“We need to learn how to THINK like a pianist”.

Students have heard me say more than once. Think Like A Pianist!

In truth, I mean something specific when I say this. The way we read music, the way we access our instrument and the way we apply aural skills to our study has a quality that is quite uniquely pianistic.

We sit with our instrument laid out in front of us - all the notes visible and waiting for us to choose which ones to press. In theory, we could advance to quite proficient levels without ever engaging our ear. We could become a rather fancy sort of typist…sad but true in too many cases.

A pianist needs to develop an excellent ear - this is absolute. However, unlike other instruments where learning can begin mostly (and in some cases exclusively) with aural training, in order to progress on the piano, students need to immediately understand the geography of the keyboard. This is the case for even the youngest student. Maybe they don’t read the grand stave immediately, but from the beginning a piano student will naturally approach the instrument logically and visually.

This is good! This patterned, spatial way of understanding music is important for the survival of the piano player. It’s the way we read music - simultaneously reading horizontally and linearly, it’s fundamental to the way we memorise repertoire, and quite plainly, it’s how we coordinate our hands to play lots of notes at once!

The challenge as a teacher is how to include effective aural training in lessons when all of these other physical elements take up so much learning time. This is a brief overview of my method.

TEACHING THE BEGINNER - Focusing on Sound

Listening:

High/Low
Strong/Soft
Round/Sharp
Long/Short
Happy/Sad
Bright/Shadowy
Rushing/Pulling Back

This is a wonderful stage of teaching. Children are fantastic listeners. Afterall, they have just spent a few short years learning language and how to communicate fluently, and in many cases prolifically! It’s only in later years that we often neglect the art of listening. Children are masters of this and bring with them as well an active imagination and curiosity. Talking about sound is easy and fun.

“Can you make a sound like slamming the door?”

“Can you make a sound like snoring?”

“What does wind sound like when it’s very, very gentle?”

“A frog in a swimming pool, what does that sound like?”

This is a perfect stage to bring out different instruments to experiment with different sounds. I have a set of boomwhackers and various auxiliary percussion instruments that are make wonderful variety of sound.

Singing:

I also use this early stage of learning to develop the confidence to sing in lessons. We sing a lot in lessons. We sing the words to all the method book pieces and make up words for pieces that don’t have them. In the most extreme cases (i.e. a beginning teenager), if a student really doesn’t get on with singing, I use this stage to get them used to my own singing - because over the years they are going to hear a lot of it!

How Long Does this Beginning Phase Last?

As long as necessary. If a child starts lessons when they are 5 years old, this phase can last up to 2-3 years. If the student is a beginner when they are 10 years old, it might only last a few weeks or months. This phase is important and should not be rushed. Most time in lessons and in practice will be spent trying to physically execute the demands of the piano, so this basic aural work needs to be allowed to develop over time, I don’t rush it.

THE EARLY INTERMEDIATE STUDENT : focusing on Scales and Solfa

Learning scales is a bit of a turning point in a student’s piano journey, They have to be physically able to handle the technique of performing a scale as well as being able to quickly recognise how a scale should sound.

In the Hungarian tradition of aural training, students develop strong Relative Pitch. In my experience, this “moveable DO “ approach to ear training is by far one of the best pedagogical practices and creates some of the finest musicians. I passionately follow this approach in my own teaching with the understanding that on the piano pitch is tempered and Relative Pitch will always have an element of Absolutism. This is why it is acceptable for a piano student to first learn scales technically by rote and then learn Solfa after.

I first teach the C major scale by rote, hands together, one octave - with no singing.

I use Scale Cards away from the piano to spell the C Major scale, We use little tokens on the keyboard to recognise the pattern.

We practice hands separately for ages and hands in unison for ages, until C major is easy to play. Finally, we move on to G major and slowly begin to pick up momentum as we move around the Circle of Fifths.

When the student can easily play 3 or 4 different major scales I introduce Solfa. I LOVE it when we arrive at this point and I LOVE teaching the first lesson in Solfa!

Because of the groundwork the little pianist has already covered, the concepts of relative pitch and transposition comes instantly. It’s like magic - as though the skill has been lying dormant in the student just waiting for the exact moment to come to life.

I Introduce Solfa Like This:

I put out the Solfa Cards and say “if we want to sing a scale, we do it using these syllables”.

and then we sing a scale (in any key, it doesn’t matter - usually a key that’s easy to sing!) whilst introducing the Curwen hand signs:

When the student starts to feel comfortable with the hand signs and the strange Solfa syllables, we pull out just DO-MI-SOL and learn a tune using just those.

I use the little song Apple, Apple from First, We Sing! 100 Little Songs and Rhymes by Susan Brumfield. But any tune written using just the notes in a major triad would work.

When they are comfortable with this we move the Solfa Cards to the piano.

“Choose a scale, any scale” I say. They choose one of the few they know and then I tell them to play the scale with one hand, perform the hand signs with the other hand and sing the scale at the same time!

DO-RE-MI-FA-SOL-LA-TI-DO

They always find this very funny at first as they try to play and do the hand signs at the same time, but it’s also amazing because after a few attempts they master it.

Next I ask them to find DO-MI-SOL in the scale they’ve been playing and we sing Apple, Apple again, whilst they play with one hand and do the hand signs with the other.

Wow! without fail they get it almost instantly, and then all we have to do is simply repeat the process with different scales.

Over the following few weeks, we do this same process with more simple songs, slowly adding the Syllables “Re” and “La” to our Solfa repertoire, and also transposing to more scales as they learn them.

**We don’t introduce “Fa” or “Ti” yet as we normally avoid the tritone and the idea of a semi-tone in the beginning, simply because they are typically more difficult to hear. We focus on leading tones later when we study dominant-tonic relationships and the idea of the V7 chord.

When the student finally feels comfortable with all of this we move away from the piano and I introduce a totally new tune just using Solfa and the hand signs. We sing it several times away from the piano before I instruct them to go back to the piano and play it in any key.

Voila! They are suddenly able to “play by ear” and transpose with complete ease.

THE INTERMEDIATE / ADVANCED STUDENT : Focusing on sight singing

We’re getting more advanced now and “Sight Singing” is really a topic for a different post, but I want to mention it here to round off the progression of this aural method.

When the student becomes confident at singing in Solfa and transposing simple tunes, the next step is to take this skill and apply it to the written musical score. Our ultimate goal of course is to develop the skill of singing music by sight in Solfa away from the piano.

Several things need to be established before this can happen:

The Student needs to be a fluent reader
The Students needs to be ready to understand Semi-Tones and Dominant Chords.
The Students needs to understand Key Signatures and the basic idea of Scale Degrees when they are written in music notation

My daughter’s violin teacher always says “Where does the music live? not it your fingers but in your head”. Learning music in this way gives students such a deep understanding of how to interpret and create. It provides a foundation upon which they can build both performance and compositional skills with creativity and passion.

Even though we can’t manipulate pitch when we play the piano, we can begin to understand how to perform in a way that belies this fact, by understanding how the music should sound first. This is a skill unique to our instrument.

We have to learn how to think like a Pianist.

Aural Training with Piano Students, When and How to Get Started

Teaching Music Students to Practice: Some Myths and Some Tips