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Teaching.
It's like a playground for the mind that's always evolving and this past week has taken me to a completely new playground - one that I'm just seeing a tiny glimpse of but that I'm so very eager to explore.
The class in question is the accompanying class at Radford University. Not to be confused with accompanying classes at most institutions, this class is one that is a required, year-long course that is taken mostly by vocal music education majors in their junior or senior years. Most of the students have not taken piano lessons before and have only gone through the required group piano classes. My job is to help them get to a level where they can accompany singers, either in a choral or solo setting, at a basic level. This has proven to be a great challenge to me since they really aren't pianists. In a post I wrote last year,
Reflections on the first year of teaching piano sightreading, I discussed some of what I had discovered during my first semester of teaching in detail. In today's post I'll move on from those observations to draw attention to one interesting experiment I've conducted this week and its surprising (at least to me) results.
First, here is what I've been frustrated with that I'm trying to tackle:
- The students read note-by-note, note value-by-note value which makes reading piano music especially challenging, tension producing and tiring.
- Because they feel they have to concentrate so hard on each and very note they rarely, if ever, look ahead in the music.
- They count out loud in such a way that they aren't really internalizing a constant beat, shifting instead between feeling the larger beats and the subdivisions depending on the rhythms they are reading. Often times when they try to go back to feeling the bigger beats they can't and end up counting the main beats twice as fast as they should be. (I wish I could come up with an image or example for what I'm talking about. I realize it's a bit confusing - sorry!)
- Because they have a difficult time feeling a constant pulse and because they can't stand making a mistake they stop when they do something wrong. It is very difficult to get them to keep going no matter what.
Determined to help them get over some of these issues I pulled out an exercise that taps into a technique I use all the time when I'm sightreading. The purpose of it is to keep the eyes, brain, and hands moving in steady, rhythmic, synchronized way. Here's what we did while we read piano duets together. With me playing the more complicated bottom part as written I had them play the 5-finger position top part as follows:
- First time: playing at a very fast tempo so that 4/4 measures could be felt and counted in 2 rather than in 4, and 2/4 measures could be felt and counted in 1 rather than in 2, they looked for and played only the first notes of every measure while counting out loud. Since we were doing this very quickly they really had to keep their eyes moving. Because they weren't having to worry about rhythms and because I was playing with them, they could maintain the steady pulse and feel what it's like to get in a wonderful groove.
- Second time: slowing down the tempo but maintaining the same counting scheme, they continued to read only the notes that fell on downbeats but I asked them to add in whatever their eyes saw around those downbeats.
It took them a few tries to figure out what I meant but once they did I think we were all shocked by the results. On day one of this experiment, after only one attempt each, when they went to do the second play-through where they were focusing on the downbeats but allowing themselves to play what they could, they played virtually all the notes correctly at the first attempt without any problems with rhythms they had previously struggled to execute correctly. And no stopping! To top it off they all played extraordinarily musically, especially considering the fact they aren't pianists. I was literally gobsmacked.
And the cherry on the cake?
I met with one of my students today and led her through our exercise with the same exciting results, only this time when I looked at her it looked like she was going to pop. After saying, "Brava!" I asked her, "How did that feel?" She had this enormous grin on her face and she said something along the lines of, "This was the first time I've ever played music and actually heard another part. I heard your part - I heard mine. It was beautiful!" I asked her if she realized that she had done all the rhythms correctly and she said, "Really? I wasn't thinking about them at all!" Coming from someone to whom rhythm doesn't come naturally, that made my day.
So why did this work so well, at least this time?
Perhaps it worked because it showed them that their eyes and brain can take in quite a bit all at once without having to expend energy on each and every dot on the page. This freed them up enough so that they could include their ears in the process. They could hear the music that was being made and could respond in expressive ways. In regards to the rhythms that they previously hadn't been able to do very easily, I now wonder if they do indeed have a grasp of rhythm but don't realize it themselves. They don't trust that they can see a pattern and automatically be able to reproduce it without counting all the tiny subdivisions that require so much additional brain power.
We'll see what happens from here. I realize it's just a start but wow, at least for this week, I'm thrilled and am eager to figure out what to do next. If anyone has any thoughts or personal stories about this topic, please do share - I always learn a lot from all of you!
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