BlitzBitz - Samantha's Blog

Theory has a bad name

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:37:37 GMT

Vicious Cycle

The vicious cycle of theory study goes like this:

Student dislikes theory because all their friends do or because they ‘just want to play’ => student avoids theory => student does not do well at theory => student dislikes theory

How did this happen?

I believe the main reason this cycle comes about is because we rush through theory. Very often, as soon as the practical exam is over, the piano books are put away and it’s THEORY TIME! The whole lesson is devoted to that sorely neglected theory workbook, which hasn’t seen the light of day for 4 or 5 months, in a frenzied effort to acquire the bare essentials needed to pass the all-important prerequisite exam. Let’s face it, students usually only do theory because they have to. Apart from the odd mature-age student who takes up theory just for the fun of it, completely divorced from any practical instrument study, it’s usually a race against the clock to get everything done and it’s hardly ever much fun.

How can we break the cycle?

Breaking the cycle means finding a way to teach so that students don’t feel completely abandoned when it comes to theory. There are three issues here:

How to get the most understanding from the lesson time available;
How to instil a sensible ‘practise’ routine when it comes to theory;
How to love it and have fun!

The only answer is to create an approach in the lesson that draws everything from the music the student is playing, and to engage their interest and understanding through the use of their instrument. You are not just their piano teacher, you are their music teacher.

Theory is a subject in itself

Imagine you have a little piano student named Sally who gets dropped off for her lesson one day by her Mum. As you greet them at the door the mum hands you a trumpet and says “We’ve decided we’d like Sally do start doing trumpet exams too, but we can’t afford to pay for any extra lessons, so can you please just cover it in this lesson time?”

Let’s assume for a moment you just happened to also be a trumpet teacher. How would you approach trying to prepare Sally for a trumpet exam as well as her piano exam? You would have minimal time to spend on trumpet in the lesson, so the first thing you would do is explain to Sally’s mum that you expect a lot of practise to be done at home, and that you’ll need a lot of support from both herself and Sally in making sure this is done. In the event that Sally’s mum is a little pushy and insists that the exam be done that year, you would probably explain that you would be reluctant to enter Sally for a trumpet exam until you were very confident that she was progressing well and had a regular practise routine at home.

This is essentially what we as piano teachers are asked to do all the time. We are preparing for two exams – two subjects – in one lesson time. However, doing theory worksheets inside lesson time is just like listening to practise that should be done at home. Lesson time is the time for interaction – sound, games, movement, talking – and continuing with worksheets at home is the best way to maximise the time available.

In order to teach theory and practical successfully within one lesson, you need support from the parents, a student who understands the difficulty of what you’re trying to achieve, and a well structured lesson to ensure that no particular aspect of their musical education is ignored for long periods of time.

The Holistic Approach

There are many students who claim they never want to do any practical exams, which of course is fine; then there are those who have opted for the wonderful Piano for Leisure syllabus, which does not have any theory or musicianship prerequisites. Does this mean that these students should not understand the structure of scales, or the tonality of chords, or even how to draw clefs properly? NO! Whilst theory exams take place with pen and paper, theory itself should not be seen as purely a written subject: it is the understanding of the rudiments of music, which is based on SOUND. As music educators, we want to take a holistic approach which will help mould our piano students into well rounded musicians.

A holistic approach means one in which your piano student emerges with a wide range of music skills. These consist of performance, aural development, sight reading, improvisational and analytical skills. All of these skills are an essential part of being a good musician, and teaching these skills should not be limited solely to students doing piano or theory exams.

Use your TIME efficiently

Structuring the lesson is always about how to use that most precious of commodities: time. Since time is something we never have enough of, it’s so important to have an overall plan of how we’re going to get through the year.

Here are four essential elements to include in piano lessons, relating to T-I-M-E:

T- for Timer; whether it be a stopwatch, a little 3 minute egg timer or the clock on the microwave, everyone teacher needs to keep track of how much time is being used so as to not get bogged down.

I – for Instrument; use your instrument! A piano is more effective than a pen and paper. Use the music to point out any musical fact.

M – for Movement; play games, get your students off their chairs whenever possible. Swap places, go somewhere different in the room like the floor, use games that require some sort of movement so that they feel they are doing something different. Movement also applies to movement away from the mundane and ordinary; get some excitement into the lesson!

E – for Expectation; you must have an expectation of the student that they will do the work at home so that you can mark it either in the lesson or outside it.

Widen students’ learning

Let’s take a famous piece such as Minuet by Bach. At the time of playing such a piece a student would most likely not be studying towards a theory exam (more discussion on prerequisites). There are many interesting things to point out, such as the sequences, which will not be covered in an examination until 3^rd grade. Should we wait three more years before introducing this student to the concept of sequences? Of course not! Use the correct terminology from the beginning, expose your students to all elements of music regardless of their progress in theory examinations. This sets them up well for later, and if and when they do finally study sequences in the formal Grade 3 environment, they will be quite relaxed and familiar with the concept.

The Higher Grades

It is extremely difficult to cover Grade 4 and above within the piano lesson, even given the fact that your student might be up to a 45 minute or 1 hour lesson as he/she might be doing 8^th grade piano. Most of the time, extra lessons will be needed, as concepts such as harmony and melody writing need special attention, and it’s not really possible to gloss over them! However, using a timer whilst doing these subjects can be an effective tool. If you time how long you spend explaining these concepts, however, it can help to give your students some idea of how long they should spend reinforcing the concept at home, which should be at least a ratio of 1:2 to be successful.

Things no piano studio should be without

Here are some things I feel are an absolutely essential part of any piano lesson.

A timer of some sort – clock with a second hand, stopwatch, phone... any timer will do.
A whiteboard is fantastic because it’s so easy to rub things out. If you can get one with magnets that’s even better, it’s just more fun for the student.
Flashcards – I believe that just about any problem can be solved with a set of flashcards. These may contain anything from notation to Italian terms to general knowledge. It’s a fun way of getting information across.

Hopefully by implementing all or most or even just some of the above, theory’s bad reputation can not only be salvaged but completely turned around!!!

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The Importance of Goals

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:54:40 GMT

When you practice a musical instrument by yourself, it’s a pretty solitary experience. There’s no team spirit, no friends at the training session, no coach to tell you what to do. It can be REALLY hard to be disciplined in practice – that is, to tackle the stuff that really needs work first and leave the easy pieces until the end. But even if you manage to do this, sometimes it’s not enough just to have the intrinsic satisfaction that something has been achieved. You need to play the pieces for someone else regularly (not just the teacher), and get feedback from that someone, be it in the format of applause, a report, an award, or maybe just lots of gushy comments about how well you’re doing. It is these things that keep most students practising in the long term.

So what it really comes down to is praise and recognition. Everybody loves positive feedback – whether from a teacher, a parent, a boss or an employee. Receiving praise is a huge motivator for most people.

Take my two children for example, who are polar opposites. My daughter is an approval junkie and responds to positive reinforcement even better than our labradoodle puppy. Verbal praise makes her positively beam, the thought of getting an A+ (or perhaps the thought of NOT getting an A+) makes her practise madly, and applause from an audience is pure heaven for her.

My son functions very differently. He plays in many different bands and loves the music. Although he enjoys doing well in an exam and doesn’t mind performing, that is not what motivates him to practice. It is his various bandmasters asking him to learn his parts, or practising for an upcoming band audition, that gets him on his instrument regularly.

What both of my children have in common, however, is that they both have goals that motivate them to practise, and without these goals the practice really starts to wane. Goals are an extremely important part of music education, and there are different types of goals that suit different students.

Performance-based goals

Eisteddfods and exams are the most common goals that students and parents set for themselves. The thought of doing well in an eisteddfod or an exam can be a great motivator for practice. However, these are highly stressful goals and not all children have a positive experience. In fact, sometimes it’s the ‘exam road’ that can end up putting a student off music for life.

Practising for a concert or a school assembly is another performance-based goal that also gets the practice going and the adrenaline pumping, but overall is a slightly nicer experience than an exam or an eisteddfod because there is no judging involved. Organising home concerts for family and friends put this type of performing on an even friendlier scale and works fantastically as a short term goal.

An even less stressful performance-based goal is that of making recordings of repertoire learned throughout the year. Having several ‘takes’ at getting a recording perfect is a wonderful teaching aid and makes students really listen to themselves! The recordings can build up over the year and be burned to a CD for a wonderful end of year present!

Repertoire goals

The 50-piece challenge is a fantastic repertoire goal that can be run as a competition or an individual pursuit. The great thing about this challenge is that it offers long-term and short-term repertoire goals: long-term being the exam pieces, and short-term being easier pieces that are knocked over in a week or two. This improves sight-reading drastically and prevents the boredom that can set in when you’re only learning 4 or 5 pieces over a whole year.

Ensemble goals

Playing in a band or an orchestra is a marvellous experience that pianists mostly don’t get to enjoy. I always recommend that my students take up a second instrument once they have had 2-3 years on piano. Practising an ensemble part at home and then practising with the band or orchestra is another dimension in music education that is extremely valuable.

However, piano duets are a marvellous form of ensemble playing. Two people BOTH have to know their parts in order to rehearse successfully, and an upcoming rehearsal is an excellent practice motivator!

Award goals

In my studio I offer all sorts of rewards and awards, from stickers through to trophies through to practice scholarships. These are things that students practice towards willingly (and in terms of the practice scholarship, really gets the parents involved because it saves them money!).

To sum up, everyone needs goals to work towards. For most adult students, just the joy of taking up piano, sometimes for the second time, is a goal in itself. But for most children, it’s really important to have something to practice FOR. Every child is different and it’s a matter of honing in on what the best motivators are for each individual.

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House Points Update

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:41:14 GMT

In an effort to stimulate more practice and a fairer competition, I decided to refine the House Points system I described in December last year.

No matter how I’ve tried to mix up the students and houses, for the last couple of terms one house has clearly run away with the House Cup. This makes it a little de-motivating for the students in the ‘losing’ houses (there are usually three houses); as the competition draws to a close they can see they would have to practice through the night a fair few times in order for their house to catch up.

So at the end of Term 3 I calculated each student’s average amount of practice per week for the term. Some of them had practised heaps, some not very much at all. I then split them into two houses only: ‘Ravenpuff’ (a cheeky combination of Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff) and ‘Slytherdor’ (a cheeky combination of Slytherin and Gryffindor) and made sure that each house had an equal amount of average practice times (as opposed to an equal number of students).

I explained to the students that if everyone continued to do the same amount of practice as the previous term that the houses would tie. The only way to win would be to increase the practice time – or hope that the other house practices less.

Every single student increased their average weekly practice, even the ones who had a high average from the previous term. They may have been spurred on by the fact that everyone’s average practice time was listed on the wall, so it was easy to see who was doing what and where each house was up to.

This worked really well! In the end the competition was extremely close and the two houses finished within 100 points of each other (winning house was Ravenpuff with 7153 points).

The element of competition is a huge motivator for most students. The beauty of the house system is that it’s a group effort, and even if your own weekly practice is not high, you can still be part of a winning team.

The flip side of all that, which my husband pointed out to me, is that the students who worked really hard during 3^rd term were then ‘punished’ by having a high average score to beat, and the students who were lazy in term 3 were ‘rewarded’ by only having a very low average score to beat. Luckily there wasn’t a single student who picked this up, but nevertheless we are still working on the perfect mathematical formula that will keep everyone happy and will let you know as soon as we come up with it!

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How to Get Rid of Mistakes

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:56:47 GMT

My daughter recently came home from her flute lesson with a great little system for correcting mistakes, which she called ‘IRC’.

IRC stands for Isolate, Rhythms, Connect.

Her flute teacher, Emma Sholl (of SSO fame), discussed with her that ‘Isolate’ means to figure out exactly where the mistake is. ‘Rhythms’ means to go over and over that spot in different ways, primarily using different rhythms. ‘Connect’ means to then link that passage back to the rest of the piece. Cool!

I was really pleased to hear about this system, because I do something quite similar with my piano students, although we’ve never come up with a great little acronym for it. But for pianists, it’s usually not quite as simple as the three steps above.

The first problem is that the student sometimes cannot easily isolate the mistake, mainly because they don’t know what the mistake actually is.

They can hear something is wrong, so they go back to the beginning of the section (or worse, the beginning of the whole piece, even if the mistake happened towards the end) and try again, hoping the mistake won’t happen again. If something does go wrong again, they go back again. And again. And again. Sadly and ironically, by going back and repeating the same mistake over and over, the actual mistake has been “practised in” or at least given as much air-play if not more than the correct version.

If the mistake does happen to disappear, which it sometimes does, the students then keeps going, relieved to have ‘gotten through’ that bit!

But how did the mistake disappear? The student has not fixed the mistake. By going back again and again, the student is trying to get the fingers to ‘just do it’, rather than really knowing what to do. To play the passage correctly now involves a bit of fluking, a bit of luck. And since the relieved student, upon hearing it correctly, charges ahead rather than going over the passage (for fear of the mistake reappearing), there is no knowing whether the passage will be correct next time or not. (Well actually we DO know – most likely not.)

Then there is another type of mistake, one that is often not even recognised as a mistake: the gap. The pause. The interruption to the rhythm that occurs when hands are not ready. The slight hesitation when the wrong finger is about to go on the note and then hurriedly changed (I often call this one a ‘micro-mistake’). This type of mistake to fix, because students can’t hear it. They are concentrate on getting the notes right, not on getting the piece fluent.

So, how does one isolate a mistake, no matter what kind? It’s pretty scary: it involves stopping, listening, reconciling with the notes on the page, checking the fingering, practising jumping the distance between notes and chords. Sometimes the mistake is really in the left hand when you think it’s in the right hand. Sometimes the actions of one hand are CAUSING the mistake in the other hand. (No wonder students don’t want to do this; it’s not nearly as much fun as ‘playing through’ the piece from beginning to end, which is the common approach at home.)

Correcting mistakes can be more challenging for pianists than for other instrumentalists. For example, most of the above paragraph is not applicable to flute playing, because on the flute both hands are working together to produce the same note, and most notes on the flute can only be produced with one type of fingering. But pianists have ten fingers which can make ten different sounds, sometimes simultaneously, and these same sounds can be created with a huge variety of different fingerings! For this reason, mistakes can be a lot harder to find, let alone fix.

For a pianist to isolate a mistake, he/she must first stop (not just fix it and then keep going), rewind a little bit (not all the way to the beginning of the piece), and figure out where the mistake is coming from (i.e. which hand, which note, which finger). This can be tricky. But now comes something even tricker: to recreate the mistake. (This will be the new ‘R’!)

We don’t want to spend a lot of time recreating and we certainly don’t want to reinforce the mistake any more than it already has been, but to be able to actually recreate the mistake means a student knows exactly what the mistake is, and is aware enough to avoid it next time around.

A mistake in the sound is often quite straightforward to recreate. But if the mistake is a fingering mistake, a problem unique to pianists, students may be completely unaware. It takes very careful playing to figure out which finger you are supposed to use vs which finger you DID just use! Fingering is a bit like choreography – keep changing it all the time and eventually the whole routine will just crash.So it really is worth figuring out which fingering you’re accidentally using, even if that means realising you’re using a different fingering each time. This is still valuable information.

Getting back to the acronym, so far we have ‘I’ for isolate and ‘R’ for recreate.

The ‘R’ according to the flute teacher was for ‘rhythms’. Playing a passage in different rhythms certainly does help it to become more smooth and confident. But this assumes that the notes themselves are already correct. There are lots of different strategies students can employ to get rid of mistakes, so the rhythms strategy will be incorporated into… ‘E’ for eradicate.

Eradicating a mistake, or as one of my [teenage boy] students put it, to ‘surround and kill’ a mistake, means to completely and totally erase it from existence. The most common way that most young pianists try to do this is by playing the passage separate hands over and over. The mistake appears to be gone. But then they play it with both hands, and the mistake comes back. This is because the mistake only occurs when both hands are playing at the same time. So to eradicate it, the student must use both hands at the same time.

Here are a few suggestions of ways in which pianists can eradicate mistakes:

1. Rewind one or two beats before the mistake you’re trying to correct. Start playing and ‘freeze’ on the note or chord that was going wrong, taking special care to play the right notes with the right fingering. Do this quite a few times. At first there will be big pauses while finding the correct notes to ‘freeze’ on, but after a while the brain starts to anticipate the notes in question and everything becomes more fluent.

2. Play in different rhythms AND different accents. This mainly applies to scale passages.

3. Practice ‘backwards’ – that is, practice one bar, then the bar before it, and so on.

4. Practice the passage at different speeds – not just slower, but sometimes a lot faster

5. Go backwards and forwards between two tricky chords, sometimes playing each chord two or three times each.

So now we have ‘IRE’ - Isolate, Recreate and Eradicate. This is good. But eventually we really do want to play through from the beginning. How do we put the piece back together?

This is where ‘C’ for connect comes in. It would be fair to assume that a mistake that has been isolated, recreated and eradicated successfully within the context of the small passage being practised should then be gone when the piece is played form the beginning. But so often the mistake reappears when it is put back into the context of the piece. This can be so frustrating! What needs to happen at this point is a widening of the practice ‘area’ – that is to include a few more bars before and after the mistake, and continue to apply the ‘IRE’ concept. The fingers need to play the newly corrected notes under all sorts of conditions, and it may take a few days before the mistake really is gone. Now we are connecting it – and for the sake of assonance, we’ll change ‘connect’ to consolidate.

Isolate, Recreate, Eradicate, Consolidate. This systems works to get rid of mistakes. Hope you find it useful!

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50-pieces in a year: Update and Repertoire Suggestions

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Mon, 09 May 2011 02:08:27 GMT

For all those of you who have embraced even the idea of offering the 50-piece challenge to your students, I’m here to tell you that it’s the best thing I have ever done with my students.

Each week they come along to lessons eager to get more ticks on the chart, or at least more dots, showing that pieces have been started.

But what is the reason they are so eager? Yes, they are enjoying playing more repertoire and not getting stuck playing the same three pieces all year. Yes, they are finding out how rewarding it is to experience that sense of achievement of finishing a piece in just one or two weeks. Yes, their sight reading is improving and their parents are delighted. But the most important reason they are so eager is…

COMPETITION!

The chart on my wall, next to the piano, lists every student and they can see at a glance who has the most ticks. Whilst I have never promoted this as anything other than an individual pursuit, the element of competitiveness is really pushing everyone along. There is no prize for the ‘winner’ (i.e. the person who gets to 50 pieces first). There is only the satisfaction of having done it yourself. But nevertheless, the idea of having the most ticks or dots seems to be the most motivating factor for practising more.

In one term, five students have exceeded the quarter-way mark: 13 pieces. The ‘top’ person is up to 20 pieces already! The rest have a healthy start, with most students above 10 pieces.

Here is some of the repertoire I’m using for this challenge, which is working really well for my students:

Dozen a Day – one exercise can count as a piece for the real littlies, otherwise a whole unit can count as a piece.

P-Plate piano (for students up to Grade 2 or so, they learn these super fast)

‘Getting to’ series: work through books that are 3-4 grades lower than the current exam level. For example, my Grade 8 student is doing stuff from Getting to Grade 4/5 and learning one piece in about 2/3 weeks.

‘Not Just Another Scale Book’ by Mike Springer. There are three levels and it’s fantastic practice for reading in keys.

The beauty of the ‘no winner’ situation is that for those who have fewer ticks than others, that is those who are coming ‘last’, there is no sense of defeat nor any inkling of giving up. Rather they look at the chart and see that it really is possible to be getting through all those pieces, they just have to spend a little more time practising.

Finally, I have found that the lessons are just so much for fun for me, hearing all this different repertoire all the time. I’ll keep you posted as to how they’re all progressing next term!

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Seven Essential Exam Tips

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Mon, 02 May 2011 12:05:22 GMT

With the May written exam series fast approaching, here is a series of tips that will help students and parents prepare for the big day…

1. Avoid cramming

We all know that knowledge quickly gained is knowledge quickly lost. Take these last two weeks to do steady revision each day – don’t leave it all to the night before!

2. Arrive at least half an hour early

The supervisors start calling the students in well before the allotted starting time. There’s a lot of sitting around to do so it’s best to expect this and have strategies for coping, like some mental revision.

3. Have adequate materials

At least 3 pencils and a good eraser are the absolutely essential materials, in a small clear zip lock bag. It’s also very important to bring the exam notice with your candidate number on it!

4. Use the reading time

This is a really important one. There is 10 minutes of reading time before the exam starts. In my opinion this is the most important 10 minutes of the whole exam.

Back in 2007 when I sat the Music Craft exams to see what they were like, I was really eager to see the exam content. As soon as the 10 minutes of reading time began, I was able to satisfy my curiosity! I read every question very carefully, thinking about the style of questioning and how my students might cope. Looking around, I could see that almost every other student in the room was sitting looking bored, not reading the paper, just waiting to be told to start writing.

Once we were allowed to start writing, it felt like I was having a second chance at answering the questions because I had already done them in my head. I found that there was much less chance of me misreading the question or making a silly mistake, and that I was able to ‘correct’ things along the way, sort of like proof-reading or checking, but different because I hadn’t actually written anything down the first time around. The students who had not read through the paper did not have this advantage.

5. Don’t rush

It’s not a race to see who can finish the exam the fastest. Also, don’t think that completing it quickly and giving yourself more time for checking at the end is a good strategy. It’s NOT. The more you rush, the more careless errors you will make, and it’s very difficult to pick these up (see tip no. 6).

6. Check your work

The really important things to check are that you’ve answered every question on the paper, that you haven’t accidentally skipped a page, and that all of your notes and words are clearly legible.

Checking all of your answers is important but will only work up to a certain point. Don’t we always ask someone else to proofread our own work? That’s because it’s very hard to see our own mistakes. By all means read over your paper at the end, but a much better strategy is to read the question carefully first (see tip no. 3) and complete each task slowly and thoughtfully (see tip no.4). This will give you a much better chance of getting a high mark.

If you find that you have finished early, even after having taken time to check your paper three times, you may ask to leave early if you are done. Some supervisors will not let students leave early no matter what time they finish, so you’ll just have to sit quietly. A more standard rule is to not let anyone leave within 15 minutes of the official end time – this is to avoid major distractions for people working right until the end.

7. Try not to hum in the aural exams

I have always told my students that they may not hum in the aural exams, that humming is definitely not allowed and that nobody else will hum. However, when I sat the Music Craft aural exams in 2007 I found that this was not the case. After every question was played it sounded like a swarm of bees had entered the room! This can be quite off-putting and sometimes it was necessary to hum softly just to overcome the sound of everyone else doing it. But if you can manage to block this out and hear everything in your head, this is a much better way to complete the exam.

Good luck for later this month!

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How Much Practice is Enough? Part 2

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:14:49 GMT

In Part 1 of How Much Practice is Enough?, I attempted to calculate, in real numerical terms, the amount of practice required to get through a certain AMEB exam. In this follow up article, I will explore some of the other issues surrounding exam preparation.

Preventing boredom

Boredom would have to be the no.1 reason for good exam preparation being thwarted. There is nothing worse than having the same four pieces to practise all year round, with only miniscule improvements each week, if any at all.

Exam repertoire is most definitely getting harder. Every teacher I speak to agrees with this; every three years or so the AMEB brings out a new series and – sure enough – the pieces are more difficult than the previous series. So it’s not surprising that the repertoire takes longer to learn, and that students can get bogged down perfecting one piece over a long period of time.

So what’s the solution? More repertoire. But obviously not more of the same super-high-standard repertoire… just some simpler pieces, say 3 or 4 grades lower, which can be learned in a couple of weeks (max!) and which provide variety and a sense of instant gratification (which we all know this generation thrives on J). My esteemed co-author and dear friend Abe Cytrynowski calls these shorter pieces ‘rocket’ pieces… they must be learned and mastered at rocket speed!

Rocket pieces are also a terrific way to keep motivation high during the holidays. See how many pieces you can surprise your teacher with in the first lesson back!

Piano for Leisure

The Piano for Leisure (PFL) syllabus is fantastic for those who either can’t put in as much time or who are somehow not quite efficient enough with the time they do put in (it would be fair to say that the 1500-hour total discussed in Part 1 applies mostly to the Piano syllabus rather than the Piano for Leisure syllabus).

The main differences in the PFL syllabus are that there is MUCH less technical work to do, and only three pieces to learn instead of five or six. But beware… the actual repertoire for each grade is just as challenging, so it’s definitely worth including lots of rocket pieces in the weekly routine!

Reaping the Rewards

When a student is working towards an exam, the result reflects the amount of practice undertaken by that student. Lots of practice usually results in a good mark, hardly any practice usually results in a poor mark. (Yes, there are some students who somehow manage to fluke an ‘A’ with very little practice, but this is rare, and dare I say somewhat annoying.)

Regardless of your result, if you go on to attempt a higher grade, you will need to do more practice. Yes, you may be a better pianist than you were a year ago, but it just doesn’t work to keep the amount of hours at the piano the same. So, to keep up with the challenges of the exam, you need to increase your practice time by about 15%[1] - and this will pretty much get you the same mark you got last year (since the exam itself is harder). The table in Part 1 takes this necessary increase into account.

Skipping grades

Skipping grades doesn’t mean you can skip the practice required. You still need to put the hours in.

Most students who find they can successfully skip a grade have probably put in much more than the average amount of practice for the previous grades they’ve attempted. For example, if you got a B+ in grade 4 and decide to skip Grade 5, this still requires around 350 hours of practice in order to secure a B+ in grade 6. That’s quite a lot to squeeze into one year.

Some students ‘scrape through’ their exams, with a C or C minus. This can be due to an unexpected breakdown on the day, which is unfortunate. But for most students who end up with this result, it is due to a deficit in the number of hours’ preparation for the exam.

As an example, let’s say you got a B- for your Grade 4 exam. You’re a little disappointed, but let’s assume you didn’t actually do your 140 hours[2]. Perhaps you only did 100. That amounts to a deficit of 40 hours.

Now you have 160 hours ahead of you for Grade 5, but it all seems a bit difficult because of the 40-hour deficit from Grade 4 (resulting in a poorer technique, less well developed sight reading skills, etc.). You’re hoping to do better than you did in 4^th grade. But if you don’t actually put in the full 160 hours for Grade 5, plus try to make up the deficit from Grad 4, you certainly won’t get a mark as good as the B- you got for Grade 4. You might end up with a C. And if from there you decide to forge on to Grade 6… well you can see how the pattern goes.

Easing the Pressure

Many students and parents assume that one year is ample time to prepare for an exam. However is there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking more than one year, and in many cases it works much better to take 18 months or so. This can work particularly well for students forging ahead into the higher-grade territory who are still incredibly busy and can’t quite adjust the weekly timetable to accommodate more practice. Averaging out one year’s worth of exam preparation over 18 months can really take the pressure off.

Conclusion

The whole point of doing exams is not just to go blindly on to higher grades & harder pieces without first having a critical look at what is involved, and whether you actually have the time and lifestyle structure to get the result you want.

If you are an extremely busy person with a wide range of co-curricular activities, it may by that music exams will take up too much of your time and will prevent you from pursuing all of your interests. However, this does not mean you should give up. Just because you don’t do exams, it doesn’t mean you’re not learning! Playing lots of pieces, learning to sight-read, playing by ear, developing technique, enjoying playing for others – these are the the goals of learning any instrument. It’s not about simply churning through the examination system.

So however you decide to spend your 1500 hours, whether it be on getting to Grade 8, or perhaps just playing ‘for fun’… make sure you enjoy them. You won’t get them back!

[1] 15% is only an estimate here, based on the increased amount of technical work in the Piano syllabus and the duration of the pieces. PFL technical work does not increase from year to year.

[2] As per the table in Part 1, which suggests the average minimum amount of practice required for each grade.

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Fifty Pieces in a Year: The Repertoire Conveyer Belt

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:10:51 GMT

This term I started the 50-piece challenge with my private students. That’s right, let’s see who can learn fifty pieces in one year!

At first all of their eyes popped out of their heads. Fifty pieces? In a year? Most of them couldn’t fathom learning fifty pieces in a lifetime, let alone 12 months!

So the first real challenge here was to calm everybody down and explain how it could be done. The idea was to churn through lots and lots of repertoire, but it didn’t all have to be difficult repertoire!

I set each student a minimum standard of repertoire they could learn. For example, a student working towards a 5^th grade exam would learn at least 5 or 6 pieces over the year at 5^th grade level – but the other 44 pieces could be anything from 1^st grade onwards, from a variety of different repertoire books. So, a few of their pieces are ‘long term’ projects (i.e. the exam pieces, at their grade level), and the rest are ‘rocket’ pieces, a term coined by my friend and colleague Abe Cytrynowski – pieces learned at the speed of a rocket!

I explained that in order to get through the 50 pieces, they would need to present at least one new piece each week, and in some weeks two new pieces. Perhaps the new pieces wouldn’t be completely learned and perfected in one week, but that’s ok… it would be like a conveyer belt of repertoire, in which new pieces keep coming on at the beginning, and once they’re learned they drop off the end (except for the long-term exam repertoire, which would stay on the conveyer belt for a long time!).

All of my students now have their names on a chart on the wall, with columns 1-50 next to their names. They get a dot for each new piece they start, and the dot is then transformed into a tick (i.e. it’s 'done') when the piece is finished.

The most intriguing thing about the 50-piece challenge chart is the element of competition it has inspired. Despite my assurances that the only person they had to worry about was themselves, each week they come along eager to see who’s in the ‘lead’, trying to figure out whether 5 dots and 4 ticks (that would be 5 pieces in progress and 4 pieces done and dusted) beats 4 dots and 5 ticks!

The system is easily tailored to individual students. A piece that is easy for one student will be a challenge for another, so it’s all a matter of find appropriate repertoire. For beginner pianists, even the simplest 8-bar separate hands exercise can count as a ‘piece’.‘Dozen a Day’ is great for this. The technique and repertoire books in the ‘Exploring Piano Classics’ series by Nancy Bachus are fantastic. For intermediate pianists, the ‘Getting To’ series is always great value, and remains so right up to Grade 5 – these books can serve as exam repertoire for a Prelim student and rocket pieces for the older sibling doing Grade 4 or so!

The 50-piece challenge has not only stimulated a healthy sense of competition, it has made sure the students don’t get into a ‘rut’ of learning just a few pieces over a whole year and becoming completely bored. Students love seeing their ‘dots’ transform into ‘ticks’! It has also done wonders for their sight reading skills, because they are constantly reading and experiencing new music. I highly recommend this fun activity!

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The Essential Skills of Sight Reading and Aural

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:52:22 GMT

Sight reading and aural skills are essential components of being a good musician. It is so important to develop these skills, and not to concentrate solely on performance skills. Good sight reading and good aural gives you access to any music, any time, for life.

Good sight reading is a skill that eludes many a good pianist (or any instrumentalist, but I’m going to focus on piano skills here), and frustrates both student and teacher. The first thing a student must understand is that sight reading is a completely separate skill to virtuoso performing. Practising a certain Mozart sonata over and over for 6 or 8 months will not be helpful when trying to sight read a different Mozart sonata.

Ask anyone who is a good sight reader how they came to be so. They will tell you: because they do it ALL THE TIME. There is no-one ‘born’ a good sight reader, just like there is no-one who is born able to read English fluently without having read a lot. The only way to become a good sight reader is to sight read constantly.

However, for beginner sight readers (who are sometimes also advanced pianists!) who are frustrated with their ability it is essential to break down the elements of sight reading. When we first start to read English, we are taught the alphabet and then how to recognise patterns. We start with simple repetitive readers and gradually move on to more complicated books. This is how we should address sight reading!

There are many factors involved in successful sight reading:

· Rhythm reading

· Random note reading

· Melodic pattern reading

· Chord reading

· Melody playing (combines elements 1-3)

· Fingering

· Two hands reading/playing (combines 1-4 and requires coordination)

· Playing with dynamics/articulation (combines all elements)

· Playing under pressure (because it’s most often tested in an exam!)

At first, each of these concepts must be presented separately, and then gradually combined. A student who can master the list above will be a fabulous sight reader. But this can only come with practice.

Many students believe it is not possible to practice sight reading. They maintain that once you’ve practised it, it’s not sight reading anymore! This is true, of course... but the student has missed the point. When we pick a book off the bookshelf and open it up to read, we have no idea what the words inside are going to be, we just start reading. ‘Practising’ sight reading means opening up a piano book and playing what’s on the page, and then moving on to another book, and another, and another. The more we do it, the faster we get at transferring what we see on the page into actual sound.

It is a similar story with aural training. Many students are not exposed to aural activities until 3 or 4 weeks before an exam, if at all. And they wonder why the tests are hard! Tragically, the aural component is often ‘written off’ as a small and unimportant part of the exam.

The irony of this situation is that we, as humans, all have innately good aural skills. How many people have told you they are tone deaf? There is almost nobody in the world who is actually tone deaf. If you speak with inflection, you have pitch! If you can change gears in your manual car, you can hear changes of pitch! When you differentiate between an English accent and an American accent, when you phone your mother and know instantly from her tone of voice you’ve done something wrong – these are all finely tuned aural skills, and we all have them.

So if we all have good innate aural skills, it’s really a matter of how developed our skills are in relation to music, and in particular in relation to the aural component in a practical exam.

There are many students who have great musical potential and ‘a good ear’. My son, for example, has near perfect pitch. It’s a little erratic, but most days he can name any note you play him on the piano. But when it comes to the aural component in an AMEB exam, this ability does nothing for him. He struggles quite a bit with the singing and memory activities and has to work really hard on them.

So aural skills must be practised, just like the repertoire and just like the sight reading, for an exam. It is a specific set of skills that is tested in the exam, and these must be addressed with specific exercises. Not only this, but it doesn’t work to address them the week before the exam! Aural cannot be crammed. Confidence in aural only comes with time, patience and above all... exposure to it!

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How much practice is enough? Part 1

s.coates@blitzbooks.com.au — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 03:38:35 GMT

Studies show that if you invest 10,000 hours of practice into pretty much any field, you will be a master in that field. This applies to musicians, sportsmen, chess players, computer geeks, anyone.

This comes from a book called ‘Outliers – The Story of Success’ by the economist Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a fascinating book that discusses all sorts of reasons why people become successful at what they do – accident of birth, opportunity, cultural legacy -but a big factor is how much time you put in, and he calls this the ’10,000 hour rule’.

My first reaction upon reading this was to mentally calculate how much piano practice I’d done in my life and figure out if and when I had ever reached the 10,000 hour mark. I kind of lost count somewhere in the memories of 3^rd year Uni, but I think that basically yes I have certainly invested 10,000 hours along the way, yet for some reason I am not a world-class concert pianist. Oh.

Is this a flaw in Malcolm Gladwell’s theory? I don’t think so. The point of becoming a master of something also has to do with the rate the 10,000 hours are accumulated. Child prodigies who practise 6 hours a day will have done it in 5 years; chess champions have similar, intense exposure to the game. Perhaps if someone had told me, back in primary school, to hurry up with my 10,000 hours, I might have had a shot at the world-class concert pianist scene. (But really, probably not.)

Parents who are paying for piano lessons don’t necessarily have aspirations for their children to become world-class concert pianists. However, many parents have aspirations for their children to become ‘really good’ pianists, or at least to have achieved a reasonably high level before they ultimately give up (to pursue medicine or law). So this got me thinking… how many hours of practice gets us to a ‘reasonably high level’? Is there a number, an actual numerical goal that we could work towards, that would get us to about 8^th grade piano?

Yes, there is. But before I discuss this number, the reason I’ve quoted 8^th grade as the ‘reasonably high level’ is because 8^th grade is so often perceived as ‘the end’. I have had many students who just want to get Grade 8 done because then they will be ‘finished’. This is not so. Pianists who have done 8^th grade have not ‘finished’ their piano study. There are diploma examinations after 8^th grade, if one still wishes to be in the examination system, and then of course there is the whole world of undergraduate and postgraduate study at University, piano competitions, overseas study… the list goes on.

But let’s get back to the number. In my teaching experience, the amount of practice needed, over a period of years, to be prepared enough for an 8^th grade standard of exam is… about 1,500 hours.[1]

1500 hours of piano practice certainly sounds like a lot, but really when you think about it, that’s only 2 hours’ practice every single day for just over 2 years… woo hoo! 8^th grade done in 2 years! How easy is that!

Oh, that’s right. Students don’t practice two hours every single day. In fact I’m lucky if most of my students practice two hours every single week. There’s always some good reason why practice hasn’t happened (see ‘The Seven Deadly Practice Excuses’). And teensy weensy beginner students certainly can’t practise that long. So here is a more realistic breakdown of how the 1500 hours would eventuate.

Let’s assume you are about 6 years old and have just taken up piano lessons. The teacher has asked that you practice 15-20 mins 4 times per week (perfectly reasonable). If you actually do this, after a couple of years or so you will have invested around 150 hours into piano practice.

150 hours is a good solid beginning. Now you and your teacher might be thinking about working towards a Preliminary Grade piano exam (so that you can join in with your friends in the playground when they are all talking about what grade they are up to).. So if we can say that 150 hours has seen us through the beginner stages, how much more practice do we need to put in to do well in a Preliminary grade piano exam?

A typical scenario is that of taking one year to attempt a piano exam. Most students who attempt Preliminary can do very well on 5 x 20 mins practices per week. Over a school year, allowing for holidays, this would probably amount to 80 hours of practice.

Now you are 9 years old, you’ve put in your 150 + 80 hours of practice and you’ve just received an A for your Preliminary exam. Well done! You are thinking about Grade 1. The requirements for Grade 1 are slightly more involved; there’s at least 15% more technical work to learn and the duration of the pieces is longer. So you will need to increase your practise time to about 90 hours for Grade 1 – assuming you still want to get an A!

If we take these scenarios and build up about 15% for each successive grade, we can work out a rough guide for how many hours it might take to achieve well in each grade and eventually reach the seemingly all-important and highly regarded GRADE 8. Please keep in mind that the following table, in fact this whole article, is a guide only!

Grade	Total Hours	Practices per week[2]	Minutes per practice
Prelim	80	4	25
Grade 1	90	4	30
Grade 2	105	4	35
Grade 3	120	5	30-35
Grade 4	140	5	35-40
Grade 5	160	5	40-45
Grade 6	185	6	40-45
Grade 7	220	6	45-50
Grade 8	250	6	50-60

The important point here for parents, students and teachers to have a realistic expectation of the commitment required to do well in exams. There’s no point forging ahead year after year without increasing the practice. Defining the preparation as a concrete number of hours’ practice needed can really help to assess whether you are ‘ready’ to take a particular exam.

The best way to keep track of how much practice has been done is to keep a practice log. By reviewing your logs regularly, you can see whether you’re doing enough preparation, or if you’re falling behind. Either way, it takes a lot of the guesswork out of wondering if you’ve done enough practice.

And one final word: This is a guide only!

Coming up in Part 2:

· Piano for Leisure vs Piano Syllabus

· Skipping grades

· Taking the pressure off preparing

· Preventing boredom with pieces

· Keeping motivated during the holidays

[1] The key word here is ‘about’. ABOUT 1500 hours. Not ‘exactly’ 1500 hours. One could argue that instead of ‘about’, it might be more appropriate to say minimum 1500 hours, but this is difficult to say. Everyone practices differently, with varying levels of efficiency, and this estimation is based on the practice habits and progress of the average Australian student. ((The key word here is ‘average’. Remember, 50% of the population is below average.)

[2] The average reasonably-motivated student should be practising 46 weeks of the year (40 school weeks + 6 holiday weeks). Practising for 6 ‘holiday’ weeks amounts to half the usual amount each week, or the same amount each week but only one week out of two.

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