The Piano Pedagogy Page

It occurs to me that I’m occasionally guilty of telling students they need to use a metronome without having taught them how to use one.  It’s the musical equivalent of handing someone a chainsaw and expecting them to cut down a tree.

Pretend for a moment that you’ve never used a chainsaw.  Now imagine that someone walks up to you, places one in your hands, points at a tree and says “GO FOR IT!”

Musicians usually think of metronomes as hammers.  It’s obvious how to use a hammer: you hold the handle and whack nails with it.  To us, it’s obvious how to use a metronome:  turn it on and play with the beeps.  But for the average 8 year old, a metronome is more like a chainsaw than a hammer – something that makes a lot of noise and can get you into a lot of trouble if you don’t use it correctly.

So I started thinking about how best to introduce students to metronomes, and I’ve come up with a few things that might help:

1)  Start with clapping.  Have your students clap along with the beat at first, experimenting with how the metronome can go faster or slower.  Let them feel what it’s like to follow it.  You can use a quarter note pulse or simple rhythm patterns.

2) Have your students play whole note chords (or open fifths) with the metronome – let them hear how a metronome counts off 4 beats for them while they play.  Then, have them play dotted half notes, then halves, then quarters.  Then try eighth notes.  The idea is to figure out what it feels like to play with a metronome.

3) Always vary the tempo.  Get your students used to the idea that tempo is flexible.  Quarter notes can be slow or fast.

Once a student is accustomed to these experiences, then the metronome can be safely applied to the repertoire they’re studying.  At first, use the metronome only with pieces that are already near a performance level.  If the student is still having difficulty with fingering, rhythm, and keeping a steady beat, then adding the metronome isn’t going to help matters, it’s just going to give them something else to worry about.

And finally, I think much of this also applies to counting aloud.  Counting aloud is a tool, not a magic wand.  You have to learn how to use it before it becomes useful.  For students who have trouble counting aloud while they play, a similar set of experiences may prove helpful:

1) Have them count and clap very simple rhythms they’re already familiar with.

2) Have them count while you play so they can get used to the sound and feel of it.

3) Count with them while you play, giving them some reassurance as to how it works.

4) Have them count along with pieces they already know very well. As I mentioned before, trying to count something that hasn’t been mastered yet only adds to the confusion.

And finally, I mention all of this because I feel counting aloud and metronome use are extremely useful and valuable skills to have.  Too often, students are reluctant to do either, and it’s almost always because they don’t know how.  For some students, counting aloud and metronomes are like hammers – their use is obvious.  For most, though, it’s a tool that you need to learn how to use; a skill that, like any other, has to be developed before it becomes useful.

Back in my idealistic student days, there was something of a movement going on in pedagogy where teachers were defining “piano” as “quiet” instead of “soft.”  The idea made good academic sense – forte meant loud, and the opposite of loud is quiet, so we started using “loud” and “quiet” instead of “loud” and “soft.”

I’m changing my tune.

After listening to 27 students at a local festival recently, I found myself a bit disappointed at the dynamics in many of the performances.  It felt like everyone interpreted “forte” as “bang” and “piano” as “timid and a little slower.”  This is no doubt in response to many teachers and judges telling students to exaggerate their dynamics and make “more contrast” between piano and forte.

I think it’s important to realize that dynamics are not volume indications, and they’re not about contrast.  They’re about character.  Forte means more than just turning the volume knob up to 8, it implies some kind of feeling or emotion.  If we look “forte” up in an Italian dictionary, we find words like “strong,” “heavy,” and “large.”  If we look up “piano,” we find words like “carefully,” and “smooth.”

In other words, instead of defining forte and piano as “loud” and “quiet,” I think we should define it more like a toilet paper commercial:  ”strong and soft.”

Here’s an exercise I use to help speed up Alberti bass figures:

First, sit so that the C above middle C is directly in front of you.

Second, turn your body to the right so that you’re facing the top C on the keyboard.

Third, practice this, using 5131 5131 for your fingering:

Doing this simple exercise can help students develop fluidity and speed in Alberti bass figures.  It aligns the arm and hand in a much more natural position, and it’s much easier for students to get used to the type of rotation necessary to develop speed.

I started doing this with students because I so many beginning pieces that use Alberti bass require you to play in the octave between Bass C and Middle C, and they usually use white keys.  While this promotes pattern recognition and reading, it’s physically awkward, and students often end up with a crooked wrist and tense fingers.

Once a student has practiced the exercise above and knows what playing Alberti figures are supposed to feel like, I ask them “now, see if you can have that same feeling in the piece you’re playing.”

Okay, I have to get this off my chest.  For years now, we’ve all been reading about how piano lessons benefit children.  There are plenty of lists that describe the benefits of music study, and MENC even has a database to help music teachers convince their administrators to give them the resources they need to do their jobs.  Music teachers have used The Mozart Effect to convince parents to enroll their children in music lessons, and studies continue to make the news on a fairly regular basis.

What bothers me is that none of these studies mention the real benefit of piano study.  The real benefit of piano study, and by far the best reason to take piano lessons is that you get to learn how to actually play the piano.  That’s right, I’m actually suggesting that the best reason to take music lessons is to learn how to actually make music!

At the piano, you can do stuff like this and this and this and this.  No matter who you are, you can find an outlet for self expression through music.  Whether you devote yourself to the classical tradition or build your own piano to match your bubble dress and quirky personality, the piano can help, and it’s AWESOME.

So yes, the study of music has a lot of benefits, but let’s not forget the most important one – playing the piano.

Two things inspired this post:

The first is Concert Hands, a completely ridiculous piece of technology that you strap on to your wrists and hands to help you learn to play.  (Seriously, watch the video, it’s hilarious!)

The second is a description of a teaching technique in Julie Knerr’s excellent article on elementary technique in the first issue of MTNA’s e-Journal.  (To view back issues, open the current issue and click “Archives” in the upper left corner.)

What Knerr described is that successful teachers go beyond which key to play and help students learn where to play it.  In other words, we shouldn’t always position our finger on the same spot on the key every time.  Sometimes it’s best to move a bit – towards and away from the fallboard.

What bothered me so much about Concert Hands is that it treats piano technique as one-dimensional, back and forth along the rail.

As teachers, I think an important part of teaching technique is in the realization that technique is 3-dimensional.  We don’t simply move our arms and hands left and right, we are in a constant state of motion that includes left, right, up, down, away, towards, and every imaginable combination.  Incidentally, this is also why I find discussions of hand position and hand shape unnecessarily tedious – while playing the piano, our hands have many shapes and find themselves in many different positions.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to bring more 3-dimensional awareness to my teaching:

• How do I help my students feel at ease moving side-to-side along the keyboard?
  
• How do I help my students better control the descent and release of the key?
• How do I help students negotiate the surface of the keys?

Feel free to share any thoughts or exercises you have that address these important questions, I’d love to hear them!