“I’m playing it on the piano, not clarinet!”
I’ve heard some pretty interesting responses when it comes to asking questions about musical terms. After all, the vast majority of my students primarily speak english and western music notation utilizes Italian as its primary language.
This is largely thanks to Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of modern staff notation, as well as the many composers that utilized this way of notation and his language to describe their music. It’s a system that has been accepted for centuries of music written in the western canon and the terminology included has continued to “stick” when it comes to music printed today.
It is always interesting when students realize that they are going to have to learn some Italian in their lesson. Reactions from students span from “I don’t want to learn Italian, I just want to sing!” to “Whoa, that’s a really cool word…I CAN SPEAK ITALIAN!” to “do I have to be able to pronounce these words?”
Because of the Italian, the teaching of terms and symbols becomes a multi-step process. At the beginning of my music teaching career, this did not occur to me. I didn’t think about the difference between word translation and meaning translation, not to mention understanding and application! One of the simplest and prominent examples of this is a term learned from the get-go… “piano”. It’s an easily recognizable in music as the letter “p” .
Your typical music lesson and/or theory book will describe this terminology by stating that the “p” symbol means “piano” which means “soft,quiet”. Simple enough, right? But now imagine that you know that teddy bears and puppies are soft. The letter “p” is for pretty and peaceful and perfect. You haven’t figured out that low sounds can be quiet and high sounds can be loud (because many people find that low pitches are easier to hear). And because “quiet” is such as a seemingly simple concept, you were also given four other terms to learn at the same time….and by the way, the piano is an instrument — and as is in many cases in my studio, the instrument that you might be learning to play!
It comes as NO surprise, given those things, that when we go to review this seemingly simple concept and I ask “what does the ‘p’ mean in your piece?” I get answers such as the title quote! And when that student is so excited that they “figured out” the answer, it is such a hard thing to tell them the truth. You wonder as a teacher whether your teaching method is ineffective, or perhaps the student is not paying attention, or any other myriad of possibilities as to what went wrong. Now, hopefully, a single student answering a single question incorrectly does not set someone into a spiral of self-doubt. No student gets every answer correct and plays everything perfectly, at least not in my experience. But it is so important to assess how we as teachers approach concepts and how we can improve so that our students can receive the information, understand it, and apply it. Receive, Understand, Apply.
Introducing the concept verbally or through a worksheet for instance allows the student to receive the information from the teacher. This is the first step, but sometimes it gets treated as the only step. I should know, I’ve done it. But it has “come back to haunt me” when I assess students after teaching them with this method only to have them not be able to make it to step two-understanding.
When a student can demonstrate the knowledge that they have received in some way, this is the second step. For the example of “piano”, I demonstrate performing in a “piano” manner and have students mimic the sound. We also talk about things outside of the studio that might be considered “piano.” I give them examples through clip card activities and the like, but they have to come up with their own examples as well. We relate the term to things that are not necessarily musical and then bring it back around. Coming up with their own answer brings them to the second step. They show that they can generate the information, not just mimic what they have been told. This then brings us back to the music.
Step three is the goal: application. This is what we all want, right? Don’t just give me the answer, SHOW me the answer! It is all well and good to be able to spout out the entirety of translations and definitions for musical terms, but if you cannot apply those terms to your music, then you are on your way to becoming a music theory scholar perhaps, but not necessarily a musician. The symbols and terms were added to music so that the composer could describe how the music should sound in order to assist the performer in correct performance. They are tools and clues into the composer’s mind! I am a HUGE proponent of “off the bench” activities, but it is always important to bring those activities back into the music. Relate the concepts used in games directly back to the pieces at hand and have the students demonstrate their knowledge through their music.
I like to have many ways to teach any given concept because I do not believe that there is a “golden” approach to teaching any given student. Every human is as different as their fingerprint. But I believe that those three steps: Receive, Understand, Apply are a good backbone to approach concepts with. It keeps the method open for individuality, but provides for a way to make sure that students are really “getting it” rather than just making it through another round of questioning.
