MENC: The National Association for Music Education

Piano Education Author(s): Guy Duckworth Reviewed work(s): Source: Music Educators Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jan., 1965), pp. 40-43 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of MENC: The National Association for Music Education Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3390341 . Accessed: 14/09/2012 16:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Inc. and MENC: The National Association for Music Education are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Music Educators Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

\\ .

;E~t~ t-----c-

I: 1r~ .'
F
---U1"

............

PIANO .
! i, ..
T~T7~ ~ I. ~

, .,, EDUCATION ,:,.,,,\? ,.

. .. ...... .. .

.,," ,L..L

!1

By GuDcwot , '. " .,,..,._ ..

LJ7.(IAT

iL

E7

* How does one analyze a scene of which he is very much a participant? Is any objectivity for him possible? He can examine the materials available to the piano teachers across the nation. He can talk with the teachers with whom he comes in contact. He can examine the trade journals for trends and interests. He can have a "feeling" of the competency of the students he hears perform throughout the country. There is an abundance of materials available to the piano teacher. The methods vary from "see-play" to "hear-see-play" approaches. Some have a middle "C" orientation, others would seem to have none. The literature varies from a selection of the very best at all levels of instructionand periods of music to doggerel and musical pulp. The teachers with whom one comes in contact run the gamut from the very progressive to the obsessive reactionary. Teachers in the progressive group (of which there are far too few) are experimental with their materials and flexible with its uses, as well as sensitive to humanity and the impact of a piano educationon it. The
40

reactionary(of which there are not too many) is uncompromising with his materialsand feels it is the student's problem if he does not "get it." There is a middle group, more toward the reactionary than the progressive (of which there are too many) who go from workshop to workshop and, in failing to grasp philosophy, grab random tricks to fit into their modus operandi. As a naturalconsequence, since the progressive teacher is in the minority, questions such as the following are constantly being asked. * How do you keep the interest of the teen-ager? * How do you teach theory in the piano lesson? * How do you improve sight reading? * How importantis technique, and when do you start it? * Who should improvise? There is enough interest in piano education to support the publication of three periodicals devoted almost exclusively to the piano. The problems discussed now, however, are not too different from those contained in early issues of Etude music magazine. Even the solutions seem not too different.

The only change possibly is there are more people interested in these same problems and in the same solutions. For example, in the August 1901 Etude there is an article entitled "Playin all Keys."It starts, "Thereis one feature of piano playing which is often neglected, namely, the readingof compositions in keys of many sharps and flats." The article ends with, "Let pupils be so taught that there be no such distinction as to make them say easy keys and difficultkeys." In the February 1913 Etude, "Learning to Listen" begins with this statement: "In the ordinary run of teaching the pupil becomes more or less tone-deaf; or better, he listens less and less."Even back then? In April 1913, there is an article on "Successin Class Teaching" discussing how class work develops listening, saves time, keeps interest. Times have not changed. Going back to the May 1905 Etude, an article on "Harmonyfor Piano Students" states that ". . . unfortunately much of the current harmony teaching does not seem to be practical in its results."Ho-hum. When the piano instructorat the collegiate level is confronted with the following question, "What difMUSIC EDUCATORS JOURNAL

ferences do you find in recent years in the preparation of the entering freshman piano major?" the reply is invariably, ". . . almost none." And in some cases the instructor will add, " .. seems less well prepared." It seems that in spite of the talking and writing about appropriate and inappropriate materials, procedures, settings for instruction, standards, competitions, evaluations, workshops, courses in pedagogy, and certification of teachers, the preparation of the students entering college as pianists does not seem to change significantly. In addition to the piano major field at the college level, there are the areas of the piano minor and the classroom teacher, both relatively new in the college curriculum. It seems that we have fallen through the same trap door in these areas as we provide everyday for our piano majors-instead of a "piece," now it is a "chord." Our teaching procedures seem to be challenged. Some important questions must be asked. Do the principles of instruction change from level to level? Do musical values change from the first lesson to the advanced lesson? I think not. The confusion with our job comes when we think that a process appropriate for one level of instruction is inappropriate for another, or when we think that the criteria for selecting materials change as the student advances in his musicianship and keyboard proficiency. There are probably more constants than variables in piano education as in any kind of learning. Perhaps we should re-examine the principles. We can benefit from recent research into the teaching-learning process as applied to the subject of mathematics. The "sound barrier" has certainly been broken in this area with "new math" allowing the student to transcend quickly the formal barriers of established disciplines in mathematics. The Cambridge Conference on School Mathematics indicates there has been total abandonment of drill for drill's sake. This is nothing new in educational psychology. We have known, for example, that for drill to be beneficial, constant evaluation must take place, the problem must be important in the student's world,
JANUARY, NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE

and once solved, transferred quickly to other varied situations contrasting its use with and without the newly acquired skill. We have known about the futility of most drill, but it has been difficult evidently, to replace it with other, more beneficial, procedures. Perhaps it has been because of our own insecurity as piano teachers that we have stayed with a detailed learning process rather than a conceptual one. But if we eliminated drilling a whole note on middle "C" what would be left for us to teach? Further, by focusing our attention on the concepts which pervade all stages of learning, practice and drill would be easily woven into the acquisition of new concepts. * Our organization of materials determines to a great extent whether we teach trivia or valid concepts; and the type of teaching we do will result in a piano student's being oriented musically or not. Simply, we want a student to be concerned with line and form-with sound in time. The implications for keyboard geography and the students' physical controls are always drawn from this basic sense of musicality. This kind of teaching is different from mere note calling. Without this all-embracing viewpoint, the child by necessity learns one scale at a time, even one chord at a time. Trivia, indeed. However, with the viewpoint that all basic concepts must be aural (music is a language of sound), the student who hears a major scale deepens his understanding of that sound by trying it in all keys; he creates and hears melodies for their line, continuity, and form; he takes his understandings to the score and sees the individual notes that provide a melodic line, relating his hand to the contour of the music and learning from scanning to always have enough fingers for the range and complexity of the phrases involved. From his sense of keyboard geography, he associates the notes on the score with an arrangement of black and white keys and makes further adjustments for his fingering. We find this process vague, particularly when we have the logic of the keyboard to explain our problems for us. Since piano teach-

ers tend to "let" the keyboard solve these problems we must depend obviously on the physical and visual sense organs rather than the aural. Naturally, we bog down with trivia. For this reason, I find it increasingly common to hear from string educators that they would prefer that students not study piano before beginning a string instrument because they tend to come from piano instruction with insensitive ears. If the hundreds of auditions I hear each year are any clue, I would agree with these string educators. It is clear from the way these students approach the piano that they are dumb without the score and deaf because the symbols they have learned are signals for a physical manipulation of keys rather than for a sound pattern. The majority of teaching materials for piano education testify to a deaf and dumb approach to teaching piano. There is a tendency even in the studio that bows to a more liberal kind of piano education (some playing by ear and improvising) for the teacher to heave a sigh of relief when the preliminaries are finally over . . . the student is reading, and we can get down to business. The freedom with which his instruction began is consequently narrowed to the score and impractical music theory. The child must live with music before he can be expected to conceptualize. Only through many concrete experiences of "playing with" the music that he hears, improvises, and reads, will a child have a basis for his abstract thinking and be able to transfer his learning. We are teaching a language. Language that communicates can be taught only through creative and recreative productions. (The only difference between a verbal language and ours is the medium happens to be the keyboard.) Instead, most often drills take the place of a free atmosphere, and stifle independence and musicality. Almost any good drill master can teach codified facts, formulas, results; but only a teacher with a thorough understanding of music and its performance, as well as the teaching process, can lead students to concepts through their own discovery. As soon as we consider the
41

vagueness of conceptual teaching, for learning the atmosphere There are fewer changes. right and of answers with "plateaus wrong progress" because the student's understanding now has a broad base, and his motive for learning is consistently deepening. Now we arrange the materials of piano instruction so the child can teach himself. We try to lead a student's attention to an experience and be still while he does his own knowing. We arrange materials in such a way that the student has the opportunity to weave together his own pattern of knowledge. The "educationese" we hear so often about-self-direction, independent thought, purposeful activity, intrinsic motivation, and planningall can happen, taking the place of meaningless note learning. The method of discovery is not new to us. We know that when we are able to effect the proper atmosphere for exploration and discovery, the student has a finer understanding and analytical power with an ability to recreate formulas when required. How does a teacher stimulate this problem solving atmosphere? According to Ned Flanders' ten-year study on effective teachers (University of Michigan), the teacher has two controls he can exert: indirective and directive. Using the indirective control, the feedback from students is generally unsolicited, and if it pertains to the business at hand (there can be some garbage coming back) it generally means the students are exploring and discovering the material they need to accomplish their goals-they are independent learners following their own drives, sensitive to their own needs, creating the world of music for themselves by "playing with" some newly acquired component of understanding. To elicit this kind of feedback and activity from his students, the teacher builds upon his students' ideas whether they are right or wrong; he investigates and accepts their feelings, encouraging and praising their responses and accomplishments. He asks more questions than he answers.
U In the directive area the feed-

The classroom is orderly, the class is disciplined with each individual remaining quiet until spoken to by the teacher. To project this kind of influence, the teacher is busy giving directions, lectures, or criticisms. The competent teacher will be flexible with his influence (indirectdirect), adjusting it according to his insights as well as to his instincts. However, he must be able to exploit creative moments and he knows the more consistently directive he is, the fewer times they occur. The directive area of influence of the teacher can cause him to make some of his most serious mistakes. * He can be ill-advised about his student's readiness for new information. Result: no learning. * If the student is not ready for new information, he can try to make the student ready by talking at him. Result: frustration and anxiety. * He can give the end product of an experience before he provides the proper time for student exploration and discovery. Result: role memorization and drill. * The indirective area of influence affords the teacher an opportunity to achieve his ultimate goal for his students: gradual independence which allows the teacher to become increasingly unnecessary to the growth of his students. This is both difficult and painful to accomplish. The setting of instruction demanded for this kind of learning is different from other kinds of learning. Music is a language; therefore, it is sound. To challenge a student's listening during a private lesson is always difficult; teachers tend to know when he is, but much of the time the student does not. The problem of listening for the student seems to be more obvious in piano instruction (it is that logical arrangement of the keyboard again) than in other applied fields. Certainly our sensitivity to musical values is completely determined by what we hear; consequently, listening must occupy at least as much time in the lesson as playing. The responsibility for listening is difficult to achieve for piano students so the teacher needs all of the forces he can muster to keep the need for listening before his

students. I am not referring to listening to finished performances, but to the listening that builds performances. To be present when a performance is being worked out and to follow the process through to its final stages is as important to building a skill in listening as it is to the job of building the performance itself. Listening and examining problems on their aural merit must have every opportunity to develop if a discriminating ear is to be trained. The easiest way to do this is a small, homogeneous, cooperative group where individual attention can be focused not only on an individual performance but on an individual listening process. In a large group this activity is less efficient; in a competitive atmosphere it is destructive; in a heterogeneous group it is inefficient, with the well-prepared and talented person usually taking the back seat to the mediocre. N The education of the creative child is important for us to consider at this time. Since piano performance is an art, we should have more than our share of creative children studying piano. It seems reasonable to assume that our sensitivity to this kind of child could be considerable. Yet everything we tend to do in piano education moves in the opposite direction to the ways he learns and denies him the fulfillment of his basic drives. Let me explain. The kind of education which is the easiest, and therefore probably the kind most practiced, is one in which the student memorizes considerable amounts of culturally approved data; his motivations are dependent upon his desire to ingratiate himself with his teachers, and he accepts yes-no, right-wrong question situations. What are the results of this kind of education on the creative child? According to the University of Minnesota study of the creative child (Paul Torrence, director), the uncreative, status-quo-directed child unites with others like him to humiliate, contradict, and ultimately banish the creative child who comes up with an original but to them, threatening idea. The questions and answers from creative children
MUSIC EDUCATORS JOURNAL

back from the students is usually solicited directly by the teacher.

42

tend to irritate the rigid type of teacher, and if a creative child is bored, that teacher tends to think something is wrong with the student, not himself. In effect, we are giving approval to a type of student who is a convergent-thinker, nonexperimental and memory-dependent, instead of to the productive, original mind. The study mentioned above indicates that the creative child is willing to take a larger risk than others; has the ability to sense and question the implicit; has the capacity to be puzzled; has considerable sensitivity and exuberance; and has a greater acceptance of himself than is the norm. Are these characteristics treasured in the piano studio? For example, what opportunity is the student given to question a composer's intentions? How often are the rewards of a good lesson and good performance extrinsic from the musical materials involved? How often is improvising and playing by ear still considered threatening to the teacher's security and authority? How often can the student say, "This music is my world! I challenge it."? We are producing students who obey the letter of the music; what about the spirit of it? The letter of the law is inhibiting to the creative person. Humility and respect we want, but not without daring, imagination, and challenge. More than ever I think we are teaching as if music were a body of scientific facts established before music began. If the creative person is constantly preoccupied with details-fingers and noteswithout a perspective in which to place the less interesting part of his devotion-practice-he usually becomes a drop-out figure. For a creative person, compositional theories and performance skill must be a passionate search for truth, not a problem of routine. If we examine the history of piano playing, we see that all of the famous and near famous pianists from Mozart forward were creative people. It was not until after the Rachmaninoff generation that piano education became rooted in scholarship. According to Harold C. Schonberg in The Great Pianists, the result is a generation of pianists who are junior executives
JANUARY, NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE

and company men. It is obvious from the performances of late nineteenth century artists that we have on piano rolls that scholarship was needed. Clearly, respect for style and the score, as we conceive it today, was not apparent in the performances and ideals of the pianists throughout the nineteenth century. We know it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that concerts even included the music of the "masters." Concerts

ON THECOVER
0
With astonishing accuracy caricature is often able to express ideas which might lose their impact if submerged in words. Honor6 Daumier (1808-1879), draftsman extraordinaire, satirized in more than 4,000 caricatures the political and social milieu of the Paris of his day-scenes of war, life in the street, private life, finance, lawyers, the bourgeois morality, theatrical and literary figures-and in each the historical value heightened the artistic value. In 1852, seventeen "Musical Sketches," including this one of the two singers, appeared in Le Charivari, a French journal published daily. In the continuity and shading of his line, Daumier here suggests the rhythm of the actual musical selection being sung; his subtle use of light enhances the artificial quality of the singers' pose, and while the entire scene leans to the mock-heroic, it stops short of the ridiculous. We cannot but enjoy this artful "spoof" on the affected mannerisms of these exuberant vocalists which was Daumier's way of pointing out the pomposity of some singers. Currents of humor and pathos run parallel through this sketch and through nearly all of his others as well: he may point up human weaknesses, cruelties, stupidities, boredom, but he does so with sympathy and whimsical drollery. Art historians marvel at Daumier's unmatched ability to excel in suggesting color while dispensing with it. His forte was the silhouette, but his devotion to painting can be discerned in his use of rich velvety blacks and delicately modulated halftones. Henri d'Argis, commenting on Daumier's work, suggests that his lithographs not only constitute the bulk of his life work but that they express him more fully and more freely than a lifetime entirely devoted to painting could have done. Be that as it may. Of Daumier it can truly be said that he lifted caricature above laughter; he saw the "human comedy" with the eyes of a dramatist. The Journal gratefully acknowledges the cooperation and assistance of the Library of Congress in making possible the reproduction of this drawing on the cover. JS

were given to show off an individual's pianism, virtuosity, and improvisatory skills. An audience came to hear the artist play his own works and improvise rather than to hear a memorized performance of another composer's compositions. When the "other" composer was finally included on recital programs, the score evidently was mutilated beyond recognition. Now we are concerned with style in performance, accuracy of editions, and complete regard for the composer's intentions (or what we think they are). The emphasis now on the language of music at the keyboard is totally that of reproduction. What has happened to creative production? How much improvisation do we hear coming from the concert platform today, for example? We have made our point with scholarship and possibly have overdone it. We know now, as a result of the fine work of musicologists, that the process of interpretation begins certainly with an accurate observation of the score. But this is a minimum obligation and merely a starting point. It must be noted that we probably have inhibited our Baroque, Classic, and probably our Romantic performance for several generations to come because of the fetish we have made of the score. Further, our emphasis on scholarship in the piano studio has a definite impression of being based upon the erroneous idea that music is born to the composer in a fixed and inflexible mold; consequently, he is able to transmute the very sounds he conceives in their entirety and with an exactness to the music staff. (Anyone who has been present at rehearsals of a premiere knows the changes that take place during the preparation of a composition.) This worshiping of the score that we have come to, tends to suggest to the student there is but one authentic way to interpret a composition; but we know that the greater the composition or work of art, the more varied are the possible interpretations for it. SI do not like the "form and analysis" approach to studying a composition. It keeps the student on the outside looking in. He remains on the periphery of the language be43