learning-centric focus the fun of the piano lesson becomes all about connecting with our students, with their unique gifts, challenges, contexts and needs.

And all those lists of requirements, prerequisites and checklists begin to gather a little more dust each week as we work to meet the evolving and unfolding learning needs of our students.

Let’s Start At the Very Beginning, Part 2: Where is the beginning?

In Friday’s presentation I began by challenging the notion that our beginner piano students are in fact ‘beginners’. Sure, this might be their first piano lesson, but most of our newest pupils bring with them a myriad of musical lessons learned prior to walking in our studio doors.

Music educators are deluded in the extreme if they believe that students have had no musical experiences prior to formal classes; from hearing their mother’s heartbeat while still in the womb through to being exposed to Muzak at the supermarket, children have a very rich tapestry of musical memories by the time they are 4 or 5 years old. There is complex musical accompaniment to children’s television (whether we’re talking opening themes of Disney preschooler animations such as Handy Manny or Jungle Junction or the rich semiotic of musical signification that organises In the Night Garden),  there are toddler/preschooler rock groups (The Wiggles, The Imagination Movers, and so on), and that’s without starting on iPad/iPhone apps and mobile phone ring tones.

But that’s just on the listening front.

Our beginner piano students have also been engaged in noise-making from a quite early age as well, whether it is vocalising/singing or creating noise with implements and saucepans. Not only do they have a bodily instinct as to pitch, but they have a corporeal sensation of dynamic. They know how to make long sounds and short sounds, and they’ve mastered all kinds of articulations and inflections and they understand the emotional loadings of specific kinds of sounds. In short, their musical imaginations have much to play with.

OK, so – so far this is everyone who walks into the piano teaching studio. But now things start to differentiate, and we start to see that some beginners are far from novices.

Some beginners have had a piano in their homes from the day they were born. This places them at a huge advantage to the beginner whose parents can’t quite bring themselves to commit to buying a $200 electronic device posing as a digital piano. Some lucky beginners have even had others in their family playing the piano as part of everyday life for years before you, the teacher, first see them. The fast-tracking this background experience provides is mammoth.

Firstly, these children are familiar with the layout of the keyboard, the function of the pedals, the weight of the keys, and maybe they’ve even explored the mechanism inside the lid…. There’s a whole level of ease that this familiarity provides that will take other beginners months (maybe even a year or two) to get up to speed.

Secondly, these children have witnessed the instrument being played. They’ve seen the way the pianist sits on the piano bench/stool, how the music is laid out on the music stand, how fingers connect with key surfaces, how arms are used in creating volume and in preparation for moving across and about the extent of the keyboard. This is almost always an advantage, unless the pianist has been extraordinarily ungainly or deficient.

And this all adds up to children who feel confident approaching the piano during those first 30 minutes of formal keyboard education. As the advertisements say, priceless.

But wait, there’s more. Some beginners come to the first piano lesson with a year or two of group music classes behind them, from Kindermusik through to Orff through to whatever has been offered in the local community hall. These classes might consist of moving to music, clapping with the beat, singing songs, learning about pitch direction, learning basic principles of music notation, maybe solfège training in some way, rhythm reading, playing on percussion instruments and so forth. These students are even more ahead than their beginner peers because they’ve been consciously thinking about these musical concepts (including musical literacy) prior to considering the specific physical skills needed to play the piano.

And then there’s the issue of students who’ve grown up with print music in the house (they’ve seen all these symbols over the years, even if no one explained what they meant) and observing people playing instruments using music as part of the process. These students are relaxed about learning to read, just the same way children who grow up in homes with books are comfortable about gaining literacy skills. Again, this is an advantage that can be measured in months.

There’s little we can do as piano teachers in that first lesson to ascertain or measure the differences between our beginner students. But what we can do is quickly work with parents and students who are new to the culture of playing a musical instrument to help the whole family adjust to what really is a cultural shift. Pianos being part of family life, not sequestered off in the furthest, dankest, back room of the house; playing the piano every day, even if just for a few minutes; a sense of celebration about the music that comes from the piano, rather than an anxiety over ‘accuracy’; a little collection of print music books gathering in the piano stool, or in a book case nearby, rather than dog-eared sheets of photocopy, disintegrating/fading/becoming lost; all these aspects of musical life need to be learned.

And at the very beginning of a beginner’s piano lessons it does us teachers well to remember that, even with such cultural lessons ahead, this is not necessarily the beginning at all.

To be continued…

 

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning, Part 1: Models of Learning

Yesterday I gave a presentation on teaching beginners as part of the Sydney Conservatorium’s annual Piano Teacher Festival. I promised I would blog about this presentation, but there were so many ideas in the 90 minutes of talk that I need to break things into smaller units. So today I begin with Models of Learning.

What I couldn’t show in my presentation, but would have loved to have had as prerequisite viewing, was this clip  that sets out the issues at play in ‘education’ generally. Part of what’s fabulous about teaching the piano is that we piano teachers have never bought into the industrial model Sir Ken Robinson outlines – we’ve never taught children content according to their age, for instance, but rather have responded to students’ progress and capacity, for instance. On the other hand, we have certainly taught to the test (in many countries) and as a result too many of us have taught our students to play as if there really is only one right way/one correct answer. Furthermore, we’ve restricted our students from hearing the music prior to learning it, buying into this notion that there is an ‘answer’ and it’s cheating to go to the back of the book and find out what it is.

But the model of learning/teaching the piano that I really took to task in yesterday’s presentation was the model of information being given to the student via some (optional) explanation which then resulted in a performance. This information-explanation-performance model is the way most of us piano teachers working today (2012) were taught; music (information) was popped onto the music-stand, and with some limited explanations (how to play the ornaments, or heavy pencil markings reminding us to count the rests) we then transformed this information into a performance. The job of the teacher was to control for error, making sure that the final performance was as close to a ‘correct answer’ as possible.

That’s still the way most of us teach.

When it comes to absolute beginners this learning/teaching model ends up supporting lessons where we tell students lots of stuff (‘this is a crotchet’, ‘this is a D’, ‘this is a barline’, ‘lift off when you see a rest’) and the student has to demonstrate that they’ve remembered all this stuff when they play. We end up putting lots of circles around the bits students don’t remember, and hope that these markings will be an extra reminder to remember. Sometimes it takes three or four lessons before beginner students get all the remembering done  for one particular piece.

In the presentation yesterday I suggested a different learning/teaching model (one which parents in 2012 are likely to expect from all teachers in any learning context). In this model all learning begins with experience. So the student will have the experience of hearing the teacher play something, seeing the teacher create sounds on the keyboard. The student then explores what they’ve just experienced – going to the keyboard to copy what they’ve heard, to mimic the movements they’ve just seen, and while they are exploring these sounds and movements they will also be having more experiences (what does it feel like? what does this feeling sound like?) and further explorations (what if I play faster? higher? softer?), and these further explorations veer into the territory I called experimenting.

In the experiment phase of the learning process the student is now creating hypotheses such as “I imagine that this will sound more exciting loud than soft” or “I think it would be more interesting to play this higher on the piano” or “I expect people will be scared when I suddenly play something after a long silence” and so on. The student is exploring what is possible and experimenting with the impact these changes and different approaches will make. Sooner or later (and it really is impossible to know how soon or late it might be) the student has something to say. This is now the phase of expressing.

Expressing oneself at the piano involves deliberately doing something that will have a known effect and communicate something more or less consistently to a known audience. This is a vital part of the learning cycle, for until a child/student communicates through their playing they are not really learning to ‘play’ the piano at all, they’re just learning about the piano.

Of course, once a student expresses something the student finds themselves back at the start of the cycle – they are experiencing the music they are playing, the thing being communicated, the sounds being created.

You’ll see how ‘information’ isn’t intentionally part of this process at all. And yet students will have gained oodles of ‘information’ through this process. Even by playing one simple piece or pattern students will have learned about weight needed to make sounds (of varying dynamic levels), differences of register across the keyboard, pitch direction, keyboard geography and patterns in that geography, and so forth. But instead of learning these things through instruction the student learns these things through experience and exploration.

It’s the old saying: “Tell me, I’ll forget. Show me, I’ll remember. Involve me, I’ll understand.”

[Or is it an old saying? It seems terribly current-educational-thinking to me!]

And at the heart of my presentation was this idea that at the heart of teaching is the development of understanding, not the transmission of knowledge.

To be continued…

Nine New Year’s Resolutions: for Piano Teachers

We’re so close to New Year’s Eve I can almost smell the fireworks. And nothing focuses the mind like a firework, so here are my 2012 suggestions for nine resolutions piano teachers might consider making between now and January 1 (and then keeping from January 1 through to December 31!).

1. Spend more time playing the piano. Unless you also work as a performer (whether soloist or collaborative pianist/accompanist) the chances are that you don’t spend very much time actually playing the piano yourself. Promise yourself 20 minutes, 30 minutes, even a whole hour a day for you to exercise your pianism, even if it’s just rattling through some scales, figuring out how to play something by ear, improvising, or playing through new exam music.

2. Spend time learning a new skill or language. Getting out of your comfort zone and experiencing what it’s like to be a beginner all over again will transform your teaching, giving you  fresh insights and inspirations, whether you’re learning tapdancing, woodworking, ancient Greek, bonsai gardening, horse-riding or the bagpipes.

3. Discover the work of a composer you’ve never played/taught before. Ideally, discover the work of a few! Maybe you’ve never played Scriabin, or Telemann, or Messiaen. Or Grieg. Or Haydn. Or – well, you get the drift. And while you’re at it, commit to discovering the work of a living composer who is new to you as well.

4. Create a fresh business plan for your piano teaching business. That’s right, you run a business. You don’t have a business plan? OK, maybe this should be resolution number 1…. A business plan involves thinking through what you want to accomplish in terms of services you provide, markets you want to reach, the growth of your business, financial planning, and more. Writing a business plan creates a structure for you to articulate your vision of what you do and how you connect to your students and their parents and the community beyond.

5. Get to know some piano teachers in your area/city/state/country/world. There are great reasons why you should get to know piano teachers in your local area, but connecting with other piano teachers anywhere is what counts. You might do it via an internet forum, a music teachers association, a piano pedagogy conference, by attending the local eisteddfod/competitions/festivals, or clicking ‘like’ on a facebook page. Whatever suits your current circumstances – do it.

6. Refresh your resources. Check your examination syllabuses and manuals – are they current? Are the method books you use the best match for your teaching philosophy? Have you been teaching the same repertoire for the past 15+ years? And are the resources you use to support sight reading, aural skills, technical work and keyboard musicianship the best you can find, or simply the same resources your teacher used when you were a student?

7. Create your own Personal Learning Network. This is about using social media as a tool in improving your professional practice. Here’s a link to a good post explaining what a PLN is and how to make one work.

8. Stress less. Resolve to only enter students into exams you know they can pass, even if they do get the flu, go on an unscheduled holiday, and fail to practice for a month. Get to the end of the 30 minute, 45 minute, 60 minute lessons and stop – time’s up, and there’s always next week to work on what you missed out today. Remember, there are no medals for martyrs.

9. Sing more. I know, you’re a piano teacher, but singing a phrase can communicate in an instant what would take paragraphs of explanation. And find ways to enable your students to sing more, too – hearing your students vocalise their musical ideas gives you precious insights into their connection with their repertoire and their musical imagination.

Labels v Shapes: A Real-Life Reading Story

I find teaching addictive. It’s problem-solving, anecdote-sharing, exploration, creation, drama, psychology, youth culture, and every now and again a little bit of inspiration.

But, for me, part of the addiction (I think) is the honesty you need, as a teacher, to bring to each lesson: admitting you get things wrong, not persisting with an approach that doesn’t connect with the student, not refusing to adapt your plans to real life, being prepared [and yes, I'm now specifically referring to instrumental and vocal teachers] to find new repertoire when a student (for no discernible reason) simply hates the fabulous music you’ve assigned.

And then there’s the very humbling moment when you realise that something has gone under your radar for far too long – a student is missing something you assumed they knew, and you’ve both been going on for weeks, months, terms, or even years without the omission being noticed.

That happened to me on Monday when my gorgeous young high school-age Grade 3/4 student brought a new piece (assigned two weeks ago) to his lesson with the names of the notes written into the score in one or two lines. We’re not talking the odd note here and there, but every single note for bars and bars.

I didn’t notice at first but as he played through the music and reached these bars, I was completely taken a-back, and before I could stop myself I blurted “Why have you done this?!” “Done what?” he said (he’s one of the communicative adolescents). “Written the names of EVERY SINGLE NOTE into your music!!!”

“Well, I wrote them in to help me learn them.”

Well, yes, I had supposed that that was his general plan. But what I had meant was this: what on earth persuaded you, at this comparatively late stage of your piano playing career, to begin inscribing the names of each individual note into a section of music that you find challenging?

“Let’s try it a completely different way,” I said. “Notice how all the notes are line notes? So, without playing anything what do you already know about how this will sound?”

“It’s just a chord.” “Right, but broken, and with this extra note,” I pointed to the note that made the 7th of the chord. “

“So it’s just this,” my student said as he played that exact chord (G7 as it so happened). “Exactly!” I replied, “so we can write chord symbols above the whole bar, instead of individual note names above each single note, and, as long as you already know the chord, you should quickly be able to figure out what to play.”

We ran through the four chords that made up the first four bars of the section, first as a block, then playing through in the broken pattern used in that specific piece.

“Try it hands together,” I suggested, and next thing he played the line almost without blemish, almost at speed. I was as astonished at this development as I’d been at seeing all the little note names pencilled onto the page. “So, seeing as you can play this line so well, why on earth did you think it was a good idea to write the note names in?!”

“I can play it well now because you just showed me what the notes are,” was his reply. And he was right, in one sense, but in a literal sense I hadn’t shown him any of the notes at all; what I’d done was show him how to look at the notes as a pattern instead of a series of unconnected physical locations on the keyboard. But doing that had ‘shown’ my student the notes. All of them. And we went from stumbling and fumbling to close to effortless in the space of about 4 minutes.

This was an epiphany to me. Somehow, along the way, with this particular student, I had failed to effectively communicate, demonstrate or model that reading isn’t about labels (note names), it’s about shapes. He had truly had no idea how to attack this sudden mass of notes crowding the score and he used considerable initiative to set about mastering the section with what seemed to him the best technique: name all those notes so you just can’t play the wrong one.

But just as in life, where a label is an inadequate measure of a person, so in music labels don’t communicate much of value about a note. A note name is like a GPS coordinate: it tells you exactly where you are. What a note name doesn’t do is tell you anything about where you came from or where you are going next. For that you need to think in shapes.

Because the actions we perform at the piano require choreography (fingers in advantageous positions, wrist at an advantageous height, elbows at advantageous angles, shoulders advantageously engaged, and so forth) we need to read the shapes of notes in at least two simultaneous ways (and I’m leaving rhythmic pattern out of this discussion): firstly, as a pattern of harmonic shapes, secondly, as a pattern of physical movements. So in addition to reading G7 from the collation of quavers in that first bar my student needed to read the pattern of low to high in the particular way this broken chord pattern worked. He’d had no problem with this second, choreographic (and spatial), pattern-noticing/pattern-reading, but reading the notes as a harmonic shape had just not occurred to him.

A real-life reminder to me to teach reading shapes from all kinds of angles, as well as an important reminder to notice the clues that might have told me about this missing piece of the jigsaw two or three years ago.

Oh, and for just a moment there this was a hideous reminder of the bad old days, when writing note names over every note in the score was just what piano teachers wanted you to do….

Redefining ‘enough’ – is it even possible?

There seems to be broad agreement amongst piano teachers with the idea that half an hour is not enough time for a weekly piano lesson (beyond the youngest years, where thirty minutes might be stretching a child’s concentration span).

But ‘not enough’ for what? It all comes down to what a piano lesson ought to accomplish, and this is where the concept of ‘enough’ rapidly turns into a proverbial piece of string.

Piano teachers assume that their role is not simply one of instructing children in piano performance; “learning the piano” turns out to also involve the acquisition of music literacy, and much time is spent in lessons engaged in this non-piano-specific endeavour. Even after music notation basics have been acquired, students will be developing their literacy in their piano lessons until piano lessons cease.

Often this development of literacy skills extends into formal theory lessons, which are often seen as part and parcel of the piano teacher’s brief. And “theory” means written work which teachers need to check and correct in lessons; time-consuming, to say the least.

But even more significant than theory work is the time involved in preparing students for piano examinations/assessments. Teaching to a test takes far longer than teaching for learning. And no, the two are not the same thing. Even worse, teaching to a test that is at the extreme limits of a student’s capacity requires all the time in the world, not just 30 minutes a week (which is usually almost adequate for a bare pass).

And let’s not imagine the dark scenario where students bring along their own projects and ambitions into the piano tuition arena; 30 minutes is barely enough to get started in this circumstance.

Redefining ‘enough’ involves asking ourselves just what a piano lesson ought to involve, and what expectations we should have of students in regard to practice between lessons (both in terms of time spent, and the kinds of activities we ask students to undertake during their practice time).

At the heart of the question is this: what is ‘enough’ for us to do each week to facilitate productive learning and exploring by our students in the days between lessons? And surrounding this question is the aura of parental expectation: what is ‘enough’ for parents to feel satisfied with their child’s ongoing development? [Once upon a time these were almost completely separate questions, but in the 21st century we are seeing the rise of the parent who sees piano lessons as being first and foremost about developing the personhood of their child.]

One option is to start with the premise that we have 30 minutes with our student each week: what can we best do to facilitate learning and exploration within this time frame? Just quietly, if we start with this question it’s unlikely that assessments are going to be part of the answer (unless we subscribe to the old ‘students-won’t-practice-without-a-fear-factor’ chestnut). Facilitating learning means we focus on skills, and in this context repertoire becomes a vehicle for exploring new skills. So rather than each new piece being a collation of skill-hurdles (accidents waiting to happen), the music becomes a celebration of the skills the student has acquired. And facilitating exploration means we focus on discoveries rather than attempting to create performances that meet our perception of the expectations of others.

It’s quite possible to structure a half hour lesson to include both developing a new skill and setting the framework for a new discovery, and still have time to spare. It may not, however, be enough time to review all the discoveries the student has made during the week, and this becomes a problem, not just for you but also for your student who wants to share these discoveries with you! Which means we’re right back where we started with 30 minutes being insufficient time for the weekly lesson.

My conclusion is that redefining ‘enough’ will simply mean a new definition of what half an hour is insufficient to accomplish. But the exercise of asking ourselves what is sufficient (in terms of accomplishments and learning), taking the time to question our assumptions about our teaching praxis, is of such benefit we may find our lessons begin to change as a result.

Which leads us to the second option we have when faced with a not-long-enough half hour lesson format: looking at ways for getting the most out of those thirty minutes, seeking increased efficiencies and reducing time-wasting, the topic of my next post in this series!