>I'd guess that a similar 90+% of beginners quit the clarinet, violin, piano, drums, etc.
I blame this soley on how piano is taught. Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. You are sent of with the impression that you'd need years of daily practice to be half decent. This is an immediate turn-off. I want to play music, not memorize ridiculous memory tricks like ' every good boy does fine' .
I would imagine most people are trying to make new music and play existing music. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional pianist. Yet music teachers just teach how they have been taught, with endless instructions about keeping your back straigt, keeping the curve in your fingers ect. This makes one feel like they are not "cut out" for music and they give up .
We need a new crop of music teachers that can take advantage of new midi instruments, iphone apps ect to teach music. Piano should be introduced much later one you have grasped the how notes sound, how chords sound, why you need them ect on a simpler interface instead of endless repetitions of twinkle, twinkle from day one. Classical music should not be taught to a hobbyist. Instruction should be fun from day one, you should be making new music from day one. Endless learning of grammar doesn't make one a good author.
I strongly disagree. What you're suggesting leads to really mediocre practice and that in the long run will get people to give up because they've reached a plateau they set upon themselves without realizing it.
Your teachers know and understand stuff you're years away from grasping as a beginner. Its not about being "professional" but rather having the proper foundations upon which you can build knowledge and muscle memory. Its about spending the least amount of effort at any point in your practice so it becomes actually effective. Its about having a logical progression where each new concept adds up to existing knowledge (music theory is VERY well structured in that regard.)
I personally dread that new crop of teachers using MIDI/apps to teach music. This is anything but teaching music - its teaching MIDI and apps. You dont learn to ride a bike by downloading an app or playing "bike simulator" - its just obvious.
Saying "endless learning of grammar" and other forms of "oh god, I have to put in effort?!" mentalities show off a very shallow understanding of the domain - this is what you expect a teenager to say when looking at his courses because he's years away from understanding why they're useful. Sorry to sound harsh but its just how it comes out as.
I had two of the world's worst piano teachers as a young kid. Everything was exactly the boring nonsense in the parent comment. There was honestly more focus on posture than on actually making sound come out of the piano.
The songs I had to learn were obscure classical pieces. It was all so horrifically boring, and GOD FORBID if I ever just sat down at the piano and played around, making sound that interested me or trying to replicate something I heard on the radio. That was "unstructured time" on the instrument and was counterproductive to "real" practice.
I absolutely hated every single second of it, and finally quit in a huge blowout fight with my mom when I was about 9 years old, and just refused to keep playing.
As a teenager, I taught myself to play bass, and spent my 20's playing in bands, working in music, touring and all that good stuff. I still play bass and guitar constantly and I've never had any formal instruction in either instrument, but honestly I really wish I had kept playing the piano. The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.
It would be so easy to make piano interesting, and more importantly, FUN to practice and play, but the old-school approach, making kids play garbage they have no interest in, yelling at them over and over about sitting up straight, is the worst possible way to go about it.
Music, language learning and fitness all fall into this category of things that are difficult because they require so much regular investment, are optional in every day life, but anyone could in theory do them. For things like this, the number one factor any teacher or system should be optimizing for is motivation. No matter how important every other goal is, if you don't optimize for motivation people will just never learn. If you can't make it fun, don't even bother trying to teach most people, because only those with a burning passion will make it across that hump where it begins to have a real impact.
For examples of this effect in language learning, check out the writings of All Japanese All The Time, and for this in fitness, see Crossfit where the group setting and competitive features provide additional motivation and is wildly successful.
Of course, this doesn't ONLY apply to those things. This is also the secret of success for unschooling. As far as I have heard unschooled kids have the effortless joy of learning whatever they want at their own pace end up going much deeper on subjects that are of interest to them, and in the end they end up only 1 grade level behind their peers who went through 12 years of relative suffering.
That pretty much sums up what I said earlier: your teachers know and understand things you're years away from grasping.
They don't put you through all that out of some perverted wish to make you suffer. They do because they know what's at the other end of that practice.
I do agree not all teachers are good teachers (if you get yelled at, you DEFINITELY have a mediocre teacher) - teaching is first and foremost about transmitting a passion, then explaining the theory which holds it up. And in order to do so you've got to figure out what your student's interests are.
But see, that's the point I'm trying to make. Having the benefit of hindsight as someone who actually went on to recording records and regularly playing live in front of paying audiences, my teachers were focused on ENTIRELY the wrong things.
You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like. Let them explore and have fun. Point out problems they might have with technique, but do it within the framework of getting them where THEY want to be, playing what THEY want to play.
Don't force focus on theory and reading sheet music. When you're a kid who just wants to play something cool that shit is boring and it sucks. Once you get a handle on the instrument and really get passionate about it the theory end starts to become interesting on its own.
Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now, and there's a much better way to go about this.
Theres probably a better way to go through it, but at some point you HAVE to learn the language. Theory and reading sheet music are incredibly important (more so than most people realize) especially if you'd like to have a large musical repertoire.
> You get people interested in the instrument first by giving them a taste of how they can actually play things they like.
That can work, but its very dangerous for the student to develop bad habits in doing so - which are then next to impossible to undo to learn the proper method required to play effortlessly. My first year in music school was basically unlearning everything I learned before. Not fun. I saw a lot of people giving up right there.
Learning to read and write text is boring and sucks, yet absolutely nobody will argue its useless. Once you realize the world of possibilities knowing how to read/write opens - you forget it was a pain to learn. You're even thankful for the people who forced you to learn it. Everyone learns it, even if only a handful push it all the way to university as their major.
Music should be the same, it looks alien to teach theory and posture because its not the norm like teaching how to read is. But when you think about it people saw reading the very same way when only the elite had access to this knowledge. Promoting a culture of anti-intellectualism does nobody a service.
> Seriously, these teachers didn't know a damn thing I don't know now
I very highly doubt that, simply because its impossible for you to know what they knew, and they most likely knew a whole lot more than they made it seem when teaching you.
I'm a fluent sight reader, and it does figure into the kind of work that I get hired for, even as a part time musician without a music degree.
I used to look down on non-readers, but have had to re-think that attitude, simply due to the reality of how music gets played by a lot of people.
But the parent is talking about the electric bass, which I also play. There are plenty of successful electric bassists who never read a single dot off a page. A lot of music is performed without having a written bass part, or improvised from abbreviated notations such as chord charts, Nashville numbers, etc.
Also, it's hard to get motivated to learn reading, when your preferred genre has no written repertoire. Written charts are used in the studio, but seldom by working bands.
A problem with reading is that it's a long learning curve -- especially for adults who already know how to play -- and not much use for it unless you can do it at a fairly advanced level and seek out work that requires it. So, the so called "reader gigs" are covered by a cadre of players who specialize in that kind of work, including myself.
As a jazz musician, I live in two worlds. When I play in larger ensembles, or bands that have heavily composed / arranged repertoire, then I do a lot of reading. But when it's a jazz combo playing standards, I don't even bring a music stand.
It could very well be that different kids respond to different ways of teaching. Also, I think that a really good teacher adapts to the temperament of each kid, and some teachers are just not suited to teach the youngest kids.
There are plenty of counterexamples. My kids have both done quite well with traditional training, as have I. They are both at the top level of the local youth orchestra program. They love classical music, especially the modern stuff. One is also exploring fiddling, the other, singing.
But I've talked to parents, and have told them: The classical thing is great, but if it doesn't work, don't force it to the point where it becomes miserable. Try something else. And just like we don't know why some people seem to learn programming more easily than others, we don't know why some musicians can learn to read. It's kind of a strange skill.
Oddly enough, I've also played electric bass live in front of paying audiences, though the double bass has become my main instrument. Every instrument has its own requirements and learning curve, and each of us gravitates to the instrument that works for our temperament and interests, that change over time. I'm grateful for my classical technique and fluent sight-reading ability, because they figure into the instrument and music that I happen to enjoy playing.
In the Suzuki method, which is favored today, they don't focus on theory or sheet music until the kids have already been playing for a while.
I suspect there's probably a balance - my Russian trained piano teacher was tough, but also threw a lot of music in front of me. We played easy songs in the beginning eventually building in complexity and a lot of variety with theory mixed in. There was never a strong focus on posture or anything like that.
She also didn't believe in using mnemonics to memorize notes - that knowledge would just come from repetition. Though she did hit me pretty hard when I messed up so not sure if that's good or bad.
This reminds me of my elementary school years. This was in school in Japan I had to learn recorder. I sucked at it for first three years or so, felt that classroom instruction took me nowhere getting good at it. There was a student who was good at piano routinely played after the class was over. For some reason, five others, including myself joined and started playing their recorder to that music, every time after the music class. In couple of months, I was one of the best recorder players in the class.
From that experience I feel having fun is very important, and so is repetition. But also seemingfully boring practice session in class probably helped setting foundation as well.
Some pain in learning process is not probably unavoidable and could even be beneficial but then it's very hard to keep yourself motivated enough to continue when it's not compulsory.
> The problem was, the way kids are taught, the same way I was, seems designed to make it as repellent as humanly possible.
My hypothesis is that the "old-school approach" works for adults but is directly at-odds with teaching children.
As an adult human being of average IQ, you can keep "proper posture", note names, etc. all in mind quite easily as you learn, such that it then needs relatively little reinforcement and you can quickly get to playing music.
As a child, focusing on one thing makes you instantly revert to your "natural behaviour" in every other respect. You can pose, or put your hands on the right keys, but you don't have enough executive control to keep track of both.
The simple solution: stop trying to teach kids piano; start trying to teach adults piano (and encouraging adults to learn piano.)
The people you are talking about giving up when they plateau are likely the same people that would have given up when forced to learn the grammar. The net result is a similar number of people at the higher level but the people at the beginner level have more ability to generate music.
Down the road an ability to bang off a tune at a party is far more useful to a beginner than knowledge of music theory. Makes people happier too!
One doesn't prevent the other! I was lucky that my music teachers found it important for us to both learn theory every week, but also a complete song matching our skills level.
So while we'd have scales and chords to practice, we'd also have songs to play at parties and whatnot from the beginning.
What I didn't realize at the time is that practicing chords and scales not only builds knowledge of how notes sounds and relate to each other, it also builds muscle memory and makes you play with less and less effort until it becomes effortless. At which point the songs you learned really, really start to shine.
Its easy to dismiss practice as boring and "only for professionals" but once you start seeing what it yields you realize it is incredibly important to any musician.
Much like reading a book from an author who understands grammar and has a large vocabulary is a much richer experience than reading a book from someone who hasn't put the effort in learning it all.
Not only that, understanding the grammar makes you appreciate the works of others on a much deeper level. Same goes for understanding music theory - it improves your listening experience.
I think you're mistaking technical virtuosity and hand-eye coordination for musical talent. There's nothing wrong with being an accomplished concert pianist, but most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it. And if you're going to say that that's not worthy, you're getting into the comparative judging of genres, which is just silly.
> most people learning probably just want to be able to play a half-decent melody on a midi controller and lay a sick beat on it
Heck, I'd go further: for a lot of people, all they really want to do is to be able to "peck" notes out well-enough—and have enough understanding of theory—to compose music in some sort of software.
Personally—and this applies to quite a few people I've talked to, as well—I don't give a one whit about my ability to play live, any more than a novelist cares about being able to improvise stories live. I want to build songs on a canvas, laying down one melodic brush-stroke at a time. It's only what happens when I hit "play" that matters.
I've never ran into any type of music-teaching paradigm that has even vaguely addressed my needs as a student.
I didn't talk about virtuosity and talent, I talked about learning. What you learn is completely independent of musical genres, technical difficulty or even talent. Its the foundation which allows you to reason about these things and build all your knowledge and experiences upon.
Even the guy wanting a half decent melody on a midi controller needs to understand to some degree the relations between those notes, both in melodic and harmonic terms. Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good and being unable to apply that to different situations.
If I never learn how to write, how am I going to produce an essay?
> Otherwise the best he can do is hit random notes and hope it sounds good then wondering why it does sound good
...and then experimenting with short snatches of melody in the attempt to replicate the effect under different conditions, gradually reinventing music theory themselves; and then coming later in life to the study that gives names to the library of intuitions they've built, finally being able to talk about them with people—but happy that they did in fact build the intuition first rather than just carrying around the bulky handles to the concepts without first seeing the use.
I find that theory helps you reach intuition much, much faster for whats already out there, and then you're equipped to reach out into truly new areas.
Its the same for engineering - if you don't read the existing work in the space of the problem you're trying to solve, chances are you'll spend years doing what could've taken weeks.
>Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. [...] This is an immediate turn-off.
100% agree on this! I believe the teacher's first interaction with a new student on piano should be asking what song(s) they like. If possible, start the instruction using that particular song because that's the juice that got them curious about the instrument in the first place!
Yes, Mozart's Sonata 16 K545[1] is an enduring staple of typical piano instruction but while it's a decent tune, that classical piece is not the music that made the student want to learn the piano. It's more likely the student was sparked by something mainstream like Adele's "Someone Like You"[2]. As a bonus, that Adele song happens to be easier than the Mozart piece. Please don't kill the budding pianist with Mozart and piano drills if that isn't what he/she likes.
For some reason, it's blasphemy to let beginning piano students practice on real pop songs. (Possibly due to emphasis on sight reading sheet music of which there is more of it available for classical pieces.) This is less a problem with guitars because more kids are self-taught, lessons are informal, and every guitarist shamelessly attempts whatever is currently on the radio.
The other hard part with trying to learn piano from pop is that most of the available arrangements of current hits are trying to transcribe the hit recording rather than to put something on paper that is comfortably readable and playable.
If you want comfortable arrangements that a beginner will stand a chance of being able to make it through, you have go to back to hits from before 1965 or so. That's what I've been doing myself, but to a lot of people that's not too different than asking them to play something from 1765.
A few thoughts from a pianist with three professional music teachers in the family:
0) Someone already came up with a classical piano repertoire that perfectly increases in difficulty from "Primary" to Grade 10, in neat, progressive steps. If you look for sheet music for that Adele song, I guarantee you you'll never find a version that's appropriate for each of those levels. You might find several versions, each somewhere in the middle of that range, but no one will spend the time to interpret "Someone Like You" in eleven different ways--from an 8-bar melody up to some 15-page virtuosic piece--and then repeat that for every other song in the top 100. Can't even crowd-source that effort due to copyright.
1) You're vastly overestimating what a complete beginner can do. Remember, these are normally 5 year old kids with barely enough motor control to hold a pencil properly, no concept of beats or rhythm, etc. Pop music is usually easier, but it still takes years to work up to that Adele song. "What about adult students?" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting and there's no one forcing them to continue. Proof: note how many adults will join and then quit the gym between New Years and February 1st because they're not seeing results quick enough.
2) To build on the above, piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds. Think how long it takes to learn to play even a single note on an oboe. You need the many lectures on posture and finger position--not to mention tons of boring practice!--just to stop squeaking.
3) How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names, how counting works (fractions!), and all the associated music theory? "I play, you copy?" That's not considered good music education. Kids get decent at rote memorization of finger patterns, and then plateuau at that (very, very low) level.
4) Beginners already start with "fun" music like Old McDonald, London Bridge, etc. Most of it is lame, but then again, kids might find recently-mainstream music like N'Sync lame too. Fashion moves pretty fast. On that note, copyright/royalties on modern music are a pretty good barrier to just playing whatever you want. (And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.)
5) Trust me, teachers are intimately aware of the fine balance between motivating their kids with fun repertoire and actually teaching them something. Vocal teachers probably work that fine line the hardest since every pop song is fair game.
6) Pop songs in addition to classical repertoire is fine; not a single music teacher will object to this. My mother held three recitals a year (popular, christmas, classical) and kids held free reign over repertoire selection in two of the three (and the third was mostly a "trial run" of the pieces they'd have to play anyway for their upcoming piano exams). Pop songs as a replacement for classical repertoire is not fine. Adele wasn't thinking about teaching you anything about fingering or expression marks when she wrote her songs. On the other hand, Chopin/Liszt/Czerny/Debussy/etc. were writing with exactly those concerns in mind when they wrote their Etudes (read "studies"). They're written to be lyrical and interesting, but also to focus your practice towards a specific, technical challenge (perhaps one etude is just about fast arpeggios for the right hand, another etude for long trills with the weak fingers of the left hand, etc.)
7) Along the same lines, "classical" education isn't just Classical-era music, like Mozart. Good teachers want to expose you to lots of styles. Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony. But somewhere in that repertoire book there'll also be jazzy music, latin music, cinematic-style music, etc. written by still-living composers (although probably not as modern as Adele). In RCM books you'll find that kind of thing in sections 'D' and 'E'.
8) And yes, nobody likes scales, but drills are drills; you just have to accept that some parts are laborious and annoying. Athletes spend time running between plastic pylons and sweating it out at the gym because you can't efficiently build fundamentals just by playing games. You need a good mix of performance and practice. If you're only looking to "have fun", you can just stick to pick-up games with your friends (or teach yourself how to strum a few guitar chords), but if you're taking professional lessons in something there's an implied expectation that you're there to improve.
Obviously music is there to be enjoyed. And I'm certainly not claiming that traditional music education can't be improved. I just wanted to make the point that teachers already try to balance motivation with other goals, and that no activity worth doing is "all fun, all the time".
>" Adult students are even worse for quitting things early because it'll still take months to play anything remotely interesting
Do you think adults should start with Piano at all. I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key. You can even use those pad things with chromatic layout, which is much more logical, and do fun stuff like pitch bends.
> piano has the shortest possible path to making in-tune sounds.
prbly true for traditional instruments. I would start with a computer or an iphone app. No lectures on postures needed.
>How do you go about teaching Adele without explaining note names
Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down' . Give them the root note and let try to replicate it on the keyboard. Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
I totally disagree with here, like a lot. Even beginners can start playing 'by ear'. Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear. you can play kumbaya by ear within couple of hours of piano instruction. Surely everyone must try to play by ear before they spent years on piano lessons.
> I know you can come up really cool sounds music in Ableton within months. There are plugins which make sure you are always playing in key.
That's fine. Music is music; do what you enjoy. I'm not saying you need to take piano lessons to enjoy music, or compose music. I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.
> Even kids can tell if something is 'going up/staying the same/going down'.
Actually that's not as easy for kids as you'd think. Anyway, what you're talking about here is ear training (melody playback, specifically), and that's already integrated into every classical music program. I was talking about trying to play a complete, two-hand, Adele piece on the piano by reading sheet music. At that point you'd definitely have to know a bunch of music theory already.
> Let them come up with their own 'system'. Don't ruin their natural curiosity of discovery by telling them note names and stuff.
Sure. And for consistency, forget about BEDMAS; let's give kids the axioms of ZFC set theory and get them to just work their way on up to arithmetic on their own. (Also, parents, don't forget to pay $50 an hour, every hour, while your kid tries to discover the concept of a square root on their own.)
I'm kidding. But look, music teachers already try to push students towards as much discovery, creativity, expressivity, and musicality as the students can muster. Pop songs aren't a panacea for the motivation problem.
> Countless people have learnt just by playing by ear.
Like I said above, I didn't mean stumbling through a chopsticks or kumbaya melody by ear; I meant transcribing a full Adele song. Or anything you would reasonably hear on the radio or see in a movie.
Playing around, composing, improvising, etc. while simultaneously taking music lessons (or at least studying from a book) is great. Fantastic. I recommend that to everyone. But if your goal is to learn how to play the piano and you're trying to do it with no music theory or classical education whatsoever, you... just won't make efficient progress. I don't know how else to put it. You'll learn something, sure, but you'd learn it faster with the teacher and the teaching system.
>I'm saying you probably need to take piano lessons to (efficiently) learn to play the piano effectively.
that's fair. Not sure why parents still force their kids to learn piano, an instrument so divorced from their digital reality. Parents probably have some romantic fantasies about piano or its just lack of knowledge and availability of new style music programs.
>Yes, every pianist has to play Bach--even if you hate Bach--because it's instrumental to learning about polyphony.
This is nonsense. There are near-infinite varieties of non-Bach music to teach polyphony. Even the "chopsticks" song demonstrates polyphony. If you meant counterpoint instead polyphony to demonstrate the left and right hands playing two independent melodies interwoven with each other, Bach may be reasonable. It depends.
>And improvising or playing "by ear" is a complete non-starter. That's the kind of thing you attempt after years of experience, not as a beginner.
This is terrible advice. It's misguided. You can have any student at any young age explore "playing by ear" in the first 10 minutes of the first day of the lesson. When a 4-year-old preschooler listens to her mother hum a tune and is asked if he/she can hum it back... that is playing by ear! The child's ears heard the notes and the child's vocal cords hummed it back. With a piano, it's fingers instead of vocal cords. Deliberately delaying any joy of playing by ear until a later "advanced" lesson has no basis in pedagogy.
> "all fun, all the time".
I don't claim that all invested time into skill building is fun. My emphasis is that joy of the activity must be used as the gateway drug to the mundane drills and boring classical pieces. If joy means informal pop songs or the simple intro piano to Frozen's "Let it Go"... then start with that. If the student is happy and motivated, the door can then further be opened to Bach, Chopin, Art Tatum, etc.
Yes, sorry, polyphony was a bad choice of words. I'm not even talking about polyphony or counterpoint as musical concepts--you can certainly get the gist of these without years of playing Bach--I mean it more like this: they put those four part fugues in the repertoire because it's an excellent technical exercise for student pianists. It's easy to just play the notes, but much harder to bring out the melody as it bounces around the four voices, especially as it goes into the left hand and the weaker fingers of either hand, and more so when the voices overlap. In fact the whole thing teaches voicing in general.
> Improvising... is terrible advice.
Vocal call/response is different. I meant that it's a non-starter to expect a five year old (or an average fifteen year old, by the way) to listen to a random song on the radio and just improv what they hear on a piano with no sheet music. Hell, I've been playing for like 27 years and it would take me ages to transcribe by ear some random Chopin prelude that I could otherwise easily sight read (well... one of the easier ones anyway).
> If joy means informal pop songs... then start with that.
This is what I mean; you don't start with even "songs". I'm a fully grown adult. Reasonably good musician, I think. Played piano my whole life, trombone in high school, picked up flamenco guitar on my own. A few years ago I was left alone for a few hours with a clarinet; do you know what I accomplished after like 3 straight hours of practice? I could barely get through "London bridge is falling down", and I considered that an achievement.
My point is that you have to deal with the motivation problem well before you're anywhere near playing "Let it Go". And when you're ready to play a real pop song, trust me, your teacher will let you do anything you want if it'll get you to practice.
That can't be true. Most ex-musicians I know quit for many reasons, and most of those were self-taught.
Posture is important so you don't hurt yourself while sitting on a backless piano bench for hours on end. Finger position is important because playing with splayed fingers will limit your repertoire down the road. The best way to prevent bad habits is preventing them from forming in the first place.
The same goes with guitar. I don't teach, but I could and I can assure you that the two exercises I would begin students with would be pretty bad, but so fundamental that it'd be inexcusable of me to not teach them this stuff.
Do a down strum on each one count while I count to 4 and repeat. This is surprisingly difficult to do when you first start. This one is actually pretty fun and can make people laugh at themselves.
Hold your fret hand on your lap, then try to make a C chord. Pick each string from bottom to top. If one of the strings don't ring out, fix your hand and keep down picking until each string rings out. Keep doing this until you get it right on the first time five times. Got C? Lets work on G. I'm actually surprised at how many experienced musicians can't do this.
Yes, it is hard, yes it is work, but it's no different than programming. Nothing worth having is given to you.
The Suzuki method[1] uses a similar approach to teach music by introducing notation later on in the learning process, after desire, curiosity and music appreciation has been sparked first.
My kids both started in Suzuki programs. In fact, from what I can tell, Suzuki is now the leading teaching method for small kids on nearly all instruments. Teachers tend to modify the method somewhat. Since "Suzuki" is a brand, it comes with a specific repertoire. American teachers tend to draw from a larger repertoire, and also introduce reading fairly early depending on the kid's aptitude and interest.
In my observation, classical music is not a turn-off for kids, if they are young enough that they don't have a strong sense of what is "cool." Reaching teenagers is a whole nother ball o' wax, and I suspect, is rarely as successful.
Part of Suzuki's ideology involved the parents. He expected them to be enthusiastic partners in their kids learning music. This can be a problem if: 1) The parents don't like classical music. Many people viscerally dislike it. 2) They oppose all structured musical education for whatever reason, including their own childhood experience.
I grew up when Suzuki was still controversial in the US, and my training (on the cello) was along classical European lines. Music is a huge part of my life, though I now play jazz on double bass almost exclusively. I'm not sure that the less structured approach to learning guitar actually leads to less attrition. Among people I know (for instance at my workplace) who still pursue an interest in music at any level, relatively few play the electric guitar. Without supporting evidence, I wouldn't assume that the supposedly structured, old-fashioned approach to teaching music is actually less successful in the long run.
One possibility is people wait longer to quit. A student who sticks with it for 2 years might not get very far, but they pay for a lot more lessons than someone quitting after 3 months.
If that's how you're getting taught music you need a better teacher!
I strongly disagree with using 'apps' to teach music, it's counter productive and you won't learn. To learn piano you need a piano (or keyboard) and a proper teacher that's it, you're also not limited to learning classical pieces. And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.
>And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time
This meme has to die. Do you think Djembe players in west African village learned chords and scales to come up awesome sounding percussions ? I've seen young kids come up sweet rhythms with zero musical training. You can create new music on day one, it's built into us. Chords and Scales should be used to understand and enhance what you can create, its not a prerequisite .
Producing a rhythm is completely different than producing a song. Rhythms don't have tones, notes do. Not understanding chord structures, scales and how songs are built will make it quite difficult to produce any type of song. There are basic fundamental building blocks of how to build a song you'll need to understand or you'll just run in circles hitting notes. Imagine trying to learn to program without understanding the basics of MVC.
I am often inspired by Giorgio Moroder's interview on the latest Daft Punk album in which he praises the fact that nobody told him the rules and there was no "preconception of what to do." He just did it, and we are all better off for it, whether music or MVC -- and I could not disagree any more forcefully with your closing remark about MVC.
Fuck the rules, make stuff, see what happens. Nothing truly creatively wonderful in your life gave a shit about the rules.
...generations of programmers learned to program without understanding the basics of MVC.
When I was a kid, I read Anne McCaffery's book Dragonsong, and thought that I should make up a tune for the lyrics of one of the songs that the protagonist writes. We had a piano available, so I came up with said tune. I couldn't have (and still couldn't) told you which key it's in, and, you know, I'm certainly not going to claim that it was a brilliant composition that will endure for the ages, but it wasn't dissonant and was, through trial and error, in some minor key or other.
Obviously, having a keyboard helps, since you are forced to only play notes on the chromatic scale somewhere.
Since when is MVC a requirement of programming? I completed an entire MIT-based CS curriculum and received my degree without writing a single line of MVC. It was mentioned in passing regarding GUI development, but I never needed it during those years when I wrote a compiler, a network stack, a raytracer, etc.
It's more important to understand chord progressions and relationships than scales, and that's a lot of the philosophy of Suzuki and related approaches— you learn to sound out a melody, and then you learn what major chords sound good with that melody, and then you learn where to substitute an appropriate minor chord, and then you learn how create an accompaniment using those chords.
And at that point you've learned to recreate a song you already know, and it's not a huge step to improvise from scratch on your own melody.
There's a huge body of potential source material for this approach, including folk/pop songs, oldies, scores from musicals (think Disney Renaissance era), and most contemporary religious music.
Chord progressions and relationships are all built off scales. If you don't understand the underlying scale of a particular key you wouldn't know where the I,IV,V and VI progressions are.
MVC was a bad example imo. It's closer to trying to build something interesting without knowing what a conditional. It's possible, but why would you do it when they're so easy to learn? Scales are the same. It's not difficult to teach someone major and minor scales and have them go from there. You don't need to be able to play them flawlessly at 200bpm to be able to make something with them, but I think it's much easier to create knowing them than not knowing them.
Ummm.. I don't think this is true. I think Djembe has open tone, closed tone, slap, base tone ect. I What about folk songs from India, how did they come up with it ? I am not arguing against music theory, I am arguing against saying music theory is prerequisite for creating music.
Music is nothing like a programming language, there is no compiler rejecting your bad music. Sure people have discovered what sounds good and what doesn't and turned it into some sort of theory but those are merely guidelines not syntax rules that are enforced by the compiler.
A djembe is played with rhythm and tone, but the rhythm itself doesn't have any tone color.
Rhythm is time.
Notes are wavelength, and in Western music we use a 12 note system to denote them, and musical theory is a shorthand used to denote the complex mathematical intervals at work in it. It's fascinating stuff, and if you're interested in learning more about it there's a great BBC series available on YouTube that describes what's happening in Western musical theory: How Music Works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnbOWi6f_IM
Suggesting that students don't need to learn basic music theory is kind of ridiculous. Can the human ears find the tonic/dominant/sub-dominant interval relationships on their own? Of course. That's part of the reason we find them so pleasing. You don't need music theory to hear. You need it to communicate with other musicians. Music is a group activity. It's an ongoing conversation in our culture. If you want to participate in the musical traditions of our society, you need to be able talk to other musicians.
This means different things for different traditions, but the amount of learning needed to get your feet under you in music is less than learning how how to play most video games or even the most basic syntax of a programming language.
Can we teach it better? Absolutely. But we still need to teach it.
I've played the piano for about 3 years now, took lessons for the first year of that then stopped. Using pianomarvel.com worked pretty well for me for a while for learning certain skills. I had already taken some lessons, so I wasn't completely lacking instruction in basic technique, but I was poor at reading music (let alone sight reading). My reading skills improved significantly over a few months of doing most of their course, which basically just has you plug in your keyboard by midi to your computer and then play along to songs until you get it nearly correct. If I had been self-studying, I wouldn't have been exposed to as wide a range of pieces (more even than when I was taking lessons). I'm now much more confident picking up a new piece of classical or modern music. So, I'd say that "apps" are still useful. (Though you definitely need one that uses a real keyboard or piano and not a tablet touchscreen - bleh!) Had I been more dedicated, I could have used it to practice chords, scales, and arpeggios too.
Not sure what you mean - are you saying that the program wouldn't have provided motivations for the structure of chords and so it would have been brute memorization? That's pretty likely. It had very minimal instruction in music theory, and actually the program is more marketed at instructors to give their students structure to their non-lesson practice time and add some gamification to motivate young (and not-so-young) learners.
> And you won't be able to create new music until you've learnt the fundamentals, scales and chords etc and yes that takes time, effort, patience and practice. There's no shortcuts.
If one has passed high school mathematics, the amount of music theory sufficient to compose typical pop tunes can be covered in about one day.
Diatonic scales, blues scale, intervals, 3-chords, some 4-chords, a hint of higher n-chords. Chord roles and examples of typical chord progressions. Something about bass lines and drum patterns.
It will probably not make you able to compose hit tunes, but you will learn enough terminology to understand what is going on.
There is nothing wrong with introducing kids to an endeavor that still requires good old fashioned hard work. Music (like all arts) really does require thousands of hours of practice, and that isn't a problem that needs to be solved by replacing it with the video game version.
You could easily make the same argument for any discipline. Chemistry shouldn't be about learning boring periodic tables, it should be fun explosions. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional novelists, so English classes should focus on comic books.
If some give up along the way because they don't enjoy it, so what? I gave up on baseball at a young age because I didn't like it and wasn't good at it. Does it matter?
This is very contrary to my experience. I suspect the vast majority of people who learn piano do so with the desire to play classical music, because frankly that's the main thing it's good for. Playing piano arrangements of pop songs is a cool party trick the first few times, but loses its lustre pretty quickly (they end up all sounding similar); for composition there are probably better options in the age of computer sequencers, and fundamentally most people aren't in a position to get much value out of doing original composition.
Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect
Poor hand and back posture can lead to very serious injury, potentially even the loss of mobility. Of all the tedium of learning to play the piano, this is one area you should not skip.
Further, you need to learn note names so you can communicate with others about your music. You need to learn good fingering or you'll never be able to play fast, and your fingers will be tripping over themselves all the time.
This sounds conceptually similar to how teaching CS or teaching programming to some one later in life focusses on algorithms data structures and other "inside baseball" concepts rather than asking them what is something you would like the computer to do for you or a real life application they would like to see in the world and show them the simplest path to getting a MVP of the thing they are interested in. Once they have that they will be more curious to build something else using their first experience as a base. Maybe a few months or a year or so later they would explore deeper concepts like learning data structures, algorithms and other optimizations
Kind of an ugly but related anecdote about learning piano: I know someone who grew up in Tennessee, and started playing around on his family's piano in his teens. He liked jazz so that's what he tried to teach himself. At one point his grandma said he can't keep playing like n....rs and enrolled him in lessons like parent talks about.
Surprisingly, that's how most jazz musicians learned to play, for the past century: Take the formal lessons that you're supposed to take, then sneak out and learn jazz yourself. White parents were conflicted by the racial biases in music, but even black parents wanted their kids to learn "proper" music as defined by the academe.
My parents had no idea that jazz was my main musical interest.
oh how I wish any of my guitar teachers would have bothered to teach technique, music, notes, hand positioning, anything!
All of them asked for their $40 and then asked me to bring in music I liked so I could memorize a few songs without any explanation for what was going on.
I blame this soley on how piano is taught. Instead of focusing on music and sound, music teachers try to teach note names, sitting posture, curving your hands ect. You are sent of with the impression that you'd need years of daily practice to be half decent. This is an immediate turn-off. I want to play music, not memorize ridiculous memory tricks like ' every good boy does fine' .
I would imagine most people are trying to make new music and play existing music. 99% of ppl are not trying to become professional pianist. Yet music teachers just teach how they have been taught, with endless instructions about keeping your back straigt, keeping the curve in your fingers ect. This makes one feel like they are not "cut out" for music and they give up .
We need a new crop of music teachers that can take advantage of new midi instruments, iphone apps ect to teach music. Piano should be introduced much later one you have grasped the how notes sound, how chords sound, why you need them ect on a simpler interface instead of endless repetitions of twinkle, twinkle from day one. Classical music should not be taught to a hobbyist. Instruction should be fun from day one, you should be making new music from day one. Endless learning of grammar doesn't make one a good author.