Where Traditional Music Education Went Down The Wrong Path

Being completely besotted with playing the piano myself, I believe that unfortunately Western music education, that is generally focussed on teaching people to make music by teaching them how to read, has created a society where now there is this mythical idea that making music is only either for those who are mysteriously gifted or for people who started at 3 years of age and practise for 8 hours a day…

it always struck me that I commonly meet two types of piano players:

1. People who have had sometimes years of lessons most of whom felt they couldn’t play very well, if at all, and they couldn’t play anything without music, and
2. People who would sit down at the piano and play some great tunes, who would then also apologise and say “I’m not very good. I just taught myself; I can’t even read music”.

And everybody thought there was something wrong with them; that they were somehow “not musical enough”, rather than that traditional Western music education might have gone down the wrong lane…

Imagine if we taught kids how to speak by showing them how to read the words and giving them elocution lessons. Surely most of them would then think that speaking is extremely difficult. And if they did learn how to speak, the majority would only be able to say the words that they read out from a script, rather than feeling they were expressing themselves. That would be crazy, wouldn’t it! Yet, this is exactly what traditional piano teachers commonly do.

Having taught hundreds of students over the last 20 years who all were perfectly capable of learning to make music I came across an article that clarified what happened with music education. Apparently in the 19th century pianos were the Netflix of today. As people bought them and taught each other tunes salesmen then thought; “What else can we value add?” And the answer was; “books with piano music”. In order to play these books, teachers were then needed to teach how to read them. That’s how teachers became teachers of reading rather than teachers of playing.

PianoEasy starts off creating a very physical relationship with the piano, connecting our arms, our fingers, our legs, our eyes, our ears, our feet, our hearts with this beautiful big instrument ...

PianoEasy starts off creating a very physical relationship with the piano, connecting our arms, our fingers, our legs, our eyes, our ears, our feet, our hearts with this beautiful big instrument that offers so many notes, laid out in such a beautiful recognisable way with that “two blacks, three blacks” pattern, offering so many possibilities on how to play them; bass, chords, rhythmically, melodies, embellishments, runs, individually, many notes at a time, slow, fast, loud, soft, held down, played quickly…

With PianoEasy your house will soon be filled with music. Players will all enjoy learning loads of songs, and over time, master a thorough understanding of how Western music works. They gain wonderful skills like improvisation, composition, re-arranging, reading, writing, accompanying and performing, while working with all sorts of different genres, from easy listening, to classical, to blues and jazz and popular songs. From early on players are encouraged and shown how to make up their own songs, own lyrics, and express songs in lots of different ways.