Of the hundreds of thousands of children who start to learn the piano around the world each year nearly all of them will say, later in life, that, despite their years of piano lessons, today they can’t play a note. And then they’ll tell you about a family member who never had a single lesson and who can play anything by ear. This incredible disconnect between lessons and life-long skill doesn’t get discussed much by piano teachers, despite the overwhelming evidence that the hundreds of thousands of brand-new beginner pianists will not grow into adults who can actually play the piano. There is always the exception to the rule, and of course every piano teacher is one of those exceptions who found that piano lessons did help them become better pianists. And so they teach pretty much exactly the way that they were taught. This even comes down to using the same method books with their students that their teachers
Piano Teaching
How hard is a piece of music?
For piano teachers working in countries with a strong examination culture (this means anywhere that is, or once was, part of the former British Empire/current Commonwealth) there is a general consensus about how hard certain pieces of piano music are. And this general consensus revolves around an idea of ‘grading’ – that a piece of music ‘is’ Grade One, or Grade Five, or Grade Eight. No one ever talks very much about what makes a piece have Grade One-like qualities rather than the qualities of a Grade Two piece. But, within a teaching culture where the lesson is almost entirely focussed on the exam, teachers develop an acceptance of the gradings given to pieces by the examination boards they choose to use, and this becomes the basis for intuiting a degree of difficulty for new repertoire. If the piece ‘feels’ like Grade Four, then Grade Four it must be. The challenge to grading new repertoire is most keenly felt when grading
Educational Piano Music
There’s so much of it in print, so little of it that you want to use. In this blog I’m planning to work my way through the contemporary (meaning somewhat recent, or at least, still in copyright) piano music I love and use, as well as reviewing new publications I am looking at in my quest for great new material. The shame of it seems to be that for many piano teachers Bartok’s Mikrokosmos drew a line in history, and they are reluctant to use anything very much that has been written since – unless it is just ‘for fun’. Further, the profession’s collective propensity to start beginners on white notes with both thumbs moored on middle C makes some of the brilliant contemporary contributions to pedagogical repertoire to be (at first glance) far too advanced, when in fact these pieces are perfectly designed to celebrate what young fingers, wrists, arms and brains (belonging to beginners) can and do enjoy
The blog begins….
Previously: A childhood in New Zealand, desperate to start piano lessons so I could compose more easily, not enough books in the school library but plenty of sexism to confront and theology to deconstruct. Growing up on a farm, growing up in a city, sick through enough of my childhood that I didn’t quite expect to grow up. Composing came easily, but what to choose to say to the world, and who to decide to be? Sometimes charting a perilous course between incompatible identities, irreconcilable expectations. Choosing to change the culture. The culture I’m changing in 2009 is the culture of piano teaching (see “P Plate Piano”, “Getting to” and other topics in weeks to come), but this very niche educational market is only one terrain I hope to help change (for the better).
Elissa Milne 