Development Musical Concepts Gratification Reading Music Why Study Piano? OK, I understand the importance of piano and I am ready to start my child on.... PIANO VOICE AN INSTRUMENT

READING MUSIC

The process of learning music includes two major skill areas: 1) reading music and 2) playing the instrument. Learning to read music is as difficult as learning to read a language, and takes as many years. The first 1-2 years are spent simply recognizing notes (similar to the alphabet for reading), then the next 3-5 years are spent recognizing the patterns of the notes (similar to words in reading). Then, the student must spending several years learning enough music to be able to see larger patterns and recognize musical gestures and elements of form (smiliar to reading novels).

All musicians must learn how to read music, and for each instrument there are many musical elements that are unique to the instrument (e.g. two staves & chords for piano, bowing indications for string instruments, breaths for winds, etc.). But most importantly, the student must learn how to translate the musical symbols into actions that produce sound on the instrument. For the piano, the process is the simplest of all: depress the correct key and hold it for the note value.

On the first level, associating notes on the page with which key to depress is a very easy to grasp concept. On other levels, the mechanics of knowing how to produce the sound are equally as easy. On other instruments, knowing how to translate the notes into "pitches" on the instrument is far from easy to grasp - often involving several fingers or positions or placement of the hand. Further, the method of sound production can be also very difficult - with the student producing sounds that are unpleasant or even unidentifiable.

As a result, students have difficulty understanding "why" the sounds they make do not sound right. Is it a reading problem? Is it the pitch problem? Is it a timbral (sound production problem)? Is it something else? Beginning students cannot even fully grasp what these questions mean, and the teacher can often be at a loss to know exactly which area is causing the student the most confusion. As with a medical problem which must be diagnosed, it is necessary to test each symptom separately and isolate the variables. On the piano this is much easier to do - on other instruments this is quite difficult.