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…

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…

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.

Lists reflect those who make them, but they also reflect the list-making process. A To-Do list might be broken down into things to do before lunchtime, things to do before the weekend and things to do before Christmas, as a way of managing different priorities. A shopping list might be organised according to retail establishments, or even by way of supermarket aisles. Even books list contents by chapter, by title, alphabetically or by author name. There are all kinds of ways of organising the lists we make.

A radio station I rarely listen to recently compiled a list, as voted by its listeners (and me), of the 20th century pieces of classical music most cherished by its listeners (and me).

The enthusiasm for lists seeming to be universal, particularly amongst readers of blogs and consumers of music (see High Fidelity link above, and cf Rage programming, any hit parade/countdown music presentation format, and hints for bloggers), this appears to be a winner of a broadcasting idea. Lists are a starting point for debate and discussion, and all curation is (at heart) sophisticated list-making, so there seems little to lose in such an endeavour.

But a great list needs clear definition. Favourite Compositions for Viola in Quintuple Time. Favourite Compositions for Piano by South American-born-and-raised composers. Favourite Art Music Compositions for non-orchestral instruments composed 1996-2000. And so forth. Generally speaking, the more specific the confines of the list the more intriguing the results.

And this ABC Classic FM top 100 20th century classical music pieces featured an unhelpful looseness of definition in two key ways.

1. Time Constraints. So the 20th century either began on January 1, 1900, or on January 1, 1901. Decide which and be brutal at excluding works not within the arbitrarily decided starting point. Yes, this means that works composed in 1899 were not, in fact, 20th century works at all. And a century lasts 100 years, not 110 or 111. So works composed after December 31, 1999, or after December 31, 2000 (keep it consistent with the decided-upon starting date) shouldn’t have been included either. Unless you change the name of the list.

2. Intention/Reception/Production. The 20th century saw a diffusion of musical styles and consumption, and the term ‘classic’ or ‘classical’ has come to represent a particular subset of styles and consumption models. The final list included works composed for film/performed by orchestra: an interesting cross-roads of what constitutes classical music. Brilliant and demonstrably popular film scores were not included, one assumes because of their unsymphonic approach. TV themes of similar popularity and interest also went unnominated. Musical theatre entries told the same story, the scored-for-symphonic-orchestra-and-composed-by-legitimate-classical-conductor West Side Story featured in the list, but nothing else from this genre. In fact, the moral of the story seems to be that if it’s symphonic in ambition it probably counts as classical music in this list-making process.

So what if we made some different parameters for the construction of a 20th Century Classic 100? What if we broke it down a little in the voting process, and then compiled an über-list from the results?

How about this: vote for up to 3 in each of the following categories; the same composition can be included in as many categories as you please; dates of composition are strictly from January 1, 1901 through to December 31, 2000.

1. Astonishing

2. Beautiful

3. Ground-breaking

4. Orchestral for the Concert Hall

5. Small Ensemble/Chamber

6. Non-orchestral instrumentation/forces/media

7. Keyboard

8. Opera/Music Theatre

9. Film/TV/Games

10. Vocal/Choral

You can vote for as few pieces as you like, or for as many as 30. The most voted-for pieces will make it into the top 100, irrespective of category.

Who’s in?

The countdown began at number 100, naturally, and John Adam’s The Chairman Dances from Nixon in China seemed about right. But over the course of the next 10 or so entries things began to unravel. Schmaltzy and ersatz contributions were mixing it with works commonly regarded as masterworks, and straight-out film scores even got a look-in. We all knew this was a popularity contest, but even so it felt as if voters hadn’t known the rules (even though there actually weren’t any rules, apart from the oddity of ABC Classic FM declaring the 20th century to have lasted til 2010).

Social media and outrage make excellent companions, and it didn’t take more than a day for the ABC Classic FM facebook page to feature a post requesting that those contributing to the debate take a positive tone; in addition, facebook’s quirks meant that some posts were marked as spam and required moderation to be included, so there was some confusion regarding exactly what was being moderated away.

Listeners could also call a talk-back line to pre-record their responses to the broadcasts, and the choices of listeners in the countdown. This was the most amusing aspect of the week-long broadcast. Many positive comments along the lines of “I’m hearing so much wonderful music I’ve never heard before” were interspersed with “this rubbish is a disgrace”, this negative comment uttered as frequently about the schmaltzy works as it was about the inclusions that were distinctly ’20th century’ in their aesthetic. Contributing to the entertainment was the experience of hearing the accents and intonations of Classic FM’s listenership, then inferring the listening demographic from phonetics alone.

Twitter is, of course, beyond moderation, so comments posted there were both pithy and unforgiving, and tended toward a more academic conception of the 20th Century: the notion that the century should last only 100 years and not include works originating in 1899 or post-2000, for instance, was taken for granted; the inclusion of works composed outside an art music intention was poorly received, and the inclusion of works that were largely lifted from the 19th century (whether we are talking late-century plagiarism or composers in the earliest parts of the century composing in anachronistic musical languages) met with broad disdain.

Particularly fascinating was the way the ABC Classic FM broadcasting team dealt with these various kinds of feedback: pre-recorded phone messages were regularly played, representing a wide spectrum of views; facebook comments were increasingly incorporated into the broadcast as the week went on; the twitter conversation went almost entirely unreported, and only tweets free of critique made it into the broadcast hours I heard. Many broadcasters were clearly unfamiliar with the whole concept of social media, another interesting demographic reality.

Those of us conversing via #classic100 on twitter found ourselves quite dispirited by the time we came to the final 20. It was clear that important works weren’t going to make it onto the list at all, and many immensely popular composers from the past few decades were also going without representation.

In a superb stroke of programming the concert broadcast of the top 5 pieces was immediately followed by a two hour broadcast discussing some of the works that didn’t make the top 100, but were in the 101-200 tranche of nominations/votes. This was beautifully done, and many listeners commented via facebook that they enjoyed this broadcast even more than they’d enjoyed the concert prior. Of course, this review of what wasn’t included had the benefit of curation in a way that the listener/voter-determined top 100 had not; the two hour broadcast was able to highlight ideas, genres, and stylistic directions from the 100 pieces in such a way as to tell a story, and this narrative arc contributed to the sensation that the post-countdown show was (in many ways) the best part of the whole week of 20th century broadcasting.

Musicians from outside Australia following my conversations about this #classic100 countdown via twitter were able to stream the radio broadcast via the net, so I ended up having fascinating conversations about this music with listeners in the Americas. They were amazed to see the final list; the inclusion of Australian composers they’d barely heard of and the dominance of English composers from the earliest reaches of the century being the most remarked-upon features of the countdown.This turned into a social history of Australia lesson for them, and a reminder to me that ‘classical music’ in Australia skews Anglo in ways that are unsustainable and undesirable.

One of my favourite tweeps, @gigglyfriday, did a running score of the Classic 100 countdown – by country. She hashtagged this #liketheOlympics, and right from the start those of us on twitter discussed the chances of the Russians taking out more places than the Brits. We thought the Brits would punch above their weight, but many of us were genuinely astonished to see the final countdown having Russia in 2nd place. I mean, even with just Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff you’d think the Russians would have it in the bag. But no, Britannia ruled.

Someone on twitter objected to the #liketheOlympics hashtag on the basis that if this were truly like the Olympics the Chinese would be in serious contention, and of course not a Chinese composer was within cooee of this list. It reminded me of a concert I attended in 2002 – a prominent Chinese orchestra was playing the Sydney Opera House, with something from the orchestral canon, a few pieces from Chinese composers, and something commissioned especially for the tour from an Australian composer. It was a great night out, but startling to me: the Opera House Concert Hall was filled with Australians of Chinese heritage, a demographic I’d never seen in any numbers at orchestral concerts before. That event, and the omission of particular kinds of musical voices from this countdown, remind me that our society is much broader than the pop v art music debates often allow.

Did I agree with the top 100 20th century pieces as voted by ABC Classic FM’s listeners? Well, no. But I absolutely agree with making 2oth century music something that is listened to and talked about, and not just in enclaves of aficionados (most of us with some kind of tertiary training in music), and not just within the narrow confines of self-defined classical music lovers or Classic FM listeners. A list such as this top 20th Century countdown provides a starting point – a place for disagreement, debate, delight and discovery, and from this point of view I agree very heartily indeed. May the conversations long continue….

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….

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!

The short answer is “you can’t”, and in a way it’s a relief to just get that admission out of the way. It takes a lot of energy and self-deceit to pretend that 30 minute lessons on an almost weekly basis for 10+ years will produce master musicians, and once we recognise that this time frame is insufficient we can start looking for better strategies.

So, if half an hour isn’t enough, what can we do about it?

1. We can re-examine how we define ‘enough’. What are the goals we are setting? Are they the goals we want to work towards?! Most of the time, in former Commonwealth countries, teachers define ‘enough’ by examinations (do we have enough time in 32-40 x 30 minute lessons to prepare for a excellent result in a Grade x examination?). Defining what is ‘enough’ involves talking to students and their parents about what they want to accomplish, as well as interrogating ourselves as to what we think a piano education should encompass.

2. We can look at ways of getting the most out of the thirty minute lesson. Have we built inefficiencies into our lesson model? Are our teaching methods wasteful of our limited time resources?

3. We can explore how more learning can take place between lessons. Are we structuring appropriate learning experiences to take place when we are not present? Are we informing students and their parents of ways to enhance learning between formal lessons?

4. We can restructure our teaching so that lessons are longer. This may involve a serious culture shift in some teaching studios where all lessons have always been charged in 30 minute units (even if they lasted for 45 minutes!).

5. We can offer once-a-term (or twice-a-term) learning opportunities which enhance the learning being done in the one-on-one context. This might be anything from a performance masterclass through to a Baroque dance class, from a scales concert through to a blog carnival, from a group harmony class to a studio-wide YouTube concert.

6. We can encourage students to take on additional musical commitments. This could range from learning a second instrument through to accompanying worship services at church/the choir at school, or being part of a jazz ensemble, and beyond.

And as with any such list, I’m sure we could add more to it.

But it’s these six ideas I’d like to explore a little further in follow-up posts: redefining ‘enough’, teaching more efficiently, facilitating out-of-lesson learning, creating and implementing scheduling changes, enabling group learning opportunities, and encouraging participation in non-solo piano music making.

In the meantime, do you find that half an hour is simply not enough?

Discussions involving mathematics bring on a sense of alienation/torpor to many in the general public, but I’m one of those who find mathematical thinking exciting, exacting, exhilarating. And as music is (really quite literally) on my mind all the time, I am deeply interested in the assertions of others regarding the links (or lack thereof) between these two (musical and mathematical) aspects of organisational thought and expression.

It turns out that many of those who spend time disputing the existence of links between music and mathematics go on to reveal that they were never that good at maths. In fact, they confess that they’ve failed key mathematical assessments throughout their schooling. What they don’t acknowledge is that they have a vested interest in denying connections between mathematical and musical thinking, and no one seems to think it worth mentioning that someone who is no good at maths probably won’t have a very nuanced idea as to what mathematics actually is [and therefore is probably not best equipped to detail how unconnected music and maths might be].

Along these lines, if you think that mathematics is just a fancy word for “counting” the argument will go something like this: maths and music are linked because in music you do counting (of beats and intervals). That’s it. As soon as we notice that music is more than counting (either beats or intervals) it’s no great stretch to be convinced the hoopla about maths and music having all that much in common must be based on a trite understanding of what music is.

The problem is that the trite understanding isn’t of music so much as it is of mathematics. Mathematical thinking does involve quantity (which concept does involve, amongst many other things, “counting”), but it also necessarily involves spatial thinking/awareness as well as pattern recognition, two substantial non-counting aspects of how to think in and about the world.

But even within the confines of “quantity” we find ourselves in a world of relationship: “this is bigger than that” might not sound particularly profound, but a lot about our experience of music can be described within this single concept of quantity. No matter which way we hear it, louder, longer, faster, further, more (and their corresponding softer, shorter, slower, closer, less) describe nearly everything that can happen in music.

Stephen Hough makes a quite convincing case that it is the ambiguities of music that make it wildly different to mathematics, that mathematics is about stasis and containment while music is about flow and escape. But this argument only convincing as long as you buy into its proposed divide before you debate the possible connections; if you see pattern as being the apparatus through which emotion/heart is experienced (and expressed) in music, then a head/heart divide doesn’t make much sense, for example. And where Stephen Hough’s sees the experience of rhythmic ‘irregularity’ as taking music away from any connection or analogy with mathematics, I suspect a mathematician might immediately think of prime numbers, and other ‘irregular’ or singular mathematical entities.  And the notion of ‘unexpected’ reflects pattern-spotting competencies and experientially or culturally based perceptual expectations rather than anything intrinsically structural. Saying that music is nothing like maths because it includes unexpected developments is like saying a list of numbers is not mathematical simply because you can’t figure out (or predict) the next number in the sequence.

Say we were to ask ourselves what links between music and mathematics we could find, rather than the ways in which we could refute possible links, I think we would quickly establish that playing a musical instrument involves an exceptional degree of mathematical thinking. From spatial thinking (up, down, high, low, near, far, close, beside, under, above, and all manner of prepositional variations of ways we map and describe spatial relationships) through to fractional thinking (subdividing) through to symbolic representation of relationship, shape and direction and garden-variety counting: even when a musician is completely focussed on an emotional journey or an artistic truth, the expression of that journey and truth can take place without the aid of mathematical thinking.

So how do a significant number of musicians manage to persuade themselves that their music has no relationship to mathematics (if we accept that the two are deeply linked)? My first instinct and considered judgment is to blame it on poor mathematics education in primary and early secondary schools; if you don’t understand what maths is then you are unlikely to credit it as being much use or relevance to the things that define your identity.

I’ve been fascinated to learn this week that the mathematical knowledge that a preschooler brings to their first year of primary schooling is by far the strongest “predictor of a host of social-emotional skills” (see Early Childhood Mathematics Education Research: learning trajectories for young children, p.6).

I mean, wow.

I’ve not explored the research or analysis of that finding (what is it about early acquisition of mathematical skills and concepts that facilitates enhanced social and emotional skills?, is this a causal or a casual link?, etc.), but the idea that mathematical skillfulness has emotional and social benefits surely challenges every cliché that exists in the western educational model about maths and the limits of its purpose in education.

So far I am deeply persuaded that music and mathematics have complex connections, overlaps, correspondences and links, and the fact that we debate the existence of those links is mostly a sign of how little western culture understands what mathematics is.

To be continued….

But no, an insistence that the key signature tells us the tonal centre of a piece of music has gone from being an example of anachronism to being a deplorable trend in most major Australian cities (!).

To be fair, we do call those congregations of accidentals at the beginning of each line of music a key signature; that is, this term implies that the accidentals signify a key rather than simply the notes required to be played a tone or semitone higher than the straight note name pitch. But in a post-atonal, neo-modal world it defies experience to assume that an absence of key signature signifies the C Major/A minor duopoly.

Imagine my horror/bemusement/outrage/despair some 10 years ago on seeing a well-respected examination board describe a piece they’d included in their syllabus as being ‘in C’ simply because there were no flats or sharps in the key signature (and precious few in the music itself). If the writer of their teaching notes had played the music through they could surely, surely have been in no doubt that the piece began and ended on a G, and that G was ‘home’ in the way that only  tonic can be.

As egregious as this error was I’ve been noticing a far worse trend in the past twelve months: examiners who mark students wrong when they correctly identify the key of a signature-less piece of music as being other than C Major/A minor.

A teacher in Melbourne told me of a student presenting a Christopher Norton piece that is clearly in F Major (the left hand part consists of a descending F Major scale pattern, for goodness sake, played twice, and then that’s the end of the piece) whose report came back announcing that the student had failed to identify the piece as being in C Major. A teacher in Brisbane told me of a student presenting my piece, Safari, whose report came back saying that the student had incorrectly named the key as E flat minor [you'll notice there are only 5 flats in the key signature?!].

I’ve also had conversations with examiners who think a piece with one flat cannot be in the Dorian mode, even though the first and last bass notes are G (and G is clearly the home note); examiners who think that music with uniformly altered notes are still in the unaltered major or minor tonality; and examiners who fail to notice that pieces are in the Mixolydian mode.

This is a massive problem for assessment boards, for teachers, and for students who take their studies seriously. Examiners should not be the last to the party in music education, and it’s just embarrassing to think that teachers are having to explain to young students that they shouldn’t waste their emotional energy on the ignorant comments in the General Knowledge section of their piano exam reports.

Composers are going to keep writing music that doesn’t comform to the theory exam expectations; teachers understand this, and put considerable effort into understanding for themselves (and into teaching their students to understand) the way the composer is working.

The difference for the examination boards is that, for their integrity as assessment providers to be maintained, every single one of their examiners has to be up-to-the-moment in their comprehension of contemporary tonal languages. That’s just not the case at the moment.

It’s honestly not all that hard in most contemporary pieces:

• which note feels like it’s the note the piece started on?
• which note feels like it’s the note the piece ought to end on?
• are the answers to these questions the same note? If yes, this is absolutely, without doubt, your tonal centre.
• Now you know the tonal centre, is the piece in a mode? If yes, figure out which one.
• If the piece is not in a mode, then just leave your answer at “the tonal centre is X” – that is sufficient for 2011 music assessments.