Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Hugh Sung's Clair de Lune

Technique is not so readily acquired.

In this post you confuse demonstration of a skill with its acquisition. Anyway, it's all rather holistic - all these skills must work together without disruption by poor habits.

Ahem, at no stage is he. That's the point.

Of course acquisition takes practice and that is entirely up to the student. The teacher cannot practice for the student. I myself am a teacher and I know the value to the student of homework for the acquisition of skills that I have demonstrated in class.

I would hope you would want to disrupt poor habits.

Cathy

After some initial skepticism, I find that I've been enjoying Hugh's videos very much.

Learning technique and developing technique are very different things. I know this from golf - I have "learned" the elements of a basic golf swing, including the adjustments one makes for a variety of different shots (fade, draw, punch, chip, pitch, etc...)

This does not mean I can faithfully execute these different things 100% of the time. I have not yet developed my skills to a level where I am able to reliably draw a 5-iron, and I still hit the occasional errant drive or catch my 4-iron off the toe.

But despite my undeveloped swing, I still enjoy learning about the more advanced techniques, and if I watch a golf pro teach "How to Work a Drive from Right to Left" on TV or YouTube, I definitely glean some information and interest that gets me to the driving range.

I think it will. This statement greatly underestimates the demands of this piece.

I know a very hard working ABRSM grade 5-with-Merit student who worked hard for several months and achieved something performable.

I am willing to accept that this might just be the whole point, I would just like Hugh to clarify.

I teach hardly any adults and have rarely done so. Children are happy to learn basics and in fact are often put off by anything they think might be difficult. They will play simple pieces in 5 finger positions with each hand without giving it a second thought. Maybe it just doesn't work like that with most adults. The adults I have taught tended to be impatient and have wanted to play pieces above their level. Would others say that this is the norm?

+1 yet again, Kreisler

I've used the word "glean" here in PW to describe one of the ways I learn useful information. I've also used the way I've learned sports as an example of some of the ways I've learned piano. I've described my learning style as "spiral" - stretch and drop back, play harder play broader, play at the edge play in depth. I certainly, from experience in life, know the difference between seeing a technique and actually acquiring it. I liked very much jazzyprof's description of what is being conveyed in these videos.

When I first came to PW I had very much the sense of some others that piano was taught in pretty stodgy and non-musical ways. I learned soon that there are teachers who don't teach the way I was taught (and some still do . . .) But this and the "Learning from video game developers" thread are the first time I've seen some truly alternative approaches discussed with a real openness to what can happen by using them.

I didn't have good instruction in technique. I doubt seriously, tho it's hard to remember, that I actually had much instruction at all - I think what I got was pieces to play in some kind of graded order. Like piano*dad, I also wasn't very mature, certainly not musically, so the music itself didn't come until after I was a middle-aged adult. So I don't, in fact, believe that it is absolutely necessary to have been taught well from the very beginning - And I do believe that one can play *music* later in one's life even if one started with poor/no instruction. And I think these videos help that along.

I'm glad to see there's some openness to new approaches to piano.

Cathy

It's a bit confusing having this topic spread over 3 forums!

I would have to agree with kbk about the difference between demonstration and acquisition, that was very well put. All the things jazzyprof listed have been skimmed in the lessons but that doesn't mean they will be understood. It takes minutes to explain to someone the workings of notation and the basics of pitch and duration. Why then are there all these people who can't sight read?

Sight reading (and I am using the literal meaning, "prima vista") is a matter of practice: the more you do it the better you get at it. There are professional pianists who are lousy sight readers. If a beginner follows Hugh's lessons he will be able to decipher music notation and know what key on the keyboard corresponds to what note on the printed page. He will be able to read music but not necessarily "sight read", a very different thing.

You say that the things I listed have been "skimmed" in Hugh's lessons. To some extent that is true: he is teaching the minimum needed to achieve a certain limited goal. That goal, as far as I understand it, is to teach the student enough music notation and enough practical keyboard skills that they can work their way through Clair de Lune with a lot of help. Will this approach suddenly turn a beginner into an intermediate player? I doubt it. Will the beginner play Clair de Lune well enough to please a jury? Probably not. But he will play it well enough to give himself pleasure and feel a certain sense of accomplishment. His family and friends will be awed. "Why, Johnny couldn't play a single note a month ago. Look at him now!" As testament you can look at the video a beginner has posted in response to Hugh's lessons.

Will the skills learnt from studying Clair de Lune this way transfer to other music? I should think so. The student will recognize F-clefs and G-clefs and know what to do when he sees an octave. But the most important thing is that the student will be motivated to pursue further study because he is working on music he enjoys.

The nice thing about this teaching format is that the student has the videos at his disposal and can watch them an infinite number of times if there is something he didn't quite get on the first viewing. He can also post questions to Hugh and get detailed answers, sometimes in the form of dedicated mini-lessons such as the one he did on counting duple rhythms.

Do ya know how I know? Years of observing classroom teachers. The thing you see more often than not is the teacher who thinks, since they've demonstrated something, the students have learned it. No, that's not teaching, not even close. You look to the students not the teacher if you want to know what learning has actually taken place.

I couldn't find the beginner video posted in response to hugh's lessons. Is there any chance you could provide a link? Thanks.

I am going to post the link, but with some trepidation as I fear that the poor kid is going to be ripped to shreds. He is a beginner from Sweden, never played before and this is what he can do after one week. You will of course find many problems with his playing...wrong notes, problems with rhythm, etc. But this is where genuine positive feedback with suggestions for improvement comes in.

In his own words:


Here's the link, and remember, be nice!
Beginner

He certainly doesn't count to 9!

Must have learnt from Oistrakh.

That's right, at the Schmaltz Academy.

I'm going to come to this young man's defense and applaud his efforts to learn this challenging piece. Learning should be a joy and a continual process, not a minefield where counting less or more than nine gets you penalized and reprimanded. Teachers should provide avenues of possibilities, not barricades of myopic impossibilities.

That's why I thought maybe you could talk about the rhythm in the beginning, and make them be aware of that. Counting in the first page is NOT hard at all!!