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The curriculum I use is called Harmony Road Music Course. Other programs that share a similar philosophy are Music For Young Children and Yamaha.

www.harmonyroadmusic.com

www.yamaha.com

www.myc.com

It's not ridiculous Ben. Note reading is what most piano teachers teach. They teach it because people want to learn the classical repertoire. Nothing wrong with that. Literally.

What is "ridiculous" is the notion that we are cramming something down people's throats. I do not cram. If it's a matter of having to cram something, then they are with the wrong teacher.

You're right. Poor choice of words.

Wrong. Piano teachers teach note reading because people want to learn classical, and jazz, and pop, and gospel, and every other style of music that is written in the language of music, i.e. notation.

Really? You mean someone wanting to learn Gospel, Jazz, or pop wants to learn note reading before a chord-based approach? That's unusual.

No, what I'm saying is that reading/writing and speaking are 2 completely different skill sets when learning a language.

Written Chinese is made up of characters, not words from an alphabet. If you didn't know how to say the character in spoken form then you would not even be able to read or guess the word. Whereas if it were a language with an alphabet, you could guess phonetically, even though you don't know the word.

Asian speakers have a hard time with English because the phonetic sounds are completely different. Just like you would have a very difficult time if you tried to learn spoken Chinese right now. You would have no basis for the sounds used.

The reading and writing supplement the spoken language. I would have to learn the vocab verbally first. I probably could become business fluent in Chinese if I studied hard, even if I couldn't read or write 1 word. They are 2 completely separate things.


Same with music, btw. A blind person can learn music just as well as one who can sight-read, because music is an aural art, not dependent on reading. Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Marcus Roberts, George Shearing....plenty others.

How do you think they learned music? By listening alot and emulating the SOUND on the piano.

Reading music is not some kind of disease that that one must avoid to be able to play the piano.

FYI, chords are made of notes, so being able to read notes can only help you read/play chords.

Here's a shocker: Its not all-or-nothing, i.e. Its not either "a chord-based approach", or "a note reading approach." Chords can be learned along with reading music, in fact that is the normal approach. Check out one of Alfred's very popular Adult books...chords come in very quickly.

The ability to read notes is thus helpful for all styles of music, including reading from fake books, where a lot of pop and jazz standards are available.

Suggestion: How about applying your talents to writing materials that include reading music...then you would not have to constantly pop up on these forums on a regular basis calling into question classical music, notation, reading music, conventional music teachers, etc...and you might even make more money.

Just a thought.

That would go against what I believe about teaching piano. Plus, I already wrote a book that outlines my teaching philosophy. It's called Free to be Creative at the Piano .' As far as making money goes, I'm not too worried about it.

Reading music is important but using your ears to listen and learn is FAR more important.

I could never understand the classical bent on reading, it should be the other way around.

The funniest thing I ever saw was a clip on youtube about classical pianists who poured over a score and tried to hear it in their mind away from the piano. They would digest it all day and then finally play it once.
The most absurd approach to playing music in my mind.

They would have been better off listening to the song 10 or 20 times first.

What clip are you talking about?? If it's the one I've seen, I think you missed the point of the exercise.

Can't remember the link or name of the guy, I think he was a fairly well known current player. He had a group of students all read the score at a table, then got one of them to play it at the piano, then asked the student how he felt. The student couldn't even say anything of note, like "uh, it was ok".

Imagine teaching people a new language this way. You'd be laughed out of the class!

Exactly what is the point of the exercise? I see no benefit at all.

Maybe I missed something, but I assumed that the word "reading" in the context of piano learning (and this thread) was shorthand for "sight reading", not cozying up to a score by candle light and your favorite glass of wine and "reading" it for the next four hours (though I guess if that works for you then more power to ya). I didn't get the impression that any of the teachers was advocating the use of learning to read a score like one reads prose as a teaching method, but rather "reading" combined with the playing of what was read. But perhaps I misunderstand what the meaning is?

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As a follow up, I am familiar with teachers having more advanced students "read" scores with the primary purpose of helping to memorize it, so that would be a bit of an exception to my statement above.
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This was most likely pianist Fredric Chiu, in his "Deeper piano studies" workshop.

First of all, everybody who participates in that workshop is already an EXTREMELY advanced pianist with years of performing experience behind them, so note reading is not going to be an issue.

The point of that particular exercise was to challenge the traditional way of learning a piece of music, which is AT THE PIANO - the argument being that when you learn something AT the piano, you are too consumed with the physical aspect of playing rather than the more important mental absorbtion of the material. When you study a score away from the instrument, you are suddenly liberated from technical aspects and have a more relaxed opportunity to notice things about the music that you might not have noticed at the piano: Motivic connections, rhythmic patterns, markings, structure of the piece, etc etc.

When you start learning something AT the piano, you are so consumed with the physicality of piano playing that it can actually stifle your mental and aural conception of the work. If you study a piece BEFORE taking it to the piano, you can establish a clear, purely MUSICAL goal for the piece.

Here I quote Leon Fleisher on this...

"I think, ideally speaking, with a new piece one should sit down, probably in a chair away from the piano, and learn it, look at it, take it apart, try to understand it structurally, harmonically, and in all it's elements as much as possible. Sing it to yourself. Sing the various components, the various material. Get some kind of idea. It's not an idea that you have to be wedded to for life, but get some kind of idea of what you think it should sound like, of what you want it to sound like. Then, when you have gotten as far as you can in this manner, when you've become as specific as you can about the material in this manner, then take it to the keyboard, because then you have a goal. Then you have at least a temporary ideal, something to work towards. The basic reason for this is that I think if we learn the notes first, what we become involved with are "those difficult passages." How am I going to transcend this difficulty? And in approaching it from the purely physical point of view, we make certain adjustments in order to achieve the purely physical realization of this. Sometimes without realizing it, we'll think "Oh, this is a difficult place to get into. Maybe if I kind of spread the tempo, if I slow down a wee bit, I can prepare myself. I can gather my energies and strengths" This kind of thing begins to take over in place of musical values, begins to dictate how you're going to play it, and very often on a totally subconscious level as well as on a conscious level. What you wind up doing, eventually, after you've learned the notes, is having to achieve, having to define some musical intention, some musical value. One finds so often that one has to overcome a lot of work that one has done from the purely technical point of view. One has to change that. It's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned.

I recall a story about Glenn Gould preparing for a recording session. As the story goes, he looked at the score for the first time while on the train to New York. Upon arriving he did the recording (I'm sure with some retakes)!

I think a preliminary study of a piece away from the piano is a great benefit, th ough I'm merely echoing the words of the great teacher, Leon Fleisher (above).

Agreed. It seems so obvious to me that music is an 'aural' art first. Which is why I raised the question of this post in the first place.

I generally agree with you that there should be more creativity encouraged in training at various stages of development, the only problem is.....how?

When a seven year old comes in for the first piano lesson in her life you can't really be like "ok let's just play random notes and clusters for the next few weeks!" They can do that at home, and maybe share it with you in the first or last 10 minutes of each lesson. There has to be at least SOME sort of preliminary discipline, some sort of reference point upon which to build creative training. More effective, IMO, would be something like introducing them to a few notes on the staff, them having them compose or improvise something using those notes. You talk about introducing kids to "Simple diatonic harmony"..but this can't really be done without some basic notational knowledge...

Agreed. I don't teach children, and I know that requires a seperate skill set, but ... if I were going to do this, I'd try and find the right set of limitations to encourage creativity while actually teaching them something about harmony.

Maybe something like a few notes from the C Major scale and just 2 chords - C Maj. and F Maj. The point being to have them experience music firsthand as they create it.

The way you teach kids is to get them to to sing or hum simple songs in an easy key like C or F.

Play songs like Row your boat, Twinkle little star, happy birthday, Mary had a little lamb, anything that they would know. Cartoon and movie themes would work too. Christmas songs too.

Just make sure the melody stays in one key.

Play it to them a few times first in the key you want them to learn. Then get them to play along with you at the same time, 1-2 bars at a time.

Make sure they sing the notes aloud as they play.

Basically this is learning to play by ear. I've done this with all my students and get kids to learn songs in their first lesson. For theory, it's just a major scale.