The Truth About Piano Lessons

A piano teacher looks at what it takes to succeed in music, why parents should care, and what they can do to help their kids. (This article applies to much more than just the piano...) 

Dear Piano Parents:

You're probably getting mailings right now about fall activities for your kids. The soccer coach wants to know if you're doing travelling team, the Little League coach is scheduling practices, the dance teacher is putting her classes together. And you're wondering about piano lessons for little Johnny or Suzie.

You want to know how much Johnny will be expected to practice. You want to know if Suzie can just "try it out" and see if it's "fun." You need to know what kind of instrument I expect you to have. You want to know if you can come whenever it's convenient, and whether I'll be flexible regarding hockey games, ski Fridays, school dances, ice-skating parties, holidays, and play dates.You want to know if I'm "reasonable" by which I think you mean: Can I change my schedule to suit yours, and am I a stickler for daily practice because Suzie has so much else on her plate and  "things are crazy around here." 

It doesn't usually occur to you to ask what you can do as a parent to help your child with music lessons, but that's something you're going to have to know, too.

I'm in a difficult position as a piano teacher because I'm afraid of telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I'm afraid because the unvarnished truth is not what you are probably going to want to hear if you are like the majority of my piano parents, and when people don't like what they hear, they tend to bail out. You may go to another teacher (which is fine: Everyone deserves the teacher they are most compatible with). But I'm afraid you may bail on music lessons all together.

Because the truth about learning to play the piano scares people. That's the last thing I want to do.

read the article here

Deadline for RCM Exams

A reminder to everyone that the deadline for registering for Spring exams for this June 2013 is March 5, 2013.  The Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto)  has a brand new site and registration system that all students and teachers will have to register for regardless as to whether they have registered for previous sites or not.  Also it is important to note that rcmexaminations.org is no longer to be used, but the old site is still up their in the search engines and as a teacher you can log into it still, but that is not the site to use. Neither is rcmexaminations.ca which some enterprising person has bought to try to capture business from the RCM.  You should use examinations.rcmusic.ca if you wish to find the Royal Conservatory of Music.

Introducing iSCORE

iSCORE is a web-based learning portfolio that has been tailored to meet the needs of music teachers and their students. Generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage, iSCORE is provided without charge to qualified users, and is a major step forward in the development of online teaching tools. iSCORE is the result of over a decade of research on the use of web-based tools to support learning. In developing iSCORE, musicians and students, aged 8 to 58, offered advice and helped field test the implementation of this tool in music studios and other community music making contexts. Studio teachers, all of whom prepare their students for RCM exams, also contributed to the design and testing of iSCORE. The tool supports music-making with a wide range of features. On the home page, students can create their own profiles and goals. Using the embedded recorder, students can record and save their music-making – repertoire they are studying or compositions they are creating. An annotation feature allows users to make comments directly on video or audio materials, and iSCORE also makes it easy to link to websites, upload documents, and create work directly in the portfolio. There are also links to composition and sequencing tools to encourage creative work. Interactive boxes allow for personalized plans, reflections, and feedback from teachers.

Royal Conservatory of Music iSCORE program

Music Training Enhances Children’s Verbal Intelligence

A just-published study from Canada suggests early music education stimulates a child’s brain, leading to improved performance in an entirely different arena – verbal intelligence.
“These results are dramatic not only because they clearly connect cognitive improvement to musical training, but also because the improvements in language and attention are found in completely different domains than the one used for training,” said York University psychologist Ellen Bialystok, one of the paper’s co-authors. “This has enormous implications for development and education.”
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, was conducted at York University by psychologist Sylvain Moreno, who is now with Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute. It focused on 48 children between the ages of 4 and 6, who took part in one of two computerized training programs Moreno designed.
Half participated in a music program, which “included training in rhythm, pitch, melody, voice and basic musical concepts,” the researchers write. The other 24 took part in a visual-arts program, which “emphasized the development of visuo-spatial skills relating to concepts such as shape, color, line, dimension, and perspective.”
All received their respective training one hour per day, five days per week for four weeks. The programs were projected onto a classroom wall and conducted in groups led by a teacher.

Read the article at Miller-McCune.com 

How Much Should you Practice?

2 hours? 4 hours? 8 hours? 12 hours?
How much is enough?
Is there such a thing as practicing too much?
Is there an optimal number of hours that one should practice?

What Do Performers Say?

Some of the great artists of the 20th century have shared their thoughts on these questions. I once read an interview with Rubinstein (or it may have been Horowitz – I can’t remember exactly whom), in which he stated that nobody should have to practice more than four hours a day, explaining that if you needed to practice more than four hours a day, you probably weren’t doing it right.
Other great artists have expressed similar sentiments. Violinist Nathan Milstein is said to have once asked his teacher Leopold Auer how many hours a day he should be practicing. “If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough,” was Auer’s response. “If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”
Heifetz also indicated that he never believed in practicing too much, and that excessive practice is “just as bad as practicing too little!” He claimed that he practiced no more than three hours per day on average, and that he didn’t practice at all on Sundays. You know, this is not a bad idea – one of my own teachers, Donald Weilerstein, once suggested that I establish a 24-hour period of time every week where I was not allowed to pick up my instrument.

What Do Psychologists Say?

When it comes to understanding expertise and expert performance, psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is perhaps the world’s leading authority. His research is the basis for the “ten-year rule” and “10,000-hour rule” which suggest that it requires at least ten years and/or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve an expert level of performance in any given domain – and in the case of musicians, often closer to 25 years in order to attain an elite international level. Note that the real key here is not the amount of practice required but the type of practice required to attain an expert level of performance. In other words, just practicing any old way doesn’t cut it.

Mindless Practice

Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Tape yourself practicing for an hour, take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or ask your students to pretend they are at home and watch them practice during a lesson. What do you notice?
You’ll notice that the majority of folks practice rather mindlessly, either engaging in mere repetition (“practice this passage 10 times” or “practice this piece for 30 minutes”) or practicing on autopilot (that’s when we play through the piece until we hear something we don’t like, stop, repeat the passage again until it sounds better, and resume playing through the piece until we hear the next thing we aren’t satisfied with, at which point we begin this whole process over again).
There are three major problems with the mindless method of practicing.
Read more »

Royal Conservatory of Music's exam system to become standard for U.S. music schools

From the Globe and Mail  Saturday March 26

When New York’s famed Carnegie Hall decided the United States’ patchwork of state music programs should have a national system to unite them, its leaders gave little thought to starting from scratch. Instead, they turned immediately to Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music.

At a Saturday conference of thousands of music teachers in Milwaukee, Wis., the two institutions will announce the Carnegie Hall Royal Conservatory Achievement Program, an extension of the conservatory’s existing exam system intended to be the new U.S. standard for music training and learning.

The goal is to increase participation in music throughout the U.S., partly by emphasizing music’s central role in the development of innovative, healthy, happy societies. But it may also prove a welcome source of revenue if it catches on.

“It comes back to the goal to make participation in music a central part of the daily lives of every person,” said Peter Simon, president of the RCM.

Carnegie first commissioned consultants to explore the appetite for creating national exams and curricula. The study showed that schools, teachers and parents were eager, and tapped the RCM as having the most reputable and applicable system. The two institutions had no formal relationship, but Simon flew to New York last fall and discussions moved quickly.

“It was pretty much: Here’s the study, we want to do this, we think you guys have a great program, let’s do it,” Simon recalled. “And at that moment I said, ‘I love it, we’re off.’”

Carnegie’s education program is substantial and expanding through an ongoing $200-million (U.S.) renovation, which will carve out a 5,600-square-metre education wing. The project has similarities to the RCM’s recent revamping of its own building in Toronto.

“We totally share the same vision,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director.

National programs in several countries have shown that the sense of progress and achievement born of having a national standard is instrumental in keeping students engaged in music, says Jennifer Snow, who splits time as the RCM’s director of teacher pedagogy and a professor of piano at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The examination program is designed to be used locally by students of all ages and skill levels, a doubly important strategy as music classes struggle to survive in cash-strapped schools.

Read More at the Globe and Mail

Changing Education Paradigms

Another fascinating short from Sir Ken Robinson. This short video explores the epidemic of ADHD, how it may be caused the use of irrelevant outdated educational models, how standardization and standardized tests may play a part in this, and what effects the large scale medication of ADHD diagnosed students negatively impacts our students is having, especially in Arts education. Also how the current education system disrupts divergent thinking and rewards standardized responses, "10 years in school learning that there is only one right answer, and it is at the back of the book"..

If you watch this pay attention to the segment beginning around 5:35 - how Arts Education can  possibly be victim of the over diagnosis and medication of ADHD, and old educational paradigms.

Evelyn Glennie show us how to listen.

In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.

Bernstein at Harvard

Emotion and meaning in music. Food for thought...
Leonard Bernstein teaching at Harvard. From 'The Unanswered Question' lecture series.

The Interval Song

Here is a fun way to learn your intervals!! The interval song sung to a Latin rhythm.

Teaching corner - memorizing music

As we head towards festival and exam season here are a couple of links to recent blog posts of interest I have discovered online dealing with the problems of memorization in music.

12 Tips for Memorizing Piano Music  - specifically about the piano, but much of the information here can be applied to other instruments as well.

Practice Notebook - How I memorize Music - another article with a precise step -by - step process for looking at a score and internalizing it.