In praise of those Grass-Eating Cows - beginning music education and piano lessons

American Music Teacher, August-Sept, 2003 by Amy Greer

On a whim, my husband and I sold our cars and moved to Boston. I left a studio of well-trained piano students back in my old life; this move meant more than adjusting to a pedestrian lifestyle: I had to rebuild my work. "Yes, I like beginners. Yes, I like little ones," I said in the interview process and was hired by two music schools to teach piano lessons. Suddenly, I had more than thirty beginners, a third who were in kindergarten. Nothing in all my earlier teaching prepared me for the challenge of having so many students who knew no music and nothing about the piano, much less so many students who were pre-readers. Although I thought I knew my system for teaching beginning piano lessons, teaching a first piano lesson thirty-plus times over stretched and pulled me in painful and unexpected ways. All my earlier methods and assumptions were called into question when I began to see patterns of learning, patterns of behavior, patterns of what was and was not understood among these children.

Method Books

While I have long understood the limitations of beginning method books and liberally supplemented them with my own activities--creating systematic technical exercises, creative activities and ear-training methods--I mistakenly thought by simply using a method book, students would learn to read music. Unfortunately, method or concept books lull an unsuspecting teacher into thinking the books are teaching note reading. They don't. Or at least not directly. True enough, there are notes on the page, but as I watched my little ones stumble and fall as they struggled to decipher the mess .of dots and lines in front of them, I was humbled into recognizing I could no longer afford to ignore the problem: These students were not learning to read music.

Many popular beginning method books emphasize intervallic reading; that is, reading the intervals between notes rather than the individual notes themselves. This approach is an effective reading method because it teaches students to read patterns and groups of notes rather than getting caught up in deciphering each mark on the page. This approach also provides the potential for students to transpose easily, simply by starting on a different pitch. Furthermore, intervallic reading lends itself to efficient sight reading, where one must read in patterns and groups and not get caught up in details. Pianists, however, cannot just innocently read patterns of notes forever. As helpful as intervallic reading is, a good musician has to be able to read any given pitch quickly and accurately.

Landmarks

Most methods use some form of "landmark notes": certain pitches that students will learn to identify at sight, which they can then use to discern other pitches. For example, one landmark note is often middle C. Problems arise when suddenly the music on page thirty-five of the primer book begins on middle D. The five-year-old student who has had two months of piano lessons is expected to imagine what a middle C looks like and then find the D from that imaginary middle C. In the first months of my new studio of beginners, only one child could manage this feat. The rest had to be prompted and prodded and finally simply told that the first note was middle D. I found this whole scene frustrating as a teacher and terribly ineffective. The lesson learned, unfortunately, is not to successfully identify middle D, but rather that the book is confusing. The music itself is rarely a problem, especially if the student is successfully reading intervals and patterns. The difficulty is determining where a beginner should place his hands on the piano.

Another popular approach uses the landmark notes of "G" and "F" and makes use of the terms "G clef" and "F clef" instead of treble and bass clef. Many five-year-olds cannot remember which is which. In school, they are most likely still trying to remember which letter is which, much less which note is which on the piano. Suddenly, they are being asked to add a third and rather confusing layer to their definition of G and F: Which clef symbol is G, and which is F? While one positive aspect of this approach is that it lends itself to positions other than middle C, therein also lies the problem. The hand positions become progressively more unpredictable. The students have vague information about some G and F, but too often the first notes are not either one of these anyway. These are kids who could read the intervals of the pieces if only a teacher would put their hands into place. If they do not have someone at home who can do this for them while they practice, what hope is there that they will eagerly open their music books?

Still another method is the multi-key approach: beginning with C position and then moving on to the G and F positions. Like the landmark approach, this lends itself to keys other than C (Although how radical are G and F really?), but it doesn't specifically teach the recognition of any notes that fall into these positions or offer a suggestion about how students should identify these notes. The method books must sense this problem because many of them begin writing on the top of the page "C position." "This song is in C position!" the students joyfully exclaim and confidently put their hands into place. I appreciate the confidence that is now bestowed on these children who have been staring at me blankly for weeks regarding the beginning pitches of their assignments. Now, however, the students are learning yet another rather less than helpful lesson: The songs in the book are always in C position. But the fact remains the students cannot actually identify any notes on the page in front of them. They have learned to read the instructions at the top of the page: "C position."