With your 3 and 4 y.o. students, how do deal with their tiny weak fingers? Do you work on correct curved fingers at all? I've heard of various "beginner" hand shapes, including playing on black keys with a closed fist, or braced finger (thumb supporting knuckle of 3rd finger).
You would be surprised how strong their fingers are!
I do not work on fingers at all. I do not even bother with posture. The fact is that at this age they have a wonderful nice posture, and natural co-ordination takes over in not time at all. Most posture problems occur later as a result of social interaction at school.
Teaching at such a young age must follow the child’s impulses. So my attitude is to let them do whatever they want at the piano. It is all right to play with fists, arms, even feets! I do not regard it as a matter of having “fun” (although this is of course important), but as a matter of “exploration”. (And what could be more fun than exploration?)
If you let them explore the piano, after a while they will exhaust what they are able to do at the piano. They will then ask for ideas. This is the moment when they are ready for learning. So the important principle for this age group is to not rush things. If they have not asked for it, they are not ready for it, they are not interested in it, and therefore they will not listen to you. They will actually resent you for trying to stop their exploration. Mind you, I am talking about 3 –4 year olds, not 10 –12 years old.
So let me give you an example: Three year-old uses her fists to play. She is having a great time. What I would like to do is to have her play the black notes, so that I can play a duet with her. She is not at all interested in this, since she does not want to share the piano with me. As I try to make an accompaniment to her fist playing she pushes me away quite angrily. That is fine. I let her continue with her exploring which goes on for a couple of months. Meanwhile she sees me playing with older students, and she sees me playing as well. After a couple of months she is finished with her fist exploration. How do I know? Because now she is using her fingers (clumsily) and she is trying to imitate what she sees the other students (and me) doing. In short, she has become
dissatisfied with her achievement so far. At this point - typically – she will ask for more instruction – and even if she does not ask, she will accept it. So as the teacher you must be truly sensitive to this momentous turning points. On the other hand you can simply try to teach new stuff from time to time. If she is not ready she will not do it. In this age group imposing will not do much good.
Once she goes on to “finger stage” I will teach by rote very simple tunes she knows by ear already (like nursery rhymes). Perhaps the most frequent “mistake” is to contort fingers like passing the 3rd over the 4th. Even this sort of thing I do not correct. Historically such fingers were quite common in the Baroque period – in fact no one used thumbs! J. S. Bach is reputed to have been the first one to use thumbs. I will let her get on with it, because my view of technique is that fingers are the least important link in the chain. A
natural co-ordination for the playing apparatus is far more important and in my experience pre-school children all have this natural co-ordination if you will just let it develop.
The philosophy here is that a child of this age will not be ready for new learnings until she has exhausted all the possibilities of the current learning and is dissatisfied with it. The best way to accelerate this process is to expose the child to another child of the same age but more advanced in the piano. Children of this age will not care how well you , the teacher can play. But they will care about what other children of the same age can do (hence the great motivational power of student’s recitals).
When they start learning their first proper pieces (using all fingers, right and left hand), to start with I let them use whatever fingers, positions they want. Then I show them an “easier” way. Correct fingering and hand position are “correct” exactly because they further facility. It should be easier and more natural to use the correct technique than the incorrect one. So there should be no problem for a child to switch from an incorrect to a correct technique. If there is a problem, then it is worth investigating if the technique you are trying to impose to a child is indeed correct, or if it is just a relic, a tradition that you were taught to be correct. (For instance, Hanon is completely incorrect – sorry, Hanon fans). This requires for instance trying to do the passage in the same way the child is doing it. Trying to understand why they do it this way, and not your way. Unless you cannot understand this, you will not be able to modify it. And who knows, may be they are doing it in a better way! In any case, if you do it their way, and they n you do it your way, and your way is much easier, then they should experience the same ease, and therefore doing it your way (the correct way) should pose no problems at all.
Chilren of 6 – 7 years-old are another matter altogether. Exposure to school may have already resulted in all sorts of body armour and defective co-ordinations (caused by the process of socialization and the desire to “fit in”) that will need to be addressed. But at 3 – 4 you can pretty much trust their natural co-ordination.
At this point I want to make two digressions. They are long disgressions but they give you a glimpse of what is the background to what I have just said.
1. Think about walking. No one teaches children to walk. No one worries about the perfect toe position, or the perfect foot placement. We just let the children get on with it. They want to get on with it because they see everyone around them doing it. We also know that the “technique” for walking is really about the motor co-ordination of all the parts of the walking mechanism (feet, calves, legs, hips, swinging arms, upper body posture, etc.). We do not fret over the minutiae of all these movements. We trust that we are all wired for it, and that it will develop naturally. The only need for interference is if the child has either a physical problem (e.g. badly formed bones/hips – which will require medical intervention) or an environmental problem (have you ever heard of Kaspar Hauser, a 19th century guy that was chained to the floor of an attic since his childhood, and as a consequence could not walk properly?) in which case re-education is necessary. But these are very rare cases. I doubt you ever encounter them. The common cases are that children will learn to walk by trying it over and over again, and in the process they will develop the perfect co-ordination. Likewise, with piano playing, as they try over and over, they will develop naturally all the necessary co-ordination
provided they have enough examples around her just like they have enough examples of walking. That is why at this age group intensive constant exposure to piano playing is so important – far more important than lessons (in the usual sense).
I will give you an alternative example. Walking of course is easy because everyone does it. But what about swimming? Swimming is far less common as an everyday experience than walking. Yet everything said so far applies. Children from fishing communities can swim as easily as they can walk for the simple reason that they have been exposed as much to swimming as they have been to walking.
The conclusion is simple. Do you want to teach a three year-old to play the piano? You must supply constant exposure to piano playing. In fact, these days you can see 3-4 year old confidently using computers, just because they are now so much a permanent fixture in the home landscape. It follows that you will get nowhere with a scheme of 30 minutes lessons weekly. The best scheme for this age group is to have them hang around the piano room, so they go there for five minutes whenever they want, and so that they see you giving lessons to other children. How the hell are you going to do that? Well, in my own case the 3-4 years old are family (one is my daughter, the other is my niece and the third one is a friend of both who is often at the house).
If they are formal students who are not intimate friends/family, then you will have to enlist the help of the parents (they must be willing, if they are not you better not take on the child). The classical method to do that is of course the Susuki system: You teach the parents, the parents teach the child. I must say however that in my experience most parents are not willing to do it.
2. The best pedagogical method is historical. Have you ever heard the sentence “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Think about the human foetus. In its ontogenical development it recapitulates the whole evolutionary history (phylogeny): it starts as amoeba (a single cell), proceeds to a multicelular organism, then it becomes a fish (with gills even) to finally become human. What is the relevance of this for teaching /learning? The relevance is that when children learn they recapitulate the whole history of learning. Think about maths. What was the first thing humans learned about maths? To count and then to add. Subtraction came much later, and caused a lot of problems. Therefore you can expect a child to have facility in counting and adding but to experience problems in subtraction, since this is
what happened historically. Likewise, multiplying is an easy concept, while the reverse, division (or fractions) took a long time for mathematicians to figure out how to do it. Therefore a child will follow the same historical development in her personal development. In maths, reverse operations always represented big turning points that caused a lot of problems, but once they were solved they expanded knowledge enormously. Hence addition was not a problem, but its reverse subtraction was. The solution gave us relative numbers and the possibility of credit cards and negative bank balances. Multiplication was easy, but division was a big problem (irrational numbers finished with Greek maths who was unable to incorporate them into their system), that once solved gave us real numbers. Exponentiation (powers) was a natural extension of multiplication, but its reverse (roots) was terribly problematic (ever heard of the impossibility of the square root of a negative number?) but once solved, it gave us logarithms and most importantly the theory of complex (imaginary) numbers, where square roots of negative numbers are perfectly possible.
The point here is: if you are going to teach maths successfully you must follow history because
the difficulties people found historically are the difficulties people will find personally.
Yet in the 60s some smart alec decided that the way to teach maths was to do it
logically and start with set theory. Do you remember that? Now set theory was a solution to a very complicated problem of 20th century maths. By teaching maths starting with set theory you destroy the historical sequence. You present a solution to a problem that no one cares for – or understands. Result: in one generation educators succeeded in destroying completely the teaching of maths. Here in the UK the situation is so bad (no one wants to do, or knows how to do maths), that the government is considering paying students who are willing to take graduate courses in it.
What does this have to do with the piano? Everything. But it is easier to show it in maths than on the piano. Both theory and technique teaching should follow the historical method. You will not understand a minor scale unless you understand modes – since modes preceded it historically. You will not understand a melodic minor scale, unless you understand that historically melody preceded harmony. Any musical structure that you have right now is the solution to a problem, and you will not appreciate the solution unless you understand the problem. Counterpoint is the answer to a problem posed by its predecessor: plainsong. The classical style is a solution to the problems posed by counterpoint. The romantic style is a solution to problems posed by the Classical style, and so on. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to learn repertory in a historical order.
And of course folk music precedes it all, so little children should start with folk music and nursery rhymes. And once these become unsatisfactory (problem) you must supply them with the solution. It is their awareness of the problem coupled with their appreciation of the solution that makes learning fast, possible and permanent.
And all this applies to technique as well. I suggest that you get familiarised with things like historical fingerings. And historical pedagogies, since every child will follow the historical pattern. Hanon suggested exclusive use of the fingers lifting them high. Every child will start by trying to use fingers only. thumbs started being used only in the 18th century, so you can expect children not to use their thumbs straightaway.
Only when they become aware that there is a problem, that is, what they are doing is not working, will they be ready for the solution (co-ordinated use of the whole playing apparatus).
So, if you want to teach technique you must familiarise yourself with the ideas of these historical pedagogues (in order), each proposing a solution to a problem created by the preceding one:
C.P.E. Bach – Hanon – Czerny – Deppe – Breitkopf – Matthay – Fielden – Whiteside – Fink/Sandor/Grindea
This gives you pretty much the historical development of technique, but most importantly that is the pattern that a child will follow in his/her personal development. A lot of students get personally stuck on any of these levels, so as far as I understand , my role as a teacher is to assist a student in overcoming personal limitations by pointing out the next historical/personal step.
Best wishes,
Bernhard
Topic: What method to use for very young students