John Hill
Jun 27
Hi, How are you doing today?I want a private lessons for my son(Paul) at your location.Paul is 14 year old boy and is ready to learn.Please I want to know your policy with regard to fees, cancellations, and make-up lessons.Also,get back to me with the total fees for six month lessons(one-hour lesson in a week) starting from July 10th.
In addition,I want to know the lessons location and your phone number.Looking forward to hearing from you.
My best regards,
John.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
K-STATE SOPHOMORE FROM OVERLAND PARK RESEARCHES THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE BEHAVIORS AND ATTITUDES ELICITED FROM DIFFERENT MUSIC LYRICS
MANHATTAN — The words to “Itsy Bitsy Spider” tell a simple story about an arachnid and a spout, but simply recalling the lines could initiate an unintentional attitude.
That’s the focus of research by Kansas State University’s Eduardo Alvarado, sophomore in pre-law, Overland Park, who is looking at the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs.
Alvarado is working with Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology at K-State, through K-State’s Developing Scholars Program, which pairs underrepresented students with faculty mentors to work on research projects.
Alvarado is studying the effects priming can have on behavior by looking at the positive and negative responses stimulated from music lyrics from a variety of song categories, including patriotic and Christmas songs. Priming, he said, is when someone is exposed to a certain environment and their subconscious is activated, and then they tend to act in accordance with that environment without deliberate intent. Priming can manipulate behavior; if someone witnesses violent behavior, they would likely behave more violently.
“One of the key implications is that behaviors may be malleable in the sense that many individuals have the capacity for similar reactions in social situations,” Saucier said. “Relatively small-scale primes may activate certain reactions, and these may be pro-social or anti-social depending on the context.”
Alvarado said the researchers wanted to see if certain musical lyrics activated a pro-social response, which is a positive feeling like empathy, or an anti-social response, which is a negative feeling like aggression. Participants from K-State’s spring general psychology courses participated in the initial project for class credit. The participants had to complete a survey and do a lyrics exercise. For the lyrics exercise, participants had to fill in missing lyrics for different songs.
The songs involved in the study were patriotic songs, such as “The Star-Spangled Banner”; secular Christmas songs, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; religious Christmas songs, such as “O Holy Night”; and neutral songs, such as “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
Participants filled out a survey that asked questions about their religion and their attitudes toward other cultures and diversity. Half of the participants were asked to complete the survey before the lyric exercise, and the other half completed the survey after the exercise.
Alvarado said the researchers assume people act similarly to primes, and they looked overall at the surveys to see if there was a change in the responses before and after completing the lyrics exercise. They wanted to see if the songs created a pro-social or an anti-social response. He said the preliminary findings showed that the patriotic songs had a negative effect on the participants, as shown through their responses to the survey’s questions about other cultures and diversity. The patriotic songs made the participants close-minded and prejudiced.
“Once they were in a patriotic point of view, they were less empathetic,” Alvarado said. “They didn’t put themselves in other people’s perspective.”
Though songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” were meant to be neutral primes, the researchers found that they stimulated a pro-social response.
“You wouldn’t think that those songs were going to put people in a certain mind frame, but they do activate a certain attitude,” Alvarado said. “We found it made people more accepting and more empathetic. The reason for this we think is because we used to listen to these songs when we were little and they kind of activate childhood happiness.”
Saucier said follow-up research will focus on using stronger and more salient primes to influence pro-social and anti-social behavior. Jessica McManus, graduate student in psychology, has been collaborating on the project.
Alvarado said he has learned that being involved in research is a full-time commitment, but he wants to continue learning more through his projects.
“At first I was nervous, but I knew it was a really good opportunity,” Alvarado said. “A lot of people don’t know they can participate in research as an undergraduate.”
Alvarado said he likes, through K-State’s Developing Scholars Program, learning about research projects other students are involved in. He plans to go to law school and thinks his research experience will help him understand how people think and react to different situations.
Alvarado is from Mexico City and moved to Overland Park when he was 11 years old. He is bilingual, speaking English and Spanish, and is learning Italian. A 2008 graduate of Shawnee Mission North High School, he is the son of Eduardo Alvarado and Lisa Lopez.
source: http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jun09/ealvarado62309.html
… and I love people who support it:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/05/25/brown.graduates.sidney.frank/
For I-don’t-remember-how-long I have been taking the last week of May off, starting the piano summer the first full week of June. This week “off” is of course no vacation for me as this is the time when I am busiest putting the (somewhat) final touches on the summer schedule and calendar.
I am looking forward to teaching lots of private, one-on-one lessons - not only the regular once-a-week kind, but as many as the students show up for and my schedule allows. And my schedule allows for quite a bit, and quite a bit of flexibility, too: I am actually looking forward to being able to adjust my schedule to my students’ summer schedule which means working around their vacations, summer camps, and other activites. Where other teachers get exasperated because their schedule changes from week to week – I think it is wonderful that I have that flexibility.
In addition to the private lessons, there will be group events, all kinds of different activities – performance classes where we learn what it takes to perform (performing is so different from playing and therefore requires a different kind of preparation), history lessons, learning about and listening to recordings of pieces by different composers, etc.
When I’m not teaching or preparing lessons, I will be outside, playing with dirt. This now is the most beautiful = prolific time of the year. On our walks, Mark and I find something new in the neighborhood gardens every day! Our own yard is still very much at the beginning, I only started planting a few weeks ago, and that’s what it looks like. But it is starting to come together, a bit greener and more colorful every day now, it seems.
It is going to be a beautiful summer.
Source: diveintomark’s twitter tweats
1.
The boys are having a pillow throwing contest. I can’t imagine how this could possibly get out of hand.
2.
The tweet is coming from inside the pillow fort. I repeat: the tweets are coming from INSIDE THE PILLOW FORT.
3. (about an hour later)
Update: the attack has been rebuffed, the pillow fort has been razed, and a peace treaty has been forged. It involves ice cream.
(In case you wonder what this has to do with piano or music or teaching or learning – absolutely nothing.)
an abstract from an article by Isabelle Peretz, Elvira Brattico, Miika Jarvenpaa, and Mari Tervaniemi in Brain. A Journal of Neurology
Like language, music engagement is universal, complex and present early in life. However, ~4% of the general population experiences a lifelong deficit in music perception that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain damage, intellectual deficiencies or lack of exposure. This musical disorder, commonly known as tone-deafness and now termed congenital amusia, affects mostly the melodic pitch dimension. Congenital amusia is hereditary and is associated with abnormal grey and white matter in the auditory cortex and the inferior frontal cortex. In order to relate these anatomical anomalies to the behavioural expression of the disorder, we measured the electrical brain activity of amusic subjects and matched controls while they monitored melodies for the presence of pitch anomalies. Contrary to current reports, we show that the amusic brain can track quarter-tone pitch differences, exhibiting an early right-lateralized negative brain response. This suggests near-normal neural processing of musical pitch incongruities in congenital amusia. It is important because it reveals that the amusic brain is equipped with the essential neural circuitry to perceive fine-grained pitch differences. What distinguishes the amusic from the normal brain is the limited awareness of this ability and the lack of responsiveness to the semitone changes that violate musical keys. These findings suggest that, in the amusic brain, the neural pitch representation cannot make contact with musical pitch knowledge along the auditory-frontal neural pathway.
So, in essence, and pushing this issue a bit further: this is like autism with regard to music? Just like an individual with autism who can perfectly well see and hear – but then doesn’t know what to do with this sensory input (what does it mean when someone “smiles”??), an individual with an amusic brain can hear and distinguish musical details just as well as everyone else – but what is being heard has no meaning because there is no “contact with music pitch knowledge” due to a “lack of responsiveness”.
The question, as always, is: what do we do – now that we know?
From the book “Art & Fear” :
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Analysis Paralysis. I sometimes tell a student that while mindless “practicing” (which isn’t really practicing, it’s just putting in time) is counterproductive, dangerous and generally bad, mindful repetitions, playing something over and over, observing along the way, making minute corrective changes as you play, over and over, can lead to better results than highly sophisticated, well-thought-out ideas that never make it out of your head.
There is a difference between making clay pots and practicing the piano: if your first clay pot doesn’t turn out to be a masterwork, you can just set it aside and go for another one. When you practice, which is an athletic activity, every repetition has the potential – for good or for bad – to form a habit, to cement one certain way of playing. There’s nothing – well, not much – more frustrating than finding out, after having played something numerous times, that you practiced a mistake – wrong note, wrong fingering, wrong rhythm, wrong motion. It tends to become ingrained, and thus a pain to undo.
Still, there is something to be said for just jumping in and doing it, mindfully, listening, paying attention to what you just did, over and over, correcting as you go.
In the current issue of American Music Teacher (AMT), published by the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) of which I am a member, there is under “Impromptu” a short informational (infomercial?) entry for “Simplified Music Notation”. As a teacher of all ages and all levels with a special interest in brain research and Special Education, I am naturally interested in anything that can make a student’s life (or mine) easier, less complicated. The idea of a “Simplified Music Notation” seemed to fit that bill, so I looked at the website.
I have, in another post on this site, written about the issue of simplification, and the fact that there’s a right way and then there is a wrong way to simplify. The right way maintains the spirit of the music but makes life easier for the performer - such as redistributing notes between the hands, or leaving out doubled notes in chords that are too large for a small hand. When simplification is done right, you don’t hear a difference; as a matter of fact, it likely sounds better than the original because the performer is now technically able to play with expression whereas the original would either have been impossible to play or so strained that expression was a lost cause.
As someone who didn’t learn to sight-play (which is often called “sight-read”) until grad school, I had missed out on a lot of literature, growing up, because it was too time-consuming to learn to read the many notes – unless I knew how the piece sounded in which case I easily played by ear, using the score as a last resort to check on notes I wasn’t sure about. Learning a piece I didn’t know was piece-meal work: I’d laboriously figure out the notes in one measure, play it a couple of times until I had it memorized (another skill that comes easy to me), then go on to the next measure, and from there string the measures together. Amazingly, this worked for Chopin Ballades, Scherzi, Etudes, Schubert Sonatas and the like. It did, however, not work for Hindemith. I had somehow managed to never play Hindemith before, so my grad school professor assigned the Second Piano Sonata. Progress was glacial at best. Dr. Edwards grew frustrated and finally, suspecting that my reading skills (or, better, lack thereof) were to blame, put an easy Schumann piece (Melody? or something like that from the Album for the Young) in front of me, “Play!!” It was a disaster.
As someone who suffered the consequences of not learning to sight-play until grad school, I now take great care to teach my students how to read and sight-play. There is more to sight-playing than knowing your notes: sight-playing requires horizontal thinking and understanding, anticipation, and the development of a secure knowledge of the keyboard topography – your fingers have to know where the keys are without looking down. You also have to be able to “think” in different keys, so that there is an immediate knowledge of what to expect from, say, Beethoven’s Bagatelle in G minor – there’ll be B flats and E flats (from the key signature), and accidental F sharps, etc. This is a skill that comes easiest to those who tend to play by ear but it is a skill I aim to develop in all of my students.
While my approach to teaching how to read works, I am always interested in learning more and perhaps finding a system which works even better.
According to their website,
Simplified Music Notation is a new notation designed to make sight-reading easier. It was originally created for musicians with dyslexia, memory impairments and other disabilities, but has gained interest from a broad range of professional and amateur musicians.
Sharps and flats are given by the shape of the notehead. This eliminates the necessity of relying on the key signature and dispenses with the need for accidentals.
The key signature is still there, along with all the information in the original score, but many of the unnecessary complexities of reading music have been removed.
“Simplified Music Notation” promises
You no longer have to remember
— the key signature
— accidentals throughout the bar
— cancelling accidentals at the end of the bar
— transposing double flats and sharps
Wow. What a relief!
Or is it?
Unfortunately, this system is based on a couple of incorrect assumptions. According to this system, reading difficulties stem from key signatures, accidentals, and double flats and sharps. (I don’t know what they mean by “transposing double flats and sharps”.)
If that were so, then my attempt at reading that easy Schumann piece should have been a piece of cake: I distinctly remember that it was in the key of C (key signature: no sharps, no flats); there may have been one lonely F sharp toward the end of the first line. If they were to take that piece and transcribe and convert it to Simplified Music Notation, it would not look any different, except for that F sharp which would alter the shape of the note head instead of having a # in front of it – hardly a simplification.
Next, it has been my experience that the difficulties that dyslexic students have with reading words/sentences, are different from the difficulties of note reading. I have had dyslexic students who read music with relative ease, and I have had (way too many, usually transfer) students who had no trouble at all with reading language but couldn’t read music to save their lives.
Then, they claim to eliminate “the necessity of relying on the key signature”. While it is true that I tell my students that if a note sounds wrong, “check the key signature, then the clef (Right Hand is not always in the treble clef, etc.), then accidentals” – thereby acknowledging that remembering the key signature may take some effort – I also explain to them that the key signature is like their zip code: it gives you a map, it tells you where to find what, it puts things into perspective, into a relationship. If you are used to (skilled at) thinking in different keys, then playing a piece in A flat will pose no problems that could be traced to having to “rely” on the key signature. On the contrary, having the key signature, thinking in the key, will help you read because you are familiar with the map, you know what to expect. – If reading in A flat is a problem for you, then perhaps you are not ready to read a piece in A flat. Simplifying the notation only covers up that problem.
I suppose, the worst here is the issue of double sharps and flats, as well as “white key” sharps and flats such as E sharp. They “simplify” the notation and write the note of the white key. While it is important for students to learn that E sharp is a white key, it is equally important that they learn that E sharp and F are not the same! Yes, they are played on the same key, but they are not the same note. Just like B flat and A sharp are not the same. I like to do an experiment with a beginning student who has just figured out, by ear, an F major five-finger pattern (black key – yay!) by asking what the notes were. Many students will call that black key “A sharp” but it takes just a moment for me to explain the concept of the five-finger scale and they understand that it has to be called B flat because we are replacing the B. What is altered when you use enharmonic notes is the shape of the melody, and, importantly: the visual image (and cue). Imagine an F sharp minor scale: harmonic minor will have an E sharp in the scale. Simplified Notation will write the scale as F#-G#-A-B-C#-D-F-F#. That is not a scale! It doesn’t look like a scale, it violates the visual image we have of a scale.
Or take a highly patterened piece such as Robert Vandall’s Prelude in G major: The left hand pattern always starts with a half step down, then up again to the first note, then down an octave: G-F#-G-(low)G for instance. Visually, it is instantly recognizable: one down, one up, octave down. The pattern has implications for the fingering: 1-2-1-5, with the second finger always a half step below the first – meaning: very next key. Learning, or sight-playing this piece, we put the visual cue and the fingering together. In most measures, this pattern is followed by a repetition of the first three notes, creating: G-F#-G-(low)G-G-F#-G, etc. (Did you notice the palindrome?) Because we have looked at this and analyzed it, we now know that we don’t need to “read” the last three notes – because we know that they are the same as the first three. Actually, we don’t need to read any notes beyond the first because of the pattern! So, there goes the issue of having to remember accidentals lasting through the end of the measure. On the second page, there are two measures with (the same) double sharp: G#-Fx-G#. Visually, we instantly recognize this as “the same” as before = same fingering, etc. With Simplified Notation, this would look totally different: G#-G-G# - we would have to think about it to recognize that it is actually the same pattern. Destroyed is the consistency, the visual cue. Yes, I am sure students can learn to play this piece with Simplified Notation, but they will have missed out on really understanding this piece. And I don’t see how the Simplified Notation would have helped with memory. Understanding patterns (visual, fingering, aural, and more) goes such a long way toward memorizing; I’ve been known to say to my (new) students, when they ask whether they “have to” memorize a piece, “If you really use your brain learning this piece, you cannot help but memorize along the way!” (We know there’s more to memory than this, but it’s a fantastic and reliable start!)
The “unnecessary complexities of reading music” do not come from the key signature, accidentals, and double sharps and flats. Music notation, the way it is, is a marvelous system that makes sense. It has clear-cut rules that are mathematical in nature, they have to do with ratio, absolute distance, etc. – unlike other musical signs, such as signs that indicate touch, tempo or dynamics: there are (and should be!) infinite variations of staccato for instance.
Whenever I hear the cry for stricter rules here in town for – take your pick: non-smoking, vicious dogs, speed limits, I think: we do not need stricter rules, we need to enforce the rules we have! The rules are there, but they need to be obeyed and enforced.
So, for music notation, what we need is not a new system with new rules, we simply need to adhere to the rules we have! The rules say, for instance, that the barline cancels the accidental(s) of the previous measure. But what do we have in the next measure? A gratuitous, “friendly-reminder” natural/sharp/flat. THAT is what clutters the score! THAT is what makes reading unnecessarily difficult because it demands our attention, and then the decision that we can ignore the symbol – what a waste of brain power! I can’t tell you how many times a confused student has asked, “Why is there a natural here in this measure? I thought the barline cancels the accidental??” What can I say to the student, other than, “Well, you are right, it is unnecessary and I so wish they didn’t do that but I guess they assume that you are either dumb or not paying attention …”
When I shared with Mark who has a black belt in Karate my misgivings about this kind of simplification, he immediately had this story:
I told you about sparring with the Tae Kwon Do people.
I was paired with a woman who was perhaps 5 or 6 inches shorter than me. She had beautiful kicks and tremendous flexibility. Her spinning back kick was consistently higher than my head. Her form during the kick and after was atrocious.During the kick she was not looking at the target. At best her line of sight was 90º to the side, and at worst she was looking 180º in the wrong direction. Imagine throwing a pitch with a baseball. You look at the catcher’s mitt, you look at the target. You don’t throw the ball with your eyes closed and hope that it heads in the right direction. Without looking at the target you have no control over the kick or pitch.After throwing the kick she ended up facing away from me. Her back was completely exposed. In the karate-do world I came from the back was a legitimate target. Exposing your back to your opponent was called mubobi or a defenseless posture. In point sparring you were giving your opponent a free point, on the street you were giving your attacker your life.While her form was beautiful it was completely incorrect. She had no visual control over where the kick was going, she consistently missed the target, and she finished the kick facing the wrong way. I never had to duck or block her kicks, and I always had a free shot to her back or the back of her head after she completed her spin.She was offended when I pointed this out, and indignant when I started tapping the back of her head with my fist each time. “That’s not a target!” she would say. Maybe in Tae Kwon Do it isn’t a target, but in the real world it is a target.Her instructors had done her a huge disservice; they had allowed her to advance through their rank system with the belief that what she was doing was an effective martial arts technique when in fact it was anything but. Her form was beautiful, her style was flawless, but what she was doing wasn’t self defense or martial arts.
My name is Sibylle Kuder, I am auditing Teri Holmberg’s Intro to Music Therapy class. Before our weekly observation today, I arrived early and sat in an observation booth, watching and listening through the one-way mirror to the group in the room. This had nothing to do with the Music Therapy session, this was just the “regular” pre-school group, doing their various pre-school things: some children painted, others drew on paper, or read, built castles, etc. There were three adults in the room, young women, students of the Early Childhood program?
They moved among the children, watching and interacting.
At one point, a small girl drew a picture of a giraffe on a dry-erase board. One of the adults started to write the name of the animal by the picture on the dry-erase board, stopped in the middle, turned to one of the other adults and asked, “How do you spell ‘giraffe’?” – “Giraffe?” - ”One ‘f’ or two?” - She wrote it with one ‘f’ and looked at it, unsure whether it looked correct or not. The other adult who didn’t know how to spell it either said, “That’s a hard one to spell.” To which the first one, looking at the little girl, replied, “Yeah, that’s a hard one to spell!”
Please understand that I have no problem with someone who doesn’t know whether giraffe is spelled with one ‘f’ or two. (In French, Portuguese, Polish it is spelled with one ‘f’; in German, English, Italian it is spelled with two.) In English, you cannot tell by sounding it out; or someone may have trouble spelling in general; or the correct answer may escape you for the moment – all of which I find perfectly acceptable reasons. What I find unacceptable and inexcusable, in an educational setting (which I assume the Stone House is), is that the two young women left it at that: they seemed perfectly content with not knowing how to spell the word, reassuring themselves and the little girl that it was a hard word to spell. I find it inexcusable that the realization that ‘giraffe’ is hard to spell was not immediately followed by a “Let’s look it up!” – I bet that it would have taken me less than two minutes to find a book in that room that had the word ‘giraffe’ in it. – Or at least a “We’ll have to look that up later!” - or sending the little girl “… go see if you can find the book with the animals so we can see how ‘giraffe’ is spelled.” Or something.
:
While we were waiting in a different observation booth for the Music Therapy session to start, I watched a different group. This group was sitting on the floor, singing along with the teacher. Or trying to sing. While I realize that not every Early Childhood Teacher has had formal Early Childhood Music and Movement training, I do expect anyone who works with children to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the musical development of young children: children’s voices have a very narrow singing range, they sing comfortably between about D above Middle C, and up to A or B. This is not the normal singing range for adults who tend to sing much lower. However, children cannot sing that low. What you get if you expect them to sing along with you in the lower range is children who use their speaking voices, they sound like they “sing” out of tune. One or two of the children were attempting to sing an octave higher than the teacher which, again, is out of their range. If you keep that up, you end up with children who learn that they cannot sing in tune because they were not allowed/encouraged to develop their singing voices in the range which is natural for children (but not as comfortable for most adults). “Children are not little adults” – that goes for singing, too!
I don’t expect only spelling or music specialists to work with the children in the Stone House, but I do expect an environment which fosters a love of learning and inquisitive minds (looking something up if you don’t know it), and in which children’s specific needs are taken into account.
Many years ago, Chuck Gardner, my favorite Methodist minister, managed to weave some secular history into one of his sermons. While I don’t remember the sermon itself, nor the context, the piece of history stayed with me.
According to Chuck, in the un-enlightened Middle Ages, parents didn’t really feed their children until they were about 5 years old. The little ones got table scraps, the left-overs no one else wanted, they searched under the table (if there was one) for stuff that might have fallen down, much like some people’s dogs nowadays. Appalling, isn’t it. I remember him saying with a chuckle, “The SRS would have had a field day …” (SRS being the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services.)
How could parents be so – mean? so uneducated? Didn’t they know that children need good food in order to grow into healthy adults? Of course they didn’t know that. To them, a young child was a burden, something that wasn’t useful until old enough to help in the field, the kitchen, etc. Something that more often than not might die before being old enough to be useful. So, according to their thinking, why would you waste precious food on something you weren’t sure would live to be of use?
To our thinking, this is as irrational as it gets: not feeding a young child good food because he/she might die … One can only imagine the number of children who died - because they were malnourished! And the number of children whose bodies, due to lack of nutritious and plentiful food, were too weak to fight off diseases or stand cold weather or recover from accidents. Which, I suppose, only served to reinforce their parents’ attitude, “See, Mother, I told you he was too weak to make it! Glad we didn’t waste good food on him.”
One could argue that only the strongest survived. But even those strongest, I would like to argue, would have been even stronger had they been given a good start by being fed nutritious meals.
We still have a bit of this attitude today when we claim “that which doesn’t kill you makes you strong”. I beg to differ. Take my mother who grew up during WWII. While she was lucky enough to be evacuated, along with her younger sister and her mother, to a small village north of Frankfurt, south of a big forest which obstructed the view of the village to incoming (from the North) British bombers, thus in no immediate danger, the food that was available to them was inferior. This inferior food didn’t kill her, but it didn’t exactly make her strong either. There are many causes for brittle bones, but I blame hers on the lack of good food during a time when her body would have needed it to build strong bones and muscles.
Of course, good food and generally good care do not guarantee that a child grows up to be a healthy adult. There are diseases, accidents. Nor does a lack of good food necessarily mean that a child’s health is forever doomed. There are no guarantees. But we know that our chances of living a healthy life improve greatly if we set a good tone from the beginning.
And yet, when it comes to piano lessons, so many parents descend right back into the Middle Ages; it’s frightening. They don’t want to invest in a good instrument or a good teacher because they are not sure that their child will stick with lessons. Their argument: let’s wait and see if the child is “interested” or “shows promise”. How is this different from those parents a couple hundred years ago who waited until their children showed that they were strong enough to survive before they were fed the good stuff? Yes, again, the strongest will probably survive. But even those strongest would be stronger if they had had a good foundation via a good instrument and/or teacher.
And what about those who are perhaps slow to show interest or whose talent lies dormant for a while – even with a good instrument and teacher? What about those who need a bit of extra tender loving coddling care to bring out their talents? They will certainly be turned off by an inferior instrument, perhaps being told that they lack talent.
Seven years ago, Mark’s niece was born with cancer. One particularly observant radiologist noticed in one of the pre-natal ultrasounds an irregularity with one of her kidneys. She was diagnosed with neuroblastoma and underwent life-saving surgery at the tender age of 6 months. The surgery was successful and for now, she is doing fine.
I have had several students over the years who initially showed no apparent promise and then suddenly burst into bloom. I have also had students who showed “promise” initially but then lacked the desire to build on it.
I would propose that all children deserve good food, caring parents, good instruments and good teachers.
From the beginning.
I believe they are called “blanket statements”.
Taking piano lessons is good for you / your child / your IQ / etc.
You’ve heard it, perhaps tried to heed that advice. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t.
While there is some research on the topic, the problem is that ”Piano lessons are good for you” is as accurate as “Eating food will make you fat”. Everyone knows that, yes indeed, some food will make you fat, but it also depends on how much of which food we are talking about. People don’t seem to be that descerning when it comes to piano lessons. Piano lessons are good for you, right?
Wrong.
Remember the adage, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent”? I’d like to add, “Perfect practice makes perfect.”
Good piano lessons are good for you.
Some 35 years ago, after my first piano teacher with whom I had studied for only a year or two got married and moved away, we were faced with the challenge of finding a new teacher. Our piano tuner, a gentle and quiet man, recommended his mother. I don’t know what her qualifications were, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this woman taught piano lessons on a tall and dark upright piano in a dark corner of her dark living room; piano lessons that for a while destroyed my love for the piano.
While my first teacher, a young and enthusiastic woman, was good (which I didn’t realize until much much later when I read through some of the assignments she had written), I didn’t really learn how to practice. I was kind of lucky – or perhaps not, depending on how you look at it -, because I had some talent, and excellent ears, and faked my way through the note-reading exercises. My new teacher would get upset about my lack of sight-reading skills, urging me during our dreaded four-hand sight-reading sessions sternly, “Keep going!!!” – which is exactly what someone with no sight-reading skills can not do.
Sight-reading was not the only thing I wasn’t good at. I had no clue what it meant to practice. If I did sit down at the piano between lessons, I’d play through a couple of songs, usually not the ones I was assigned because those were “hard” and I didn’t know them, I didn’t know what they were supposed to sound like, and I didn’t know how to practice and I didn’t like them anyway. I had no sense of rhythm, I couldn’t count. My teacher managed to identify my weaknesses but that’s where she stopped; she was unable to help me overcome them. All in a tense, rigid, dark atmosphere. What I learned from her was that I wasn’t good enough. I hated lessons, and I still hadn’t learned how to practice, nor how to read, nor count.
After a while, I don’t remember how long I took lessons, my mother who by nature and nurture does not quit (”You started it, now you stick with it!”) said, “You know, if you want to stop lessons with her, that would be ok.” She also made sure that, after a break (one year?), I auditioned with a new teacher who then became not only my new piano teacher, but also mentor, guide, coach, and solid rock in my tumultuous teenage years. I was lucky.
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Perhaps because I love music and the piano in particular, and I love learning and studying and teaching, I think that we do not need any outside reason to study music. If studying the piano does help with math, languages, etc., then all the better, but that shouldn’t be the main reason to take piano lessons.
Another aspect:
Neurologist Oliver Sacks (author of case-history collections such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), during an interview about his new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, had the following answer to one of the interviewer’s questions:
From the perspective of neurological development, is it important to give music lessons to your kids?
Sacks: One can become a creative and good human being without music lessons. But it does look as if fairly intensive musical training can promote the development of various parts of the brain, which may facilitate other non-musical cognitive powers.
Please note the first part of his answer. Also note the fact that he says, “musical training can promote” and “may facilitate”. A much more realistic answer, and therefore more honest, than the blanket “piano lessons are good for you.”
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The parents of my young piano students know that I have a serious problem with the name of one of the piano methods for young beginners, “Music for Little Mozarts”. Not only do I find it presumptuous and misleading, I find it unfair to the children: they are being taught that if they only try hard enough, they can be “little Mozarts” which leads some of them to think that they are expected to become little Mozarts.
There’s a misconception here in the United States, arising from the statement, “All men are born equal.” People equate “equal” with “the same”. The fact is, we are not all the same. We are born male, female, (or, in moderately rare cases, intersexual - persons incompatible with the biological gender binary); we are born tall, short, in-between, easy-going or not; we are born first, second, the last of ten. We are not all the same. Nor should we be. In a truly great society, everyone finds his/her place, with room and encouragement to develop his/her individual talents.
Dylan Evans, in an article that was published in The Guardian, speaks of talent:
We can’t bear the idea that some people might be better than us, so much better that we could never be like them, no matter how hard we tried. That upsets our democratic ethos, our belief that all people are born equal.
But raw talent is not distributed equally. By definition, most of us are not exceptional. We are neither particularly stupid, nor especially intelligent. Only a very few are extremely gifted. [...] The Mona Lisa, the Goldberg Variations and King Lear were not the work of ordinary people like you and me. They were the work of geniuses, people so much more talented than us that we could never paint or write anything comparable to their achievements, no matter how hard we tried or how long we lived.
And here’s a thought that’s particularly dear to my heart because of its relevance to piano competitions:
The just allocation of admiration is a virtue that requires judgment and integrity: judgment to distinguish genuine talent from mere showiness, and integrity in refusing to bestow praise on those who do not fully deserve it. Prizes are only valuable if they are restricted to the very few. Not winning a prize is not something to be seen as shameful – it should be the norm, something that happens to the overwhelming majority of people.
This kind of thinking usually doesn’t go over too well with American students and parents who by now are used to receiving some kind of prize or recognition for just about everything. While I wholeheartedly believe in and teach supporting young people’s efforts and accomplishments, I think this society has gone overboard in its attempt to reward expected behavior. Making people, especially young people, think that they are exceptional just because they follow the rules or because their work is acceptable is dangerous.
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So, what’s wrong with naming a piano method “Music for Little Mozarts”? It is the arrogant assumption that all children are geniuses in the league of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is degrading to the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to put him on the same level as the majority of people who just happen not to be geniuses. It reminds me of the story of the 4-year old whose parents manage to grab him just as he’s about to step onto a busy four-lane highway. The parents, distraught, demand to know, “What on earth and in heaven’s name did you think you were doing?!” The 4-year-old answers, “I am going to cross the highway because I can do anything if I just believe in myself.”
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Hard to believe that the following is apparently not common knowledge among teachers (and parents):
Developmental psychology tells us many things that, as music instructors, we need to know. Primarily, it tells us the thinking style of the child; that is, whether the child is dominated by his or her perceptions, or by logic. It tells us why children at certain ages do certain things, such as why a child may gaze away from the piano while playing. As an example, a preschooler would gaze away due to the inability to ‘not look’ at something else in the room (known as centration). A child age 7 or older may look away because he or she is not aware that looking at the score is necessary, while an adolescent may be looking away to try out a newfound skill of memorizing quickly. This is only one of many situations that require a solid knowledge of cognition as a function of age.
Developmental Psychology also tells us why children may become stressed in certain situations. Preschoolers become stressed when aspects of their environment change; the more change, the more stress. Older children tend to become stressed when they believe they have broken the rules, and therefore seek to know what the rules are. Adolescents often talk themselves into being stressed due to their interpretation of the events around them.
Find the rest of the article at merchantcircle.
Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen,
wann kommst du geschneit,
du wohnst in den Wolken,
dein Weg ist so weit.
Komm setz dich ans Fenster,
du lieblicher Stern;
malst Blumen und Blätter,
wir haben dich gern.
Schneeflöckchen, du deckst uns
die Blümelein zu,
dann schlafen sie sicher
in himmlischer Ruh’.
Here you can listen to the melody for this song (played on piano, no voices).