A good course to teach a complex skill
Douglas College in Greater Vancouver has very interesting piano lesson classes. They are aimed at musicians that already have musical experience in high school., such as guitar and woodwinds. I found my modest experience in playing the jammer invaluable; without this practice, I would have been most truly sunk.
We launched into basic simple 4-fingered (tetrachord) patterns covering an octave and quickly expanded to 5 fingers on each hand. More complex fingering techniques were brought in. and more and more keys and scales were introduced. Eventually, we worked up to playing "exotic" minor keys and arpeggios, some of which involved "very weird fingerings", in the words of our teacher Barry.
Learn, Embellish, Repeat
One basic teaching technique was "learn, embellish"; "learn, embellish more": We would learn a simple technique, like playing a major scale in C, then learn all the simple variants: F and G (one note change), then to play in the left hand, then learn D and Bb (two notes change), etc. By the end, we were playing with scales starting in keys with black notes, which requires a different set of fingers and thumb. The net effect of "learn, embellish" was a big reduction in learning time and lots of repetition of basic finger movements. My ears also got a strong workout, as I had to hold a firm image in my head of the notes of the scale and check that the notes pressed matched the image.
It is often mentioned by jammer advocates that "the piano has 24 fingerings" (implying that it takes 24 times much practice to learn as). But, as taught at the college, the piano student really learns 3 or so basic fingerings with 8 variations. The left-hand does pick up a bit of skill transfer from the right hand (nothing like the heavy skill transfer when learning the jammer). The net effect is that the piano only requires, to be proficient in all keys, I guesstimate 3-5 times the practicing that the jammer would require.
But note, however, the term "proficient in all keys" above. The student at this point, madly learning to play, can skimp on the proficiency. Learning to play well in 5 keys, play OK 4 keys, and poorly in the 3 remaining is reasonable, and what the teacher accepted.
Curiously, the "learn, embellish; learn, embellish more" technique is very similar to the "deep practice" Daniel Coyle and others advocate. Training situations where one is at the edge of ability, making a controlled number of mistakes - and correcting them immediately – is an excellent way to practice.
And also note that the practice is training both the fingers and the ear. The intense ear training has implications discussed in the next article: Jammer vs Piano - part 5 - Expecting the unexpected.
An excellent textbook
The course textbook (Contemporary Class Piano ) was scarily massive and excellent. The teacher, Barry Barrington, himself a virtuoso pianist, selected small, relevant sections of the text to master, and gave us students a broad choice of pieces to learn.
Was anything missing?
An overview might have been nice.
There were some "overview" topics that I expected to present in this university-level course:
- Background on the musical layout of the piano: notes have what musical effect, how long they sustain
- Where the percussion section starts,
- Where the optimum chordal section is,
- What parts are best suited to create a desired musical effect?
These concepts and more have been around for years: see "How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons: What Music Is and How to Make It at Home" by Ward Cannel & Fred Marx. Mind you, it can be well argued that the student, over the course of the next 8 plus years practicing the piano, will figure out and/or absorb unconsciously much of the above points, without needing to be taught.
Am I just supposed to "know" how to learn the piano because I learned to play the sax?
A considerable body of solid experimental evidence has been built up in the last 2 decades about how to effectively practice and learn. I was modestly surprised that nothing was mentioned about effective practicing. Barry showed a cute video that urged practicing rather than dilly-dallying. little was said about how to best learn; no review of practice and learning techniques.
For a good overview of what I mean, see: Daniel Coyles' The-talent-code, and Book review: Geoff Colvins' Talent is Overrated. Note: in the college's defense, that the class did, I think, use Coyles techniques with it's "Learn, Embellish, Repeat" system mentioned above. I just suggest making them conscious.
Learning modern practice techniques is (in my opinion) extremely important: Research has found it not just a matter of practice amount, it's a matter of practice quality. The college program provided the expert coaching, but did not show us how to slow it down, how much to focus on the accuracy vs speed, and techniques for breaking it into manageable, learn-able chunks, this was left to the student.
Subtle Links between the score and the piano
If one only plays the piano, the subtle, but very deep connection between the traditional Music notation and the standard keyboard layout is not obvious. It just is a designed fact. It's everywhere; place your fingers here, and sharpen or flatten (shift the finger left or right a centimeter) the notes per the key you are in, ét viola! the right interval, the correct major or minor third, the correct complex chord magically appears. I expect that this would become automatic and very fast, provided one is young. When one is 65, perhaps not so much. I'm getting a glimmer of this automation but it's slow in growing.
Subtler Yet Links between the piano and my brain's perception of pitch
I am bemused often by an everyday skill everyone has. I consider it one of the most astonishing feats of computation in the world. People pick up a smart phone and start texting. Typing away with either thumb, both thumbs. Just doing it.
This generates the question: anyone older than 35 learned to "touch-type" on a full keyboard with really, moving key, using all fingers, so how do they automatically know how to type on a dinky little screen with one and/or two thumbs?
The answer, of course, is the that the brain is astonishingly good at creating good, flexible mental background image. In the texting case mentioned, the mind maps the learned image to the current image size and guides the fingers to targets in that image. Computationally, this is a greater feat than doing a hand-spring. Backwards.
Playing a piano requires a similar mental feat. Ponder the dynamic "musical image" a pianist must have. The ear is hearing just 88 notes evenly spaced in pitch, a semi-tone apart. Yet when playing the hands are in different relative places on the keyboard, continually moving around in 3 dimensions, the fingers shifting to sharpen or flatten a note as needed. That must be one heck of a image! The brain of the poor pianist is forced to do an awful lot of work. Those target, semi-tone-spaced notes must be very clearly marked and understood by the brain.
The jammer and any other isomorphic (evenly spaced notes), instrument does not make the mind do the same amount of work.The hands generally stay in one place, or move in simple ways.
Does this make a practical difference? In my very preliminary experience, it does. Occasionally in the last few months of playing the piano, I've had flashes of the "exact" note placement in my choral music. When I do, my wife (she of perfect pitch) reports that my pitch accuracy takes a big jump.
Could it be that intensely playing the piano for 8 months could do what 6 years of playing the jammer less intensely did not do? This must be investigated.
Summary:
I have spent 8 months learning the piano, with modest success: I passed the course, but can't play the piano, and the pieces I learned, well.
I did learn :
- To play the same pieces on both the jammer and the piano, so that I can compare the two instruments.
(Note: I am a musical klutz, but I'll be the same musical klutz on both devices) - As suspected, it was way easier to read a score and play a piano than to read a score and play a jammer.
- Learning to play the piano may have trained my ear more than playing the jammer did.
- Lots of basics about how piano teachers simplify the learning of the instrument, by starting in the simplest techniques and gradually adding on complications.
As a unexpected side-effect (the course syllabus did not mention) My musical sense of pitch improved significantly.
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