Monday 30 May 2016

Separating the Reading of Rhythm from Pitch


This is a screen grab from the internet taken from a book that uses pre-staff note reading. Many piano tutor books such as Alfred's Premier Piano Course and Faber Piano Adventures employs pre-staff reading taking up to half the number of pages in the beginners level 1 book. It would be a mistake for piano teachers to skip over these first 30 pages of the books to go right into the pages where pitch is introduced on the staff. Many piano teachers who themselves were taught on the Middle C approach are at a loss at how to teach pre-staff reading to their beginner piano students.

Why is rhythm separated from note reading?
Some teachers may ask, "What is wrong with the old system of John Thompson and Schaum, which teaches rhythm AND note reading at the word 'go!' when a child starts learning piano?". There is nothing wrong, but over the years, piano pedagogues have found that fluent reading is actually not by reading note names. That is not how good piano performers and sight readings process notes on a page and turn them into sounds out of the piano.

Let us conduct an experiment, look at the word below:

BUTTERFLY

How does your brain take in that information? Does it recognise the entire word? Does it think of the meaning behind the word? Or, does it just see the individual letters of the alphabet spelling the word 'butterfly'? 

Similarly, look at this:


How does your brain process this information? Notice there are no clef in front of the notes. But what your brain is probably processing is the intervallic relationship from one note to the next.

This is actually a more fluent reading process. It is more wholistic, taking in the big picture rather than the sum of it's parts. You are able to get a flow, rather than sporadic 'typing' action from one note to the next and ignoring the melodic flow.

The pros of pre-staff reading is:
1. Young beginners at the piano can focus on building a good hand shape.
2. They learn high and low sounds on the piano, and apply that to reading Directionally. Going up and going down, once they have placed their hands on the the starting spot indicated by the picture on the keyboard.
3. Starting on the black keys as opposed to the white keys of the keyboard, anchors the students to arch and curve their fingers. It also points them out to the 2 and 3 black key pattens on the piano which will come in handy to find the white keys later on. Eg. The 2 black keys help students to find all the 'CDE' on the piano and the 3 black keys help students to find firstly 'F' and 'B' and then 'AG'.
4. Only the concept of playing with both hands, maintaining a steady pulse and feeling 'crotchets' and 'minims' (quarter and half notes) is taught and reinforced in pre-staff reading.

What pre-staff reading does is to lay a good FOUNDATION to learning how to read music.

Dorothy Chia is a  piano teacher and author of 'Piano Pedagogy - The Questions', 'Piano Pedagogy - The Answers', Theory Explorer for the Young Musician, books 1 and 2, available at Kinokuniya, MPH, Yamaha, Gramercy, Renner, Music Bookroom and Chiu Piano. Dorothy holds a Master of Music in Piano Pedagogy and Performance from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is the 1992 DH Baldwin Fellowship winner.

No comments:

Post a Comment