PIANO/MUSIC: A Cute Analogy About Learning
Aug. 2nd, 2006 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaOn a piano players'/learners/teachers list, we had the following discussion.
"What about ear players? In my childhood, ear playing was frowned upon. You were never allowed to hear how a piece should sound before trying to play it at sight, as they felt that would ruin your sight-reading. You were not allowed to play around with by-ear stuff. And they would scornfully say, 'You learned that by rote,' if you did copycat monkey-see-monkey-do playing. So **IS** rote a four-letter word, something to be avoided at all costs? Do you believe that note-reading is the first and foremost thing (and somewhat the ONLY thing) that you should teach?"
Kevin Coan, a musician and piano teacher, came up with this response (essentially--any weird remarks were inserted by Shalanna, a Bad Person [TM]):
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
How did you learn to speak, read, and write? If you learned to speak, read, and write English the way "traditional" piano teachers teach piano, here is how it happened.
1. No one was ever allowed to speak to you. Speaking to you might interfere with you learning to read English.
2. Your first contact with English came through books and flash cards. On the very first day of "English lessons," your parent taught you the first letter of the alphabet and its sound. Each week, you learned a new letter of the alphabet and its sound.
3. You were required to form your first sentence by reading it out of your English primer. You had to laboriously sound out your sentence one letter at a time.
4. You were required to practice your first reading sentence five times every day. You had to say all of the letters out loud first. After you got the letters down pat, you were allowed to say the whole sentence up to speed. If your tongue or lips were considered to be in the wrong position, someone rapped them with a ruler, and you had to start again in the "proper position."
5. Once you "passed" your first sentence, you got a new lesson with a new sentence to sound out. Pretty much no one ever cared if you ever said the first one again or not.
6. You were never allowed to change the words in any sentence. You had to always speak your sentences word-for-word the way they were written. And on pitch!
7. Maybe English became your native language! Or perhaps you don't even try to talk now.
Now let me share with you how I learned the English language:
1. I spent considerable time listening to people speak to me, and to each other. And to the radio and TV, where people were talking.
2. I learned to speak my first sentences by rote: I listened to what someone else said, and I repeated it back. "Da-da!" "Goo-goo!"
3. I learned, rather quickly, that I could mix the words up and substitute other words. Within a couple of short years, I was speaking dozens of sentences and English had become my native language. This was ALL BY ROTE.
4. When I went to school, I learned phonics. Phonics is an organized system for learning the letters and sounds. I didn't memorize words: I learned a system.
5. As I learned phonics, the teacher always related the words I "read" back to the words I had become accustomed to speaking.
6. As quickly as possible, the teacher made me read with expression. It was the same expression I had been doing by ROTE from having listened to thousands of people talk.
7. English became my native written AND spoken language.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I thought this was cute and VERY telling!
"What about ear players? In my childhood, ear playing was frowned upon. You were never allowed to hear how a piece should sound before trying to play it at sight, as they felt that would ruin your sight-reading. You were not allowed to play around with by-ear stuff. And they would scornfully say, 'You learned that by rote,' if you did copycat monkey-see-monkey-do playing. So **IS** rote a four-letter word, something to be avoided at all costs? Do you believe that note-reading is the first and foremost thing (and somewhat the ONLY thing) that you should teach?"
Kevin Coan, a musician and piano teacher, came up with this response (essentially--any weird remarks were inserted by Shalanna, a Bad Person [TM]):
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
How did you learn to speak, read, and write? If you learned to speak, read, and write English the way "traditional" piano teachers teach piano, here is how it happened.
1. No one was ever allowed to speak to you. Speaking to you might interfere with you learning to read English.
2. Your first contact with English came through books and flash cards. On the very first day of "English lessons," your parent taught you the first letter of the alphabet and its sound. Each week, you learned a new letter of the alphabet and its sound.
3. You were required to form your first sentence by reading it out of your English primer. You had to laboriously sound out your sentence one letter at a time.
4. You were required to practice your first reading sentence five times every day. You had to say all of the letters out loud first. After you got the letters down pat, you were allowed to say the whole sentence up to speed. If your tongue or lips were considered to be in the wrong position, someone rapped them with a ruler, and you had to start again in the "proper position."
5. Once you "passed" your first sentence, you got a new lesson with a new sentence to sound out. Pretty much no one ever cared if you ever said the first one again or not.
6. You were never allowed to change the words in any sentence. You had to always speak your sentences word-for-word the way they were written. And on pitch!
7. Maybe English became your native language! Or perhaps you don't even try to talk now.
Now let me share with you how I learned the English language:
1. I spent considerable time listening to people speak to me, and to each other. And to the radio and TV, where people were talking.
2. I learned to speak my first sentences by rote: I listened to what someone else said, and I repeated it back. "Da-da!" "Goo-goo!"
3. I learned, rather quickly, that I could mix the words up and substitute other words. Within a couple of short years, I was speaking dozens of sentences and English had become my native language. This was ALL BY ROTE.
4. When I went to school, I learned phonics. Phonics is an organized system for learning the letters and sounds. I didn't memorize words: I learned a system.
5. As I learned phonics, the teacher always related the words I "read" back to the words I had become accustomed to speaking.
6. As quickly as possible, the teacher made me read with expression. It was the same expression I had been doing by ROTE from having listened to thousands of people talk.
7. English became my native written AND spoken language.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I thought this was cute and VERY telling!
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 08:09 pm (UTC)I've met only one, exceptionally talented, pianist who could pick up _all_ the nuances in a piece from reading. Me, point me at something relatively simple like 'Fuer Elise' and my ears overload, point me at something where you're supposed to have six or seven fingers on the keyboard at any one time and my ability to listen acurately packs its little spotty hanky and leaves alltogether.
Learning something, at least initially, from a score keeps you centered - everybody starts on the same page, and it gives you a chance to form your own opinion of a piece, interpreting the composer, instead of following in somebody else's footsteps.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-04 05:16 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely! In fact, I work on my sight-reading as often as I can stand to. Since there wasn't any way to record a tape or record back in Mozart's day, the ONLY way we could get his music was through notation. A lot of Mozart's fast runs I simply cannot get by ear, and that's also true of many jazz chords (I can approximate the sound, but it won't be exact.) So I end up using my reading skills fairly often. I'll read through pieces to find out what they sound like, and of course you have to play the classical repertoire pretty much as written, so you have to know the score.
But I think what we were really talking about in that parody is the attitude that a budding piano player is just a machine that translates the notation into keypresses, much like a MIDI player on the computer screen, and that's how we teach them. That's not making music, especially not at first. And that's one reason so many people give up on piano lessons, I think--they find out that they're expected to follow these little plink-plink pieces in a method book, that what they play sounds nothing like what they had in mind when they started wanting to play, and that they're being told it will be years before they can play anything "GOOD." We were saying that if you start a beginner out picking out melodies and learning to harmonize them by ear (or with some theory), and improvising, and playing along with a record, that beginner will be making music and will be much more likely to learn keyboard geography and become at home with the 88s. (Interesting that "88s" in amateur radio lingo used to mean "hugs and kisses"!) But the way that the typical beginner is taught to read is much like the parody . . . he or she sits down and is shown middle C and perhaps another couple of keys, and is told to "learn" those. Then you get another couple of notes on the staff a couple of weeks later. And you aren't encouraged to think about playing by ear.
The way that I learned was that I figured out how intervals sounded (using the song "Do, Re, Mi" from "Sound of Music" at first) and then could "hear" them in melodies that I heard on records. It wasn't a left-brained process but a right-brained process, so it wasn't as if I said in words, "That's a fifth! That's a third!" It skipped the step of translating into words or symbols at all and just came out as, "Move finger this far. This will be the next key in the melody." This is what I believe makes a musician a happy player--having the music in her and figuring out how to make it come out. If more people did this at the beginning, the slow process of learning to read would be far easier. You'd have the sound of it in your mind's ear as soon as you saw it on the page, the way you do when reading prose. (Or at least the way I do.)
If I'm going to learn something such as a Beethoven sonata or bagatelle, I start with the score. I also listen to as many versions of it as I can to make sure I want it to live in my heart, as I'll be immersed in it for a number of hours! The score and the sound of it inside my mind's ear synch. And I find that I don't play it "just like" the people on the records, even if I'm playing a hymn or a pop song by ear. I usually "hear" some stuff that isn't there for everybody. If I'm going to learn something off the CD or radio, I don't have a score. Often I wish I could write it down in notation a lot faster . . . or that I had a Clavinova to do it for me. Notation software on the PC tends to quantize everything I play into black crows on telephone wires (rows of barred thirty-second notes). And then my rubato makes the program crazy!
But anyhow, lots of kids are learning on their own using electronic keyboards, so maybe they'll start out making the discovery learning process the way I did instead of being stuck with a method book and a programmed "here's C, here's F, here's B-flat" approach.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-04 04:22 pm (UTC)And with the piano, you can get away with it for a while, because a C is a C is a C. Only when your ear improves do you realise that there are many ways of getting sound out of the same piano and that your playing would improve if you had mastered more than one of them.
With other instruments (I'm a lapsed oboist) learning the basics is much much more important. You can develop in one of two ways - learn how to do it well, then develop those skills; or fudge the basics and get stuck on a plateau.
Riding is no different. The temptations to do the tricks is all too great, and most beginners _don't_ want to do those boring seat exercises and go round in circles until they're perfect. Making music is not as dangerous as hurtling across the countryside, but can prove equally frustrating.
Sure, beginners need to be given a few candies to keep them sweet, but if they're _serious_, they should learn to do it right. With the oboe, I went back to the beginning for a second round because trying to play more advanced piaces (very relative use of the word here) showed me up pretty badly.
Looking from an advanced teaching point, I can see the value of all of the advice - get it right, work on technical skills before trying to interpret - but I also realise that it is hard for beginners to put in all that effort without seeing progress. Being told 'it will come if you spend another coupld of years on it' weeds out those who are _really_ serious; and there's a large number in between who could do ok but who are turned off.
Maybe it would help if beginner's manuals weren't so try and boring. There are, after all, some fairly simple melodies that are fun to play.