Re: Technique recommendations for 6 year old


news wrote:
> Anyone have some technique recommendations for a 6 year old who has been
> playing on a portable for 2 years and is in the Thompson Grade 2 Book.
>
> She practices about 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week (a bit reluctantly).
> She has no problem playing notes and timing is very good.
>
> She was playing something at school and the music director told her mother
> the child's technique was "Very bad, she'll never be able to play Classical
> correctly (not that she's ever expressed any desire to do so), and she
> needs to go into a Boston Conservatory (about 10 miles away) for weekly
> lessons to rectify this".
>
> Just seemed to be a little over the top.
And it was. The problem here is that many teachers try to use the same
teaching methods for students of different ages when it is not
appropriate to do so.

In the case of a child this age, if you took a high quality and
interesting, but simple piece of classical music and had her listen to
this "one single piece" (not lots of different pieces at once) several
times a day for a couple weeks, the first many times a child this age
heard the music it would have little meaning or relevance to her/him.
However, the more the child listened to the peformance of the
particular piece multiple times per day over a couple week period, a
child's brain at this age would begin to make sense of all the patterns
in the music, not to mention that the child would begin to make more
and more sense of the music itself, meaning that it would start to have
symbolic meaning and evoke emotional response. As the music itself
begins to make sense and carry on more meaning to the child, the easier
it will be for the child to learn to how to produce the music herself.
This is what I personally believe should be focused on at this age, and
at some point a transition should be made to more formal and technical
approaches to learning the instrument.. In any case, at six years old
it is rather silly and presposterous to proclaim that one either has no
future in music or needs serious "help". The brain is a sponge at this
age, and with the right stimulation and exposure, talent can arise
where no talent was present to start with.

One has to remember that the score is really only a blueprint for the
music itself. The appreciation, love and understanding for the music
itself should actually precede elaborate formal training, and at just
six years of age, this is probably something that should be focused on.


I actually went through the red book "Thompson" series when I was
child, and I found it incredibly boring and didn't make much progress
at the beginning. Most of the pieces are old fashioned little diddies
for children born in the 1920's it seems. I think it's terrible.

Then all of a sudden I started listening to a tape that had Beethoven's
"Fuer Elise" at around eight years of age, and I listened to it over
and over again, almost becoming obsessed with it. All of a sudden,
everything made sense. My teacher gave me a copy of the score, telling
me that it was way beyond my level, and then was flabbergasted at how
fast I learned it, and how well for my age. You see, I had basically
memorized the music in my head after listening to it so much and had
also developed a deep appreciation of the piece. After that, it was
all a matter of getting my little fingers to match the music as I heard
it internally, using the score to facilitate the process.

Try this as an experiment. Take something beautiful, simple, and
mystifiying like Chopin's fourth piano prelude. Get a decent recorded
performance of it. Have her listen solely to this single prelude
several times per day over a couple week period. Then introduce her
to the score, making little edits as necessary for fingering purposes
for small hands, and see what happens. See if she doesn't learn the
piece much faster, and make much more musical sense of it than she has
with other musical pieces in the past. ( I guess knowing how to use the
pedal would be helpful in this regard first, though. Hopefully she has
been introduced to it and can reach the pedal some way. )

.

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