Love of Music

You will lose friends in your life, you can lose money in your life, but music is something which stays with you whenever you have acquired a musical skill. That is why so many people still start to learn to play the piano even when they are older. I am always amazed how much time children can devote to learning a musical skill and it is definitely worth the effort.

Music appeals to the whole human person and has the ability to create a sense of unity in the two aspects of the brain and hence a sense of wholeness. For this reason the Greek thought of Music as the main art form, the most important of the muses, from which the word music comes from.

There is only good and bad music and from there it is good to observe that people are getting more open for any musical style and the idea of all the good music which we have acquired over the ages.

We have a whole support environment for people devoting themselves to sports, but very often musicians have to fend for themselves. Many of my young, especially male students, will keep it very quiet at school that they like to play the piano. Luckily that is changing, since there is so much merit in mastering an instrument well and getting familiar with all that great music ‘out there’. Music is a Universal language and can be understood by all.

Little Grace

Grace's Mum had already called me one and a half years ago. Grace was just five and her mother asked me whether she could start piano lessons.

"Well, that depends. Is there someone already playing in the family?" "No".

"Can she already understand ABC, can she read a little bit?"

"Oh yes, she is quite clever and I am reading every day with her".

Nevertheless it was decided to wait a little bit until she approached 7 years. You see, a piano is very much an instrument built for an adult human being. There are no ¼ size pianos to start learning like a violin and the hand should be developed accordingly.

It is all right usually when someone already plays in the family and the child really can't be stopped and then only in small time units, because of the small attention span.

Hence children of five years old having mastered Bach's Chiacone are really very rare. But now it was time for Myra and she had insisted on her first lesson. Ok!

What's got a Mum to do, to ensure that the weekly lesson fee is not wasted?

There are a few tips here:

It is all right for Mum to sit in, provided she does not try to explain what the teacher is saying.
Having a one to one lesson is for a child really an experience in communication and the child should develop the skill to say anything and ask the teacher herself: “Oh, i did not get that”.
You can’t expect from a child from the very beginning the discipline to play every day a little bit. It needs a some help to do this.
When the child does his/her practise It needs to become aware that indeed he/she can do this very well.
Tell you child after the practise that you could hear it from the kitchen and it sounded SO good. Until it becomes part of the identity of the child. ‘I play the piano!”.

Ah, not that big after all!

Someone once said that he knew that Liam Gallagher would become a good guitar player, because he behaved like one right away from the start.

There is nothing wrong with the idea 'Oh, I am going to be awfully good at this!'

And there was Grace now, sitting behind the large black grand piano. This being very much an 'adult' instrument, nevertheless she could with her right hand reach the lowest key on the piano and with her left hand the highest one.

'Ah! Not that big after all!'

I ask Grace to keep her right arm in the air in a straight line with the floor. Her hand should be in a straight line with her upper arm and she should not do anything at all with her fingers. They are then slightly curved.

I ask Grace, whether this feels good, which it does.

'Can you now stretch your fingers and check how much effort it costs to keep them like that?' Admittedly, that costs quite some effort!

'Can you now bend your fingers a little bit as if you hold something in your hand?'

Admittedly, that doesn't feel quite so good either. A common misperception amongst piano teachers! They ask the child to keep the fingers 'as if they are holding an apple' and the fingers then play the keys as if they were little hammers. That is surely the way to go, if you want to wreck the child's piano playing right away from the start.

We will later see how this misperception came to exist amongst piano teachers.

The hands then are put on the piano just the way they are, when the fingers are not used at all and the wrist can best be flexible. Piano books starting on the black keys are indeed very practical, because the fingers not used can easily 'fall back' to the white keys and the hand shape is natural.

The wrist can drop slightly with every keystroke. Because a child's fingers are really still very weak and specific finger exercises should not be attempted before reaching grade 4.

This helps developing a sense of rhythm when playing the first tunes and that is the most important thing to develop in the beginning. Later we will see how the child will learn how to feel rhythms and phrases, so essential in learning to play the piano with pleasure. And playing with a sense of rhythm surely is also a pleasure for those listening to it.

Talent is no substitute

When people encounter a young boy or girl playing very well, they immediately assume that – since music is a gift – obviously the person is very talented.

The secret though of getting ahead is getting started and in reality talent develops along the way.

A better defining factor is the intelligence and the regularity behind the practise and I have always wondered why my most hard working students are also the most talented ...

Yes, Big Boys can do this too!

I get students in all shapes, age, gender and it is surprising to know how many people like to learn to play the piano in their twenties or thirties with the idea that they missed out on something when they were young.

And indeed it is true. There goes a lot of time into learning to play the piano, but it is an investment well worth making. You can lose friends, family, business and money in your life but you can never lose the music you once learned. It is an asset which will stay with you all your life.

Hence it is a good investment to make while you are still young, but there is no barrier to still do that while you are older. I know of a lady who started to learn the piano when she had become sixty and by the time she was sixty seven she had acquired her qualifications to teach the piano.

And so it was with Chris. He had a nice job working at a computer firm, but had repeatedly told his girlfriend about his love for music. And for this reason his girlfriend called me up with the question if I could give a 'voucher' for piano lessons.

She would give it to him for his birthday. And so she did. And Chris went on a learning curve, which went quite fast and worked out well.

All Chris needed was a regular slot in his day of about half an hour a day for the necessary practise.

His sense of rhythm was already developed well, which gives the advantage of paying attention to the technical side of things. That can be quite cumbersome and if you want to learn fast, this does not mean you can take short cuts, because there aren't any.

But a teacher's job is to remove obstacles, which make the learning curve harder and longer as is necessary.

Olympics

Hamish likes to play fast. Very fast. I am not sure what the fuss is about, but Hamish likes it fast.

I had given him an arrangement of 'the Entertainer' to play and the faster he could do it the more entertainment it was for him.

And my refusal to follow in his footsteps gave him even more satisfaction, because he was convinced that I didn't play it that fast, because I couldn't do it as fast as he could. And so I heard him say to his Dad after I closed the door on him: 'He can't play fast!'

So of course, the week after I had no choice but to play it twice as fast as he did. May Scott Joplin forgive me.

What then is the art of playing fast?

In fact I believe there is no fast music!

That may solve the problem all right then you may think. But no, there is a philosophy of 'playing fast': All music is performed at heart beat speed I believe, unless the music is meant to rouse the emotion. But in fast music much more is happening during the same basic pulse.

You can apply the same thoughts to learning your scales. It is not the issue of playing the same scale the same way but faster.

When a horse goes slowly it walks. When it goes faster the horse trots and then it gallops. Why would it do that? It does that to regulate its energy better.

When you want to go faster you maintain the heart-beat pulse, but you play two notes in one beat: Tadi-tadi-tadi-tadi-etc. If you want to go faster again you still maintain the heart-beat pulse, but you play four notes in one beat: Tadititi-Tadititi-Tadititi-Tadititi-etc.

You can continue this process: 8 notes in one beat or 16 notes. That's advanced stuff but once the student gets the hang of it many will try that and they will manage.

Teaching 'How-to' not 'What-to'

Playing the piano involves a great deal of being able to play without any music at hand. Which is in fact improvising. For this reason from the first lesson there is always some time reserved for playing without music. Which is in fact putting the scales and chord to practice.

'Practice' NOT 'Practise!

Playing a four bar phrase in one of the keys which the student has mastered is something each of my piano students can do easily. The small beginners of 7 years old can do it after their third lesson or so on any white key using five notes.

So often we are so overwhelmed by the details of a new piece of music, that we forget about the music behind it. We forget rhythm, the prase structure and the mood and character of the music, all in order to have all the notes right.

Sometimes you hear students argue:

"Yes, but I'll put that all in later". How wrong and in-efficient. At every stage we have to realise we are practising music. We are performing, even if only we ourselves are the listener. I only we were listening.

I still remember when I was a student and went to a piano lesson my teacher used to scratch all sorts of remarks over the music and it annoyed me beyond end, because I had arrived at the level, where after a year or so I would come back to the piece I had worked on and had difficulty seeing the threes through the wood. Soon I developed a habit of borrowing my music teacher's book for the pieces I was working on. She would then write all over her own pages and when finished I still had my own clean copy!

Some people find the written marks very important and I was once sitting in a music centre after working on a Scriabin Sonata. A highly respect musician came in and wanted to know what I was working on and I give him my book.

He looked at the pages of a Dover Edition, which I like because they do not offer fingering, and arrived at the conclusion that I obviously was not studying seriously, because I had written nothing over the pages.

Hence with me as a teacher my students keep their pages clean, because only very rarely will I write over their pages. It should go in their heads and not in their books. And with most of my students that seems to work out Ok.

Reverse Engineering

Tom always got stuck at the same place and no matter how much he practised, he always made a mistake there and stopped. He had done that long enough and was in fact practising a mistake.

I advised him that in some cases it may be practical to change the strategy and try to practise in a different way. By always starting at the beginning of a section and stopping at a certain place it was not possible to practise the end part very well. Tom never got there.

Sacrificing fluency and rhythm in order to have all the notes right is a behaviour students should really try to avoid. For that reason I asked him to work back to front. Start with the last bar of the difficult section.

A good example is Christopher Norton's 'Tram Stop' from Micro jazz Collection nr. 1. The first four bars are Ok, but then students have a real problem with the following three bars:

Start repeating the last bar until the reposition and drop of your left hand is fluent and easy.

Then you go 1 bar backwards and start with the left hand there. It is important not the stop at the bar-line. A bar-line has no musical merit whatsoever. Music always wants to move over the barline towards the first beat of the next bar!