At my secondary school, we had weekly dance lessons. Whether dance should be on the curriculum at all is a discussion for another day, but I believe that if one is going to have dance lessons, they should be useful. After all those lessons, I still can’t dance – not because I have two left feet (though I do!), but because the lessons failed to teach me anything useful. Some of us had more natural ability than others, but we would all have benefitted from, and been capable of, learning the steps of the waltz, tango and salsa. This would have come in handy later on – believe it or not, I have been in situations since where those dances would have been useful – and given us a concrete skill that we could have pursued socially or competitively if we wished. I did take ballroom and Latin classes for a while at university and enjoyed them immensely. How much more enjoyable and fruitful they would have been if my school had used dance lessons to teach me the basics!

Instead, as far as I can recall, we spent our time ‘expressing ourselves’ and ‘being creative’. I remember lessons where we had to pretend to be animals or act out various emotions. This, frankly, is useless. It’s like trying to run before you can walk. There’s a place for expressing one’s feelings – it’s called counselling! – but an elementary dance class is not it. Without the basic building blocks that we call dance steps, we didn’t have a foundation upon which to ‘express ourselves’. The result was a flimsy façade that taught us skills in neither emotional expression nor dance.

Music is very similar. We need to learn a great deal before we can use the piano, or any other instrument, as a tool of free expression. There is a school of thought, which seems to be particularly prevalent in the West, that ‘being a musician isn’t about being able to read the notes.’ I disagree. Although it is true that some brilliant jazz pianists can’t read the notes, they instead have an understanding of theory that would make many classical pianists envious. I’ll write more about jazz piano in a future post, but for now let’s just say that it’s by no means an easy alternative to classical. It may not prioritise note-reading to the same extent as classical piano, but it requires a whole other set of skills which also take time and effort to learn.

I have one pupil whose previous teacher didn’t believe in learning to read music and taught almost entirely by asking pupils to copy her. This, in my opinion, is lazy teaching that does pupils absolutely no favours in the long run. Although my pupil played well when he came to me, he could barely identify a single note. This of course made sight-reading impossible, but also meant that he struggled to learn even the easiest of pieces if he hadn’t played them before. I asked him, ‘Do you want to be able to play on your own when you’re an adult?’ He replied that he did. I then explained that we would have to go back and learn the notes properly.

We began by doing weekly sight-reading and quick studies for the 5-finger position around Middle C. We then gradually introduced more notes, remaining in a 5-finger position each time. These pieces were easy for my pupil, so we covered a huge amount of ground very quickly. I supplemented this with interval recognition practice and flashcards for the notes we’d already covered. This process was long and arduous, and I could certainly have made my life much easier by not bothering. But I’m glad I did, as this pupil can now read the notes very well. It would have been much easier for all concerned if he had been taught them in the first place!

However, I don’t think that the other extreme is the answer, either. There are some teachers in the Far East who make pupils study theory and play scales and finger exercises for years before they’re allowed to tackle any pieces. This approach prioritises technical prowess at the expense of artistic expression. The problem is that good pianists need both things. Even beginning students can be encouraged to play musically, but if they cannot play the notes accurately, they don’t have the tools with which to express themselves. I believe that musical expression is the ultimate goal of all playing, but it cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs a solid foundation of technique and knowledge to back it up. Aiming for musicality without doing the hard work of learning the notes first is putting the cart before the horse. It creates a student like my pupil in the previous paragraph, who plays nicely but lacks the tools to learn independently. Such a student has little chance of continuing with the piano later on, even if they want to.

Ultimately, the hard work of learning the notes and the theory behind them can be dull and difficult. The temptation to circumvent it – by teaching by rote, for example – so that pupils can ‘express themselves’ is understandable, but it must be resisted. Without a solid technical foundation, pupils will eventually find that their creativity is meaningless.