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Currently, piano education methods have collected too many questions in them.
— How to teach students to study correctly and independently?
— What methods students should use to competently and efficiently perform the conceived on the instrument?
— How to teach each student virtuosic technique and artistry?
These questions are not yet completely solved.
As a result, teachers choose an easier way of teaching — “cosmetic repairs” of pieces played by their students.
A teacher, while listening to his student, tries to feel how he would play that piece himself. And then he begins to impose his own conception of this piece, his own idea of sounding and sensation of this piece. The teacher explains this situation by saying that the student’s performance wasn’t convincing. Therefore, the conducted lesson is reduced to making the student artificially imitate things that his teacher requests. While conducting such classes, the teacher has no clue that it’s possible that his student has a better conception of a piece and feels it deeper than his teacher. And that it’s possible that the student perfectly hears that the piece sounds totally not the way he would like it to sound. In reality, the student should be helped to overcome those barriers that keep him back and block his potential.
So the teacher begins to artificially “make” the piece eliminating only the consequences of problems and giving his student more and more new questions instead of giving him the necessary answers, which will eliminate all causes of appearing problems on the way to achieving the goal when student is able to perform the piece the way he feels it.
Teachers have to learn to see not just consequences, but also causes of poor playing. And seeing these causes, they need to give a necessary medicine — a necessary musical mean of expression that will remove this cause for good.
Sometimes a teacher will correctly feel one of the reasons of his student’s poor playing, but then the teacher again will start to eliminate just the consequence of this reason, but not the reason itself — he’ll tell his student about an important missing musical mean of expression (MEM), but unfortunately, he won’t have enough knowledge to explain how to correctly apply this MEM. For example, while explaining to a student that it’s necessary to do phrasing in a particular fragment, the teacher will explain in detail how a phrase should sound — “You come up to this sound. And it means that it will sound with more weight, a bit more noticeable, may be brighter. And here — a drop begins. It has to be played a bit quieter and slowly go away, it’s not that important anymore.” But all this is just an artificial imitation of a well done phrase because it won’t seem natural, pretty and harmonious. And the student won’t get any satisfaction from the “made” phrase because its performance will be only a mask of a pretty phrase.
A question may arise here, which a student never asks his teacher — “But why do I need this phrase here? Because you want it? Because without this phrase my playing won’t be pretty? Who wants to do this phrase? Not me.”
And this is what I call “eliminating the effect of the inability to control MEMs, but not the cause itself”.
The aim of a teacher in such situation is to explain to his student how a phrase has to be imagined correctly and through what musical mean of expression this phrase may be beautifully sung, so that the student could get pleasure and satisfaction from the process of a naturally performed phrase. And after feeling what a pleasure it is to do phrases, the student will always correctly define phrase limits and play phrases with pleasure.
This is what I call “eliminating the causes of inability to control MEMs and not just the consequences of the causes.
Students don’t need a synthetic playing, they need the keys to all doors which hold back their creativity. It’s necessary to teach them competent and efficient home practice when they’ll consciously see and resolve all problems, when they’ll master all knowledge and skills which will give them freedom to interpret and perform pieces the way they.
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