For Children

Someone asked me a wonderful question yesterday morning:  What is the difference between a piece written for children and one written for adults?

The question is profound.  Good compositions for children open the way to fantasy, to fascination, to complex and rich responses touching the realm of dreams or fairy tales. Compositions for adults have, as a rule, some conceptual interface between composer and player--structure, perhaps, or historical context. 

With children sound goes right to the heart and no heart is more open, more vulnerable, more deeply involved than that of a child.

Scales, Touch, and the Ear

First a brief description of another long-time student: This young man is a graduate of School for Visual Arts, a distinctly creative computer animation artist who has been improvising consistently since the age of seven; he scores and performs piano in his films.

Recently we have been concentrating on Clementi's Preludes and Exercises: a brilliant compendium of studies in the sound and feel of the piano's tonal specificity.  Yesterday it was a question of exercises based on the E-flat major scale.

I do not teach scales as routine formulaic affairs--they are much too important to be relegated to the boredom bin.

It was moving to hear him unearth the expressive beauty of this scale, to listen as he found its awkwardness "interesting."

Reading Old and New

First a brief description of my very astute long-time student: Graduated from business school, employed in the fashion industry, no time to practice piano but deeply responsive to every sound, working on Bartok For Children Vol. I.

Today I showed her a facsimile of some Clementi and asked her to tell me what she sees.  Answer: A lot of information tightly packed onto the page.  Then she observed something I have been trying for years to put my finger on.

She said that a person reading at that time must  have been able to process a lot of information, unlike the reading that she is doing in the Bartok.  Then it hit me: An 18th-century player with sufficient keyboard skill to play Clementi would have had experience at the harpsichord on which single tones do not resonate, but on which many notes are required to give a satisfying sound.  On the piano, however, the reverse is true: A single tone gives off such an amazing array of information that a single symbol connotes infinitely more than the corresponding symbol on an 18th-century page.

This is why it matters so much that reading be learned in terms of to auditory experience.

There are Tears and There are Tears

It was not entirely fair to cite another person's reaction to a teaching method which is at odds with my own.  Every teacher, no matter what the approach, will experience children who cry or complain for reasons not all that easy to figure out.

My reliance on gross-motor training--i.e., whole body responses to sound rather than fingers-first--is unfamiliar to most children aged 6 through 11.  It may make them uncomfortable to contemplate making the transition between a mostly sitting school day and coming to music, where a different orientation is called for.  As it is the transition that yields the discomfort they are more likely to complain to parents than to react negatively while with me: In fact they clearly enjoy the time we spend together.  Good communication with parents is key to figuring this out and supporting the child through the process.

Two memorable instances of real tears come to mind: An 8-year-old crying at a minor 6th in a Bach minuet, the relative dissonance unbearable to her sensitive ear; an adult foreign student crying during a coaching on Schubert because she realized that the more she studied the clearer it became that she did not feel comfortable with European classical music.

Internalizing is Learning

"You make the child cry; that's how you know he is learning."  That is how a colleague described a well-established and quite popular music teaching tradition. 

If perception rather than blind obedience is the key, however, the response, complex though it may be, is not tears.  Ironically, when perception is central to music learning, the teacher must also be learning to pay attention in order to figure out what the child hears.  From this mutual effort emerges a notion of music as a medium in constant creation, and of every piece of music as an event newly experienced every time it is played.

Such teaching requires effort for which we are little prepared in our own training, in which the sensation of mastery is cultivated rather than the sense of open-minded curiosity.

I was stunned to realize earlier this season that neither I nor several of my colleagues had ever read Bach's preface to the Inventions written for his 13-year-old son.  Bach indicates that the purpose of these pieces is to learn to play in a singing manner.  Hmmm.

The Open-minded Ear

So much  traditional "master"-based musical training is based on the student being listened to judgmentally, by parents, siblings, teachers, etc.  This is the opposite of the way music is listened to in the clubs--jazz and cabaret.  It has to be the opposite of the way music was listened to back in the day--the 17th, 18th, and 19th century when improvisation was the primary vehicle for musical expression.

Why can't we have it both ways?  Has canned music so slowed our brains to the level of reproduction that we can't savor the infinite possibilities present in every live tone? 

Why I Teach Children

From a statement I recently released about my teaching:
An actively concertizing pianist, I teach children to play the piano because I love their unspoiled responses to sound from which I continue to learn how music works.   My goal is to lead young learners to savor the sound of the piano, to hear how it is the root and source for all the great music written for this endlessly fascinating instrument.  

We start with music of our time because those are the sounds most familiar from movies and other media.  The beginnings set the tone for life; and live music becomes an integral part of their life, whatever life they choose.

Mutual musical attentiveness is the essence of the art practiced here.  Listening and being listened to form a reliable basis for personal and inter-personal musical focus from the very outset. *  When sound comes first, music becomes as much the stuff of dreams as of conceptual experience.  The child learns how his or her responses yield insight into a composer’s intentions.

*I also coach parents and their young children--even infants--on music as a powerful interactive bond.