How piano is learned: some thoughts

[Chris_Repertoire]

What goes on when you are learning to play piano?  As an avid psychology student and player it's been something I've been giving a-lot of thought to.  Here are some thoughts on it.

Comments are welcome

When you first start playing piano, in five finger position, you see a note on a page and you have to think effortful of what finger matches up to it.  As you gain more experience (the more time you make the connection with note X and finger X) the more automatic it becomes and the less thought you have to put into it until you get to the point where there is hardly any conscious effort in it at all.

From there you learn to move out of five finger position and establish a "mental map" of where your hand is on the keyboard and which finger maps onto which note.  From there it's just learning more notes until you have a real large command of the keyboard.

I'm not saying there aren't a ton of other important skills that are developed as you learn to play piano. Speed, rythym etc - but I think note familiarization really lies behidn them all.

As a final note I mean by all this how you learn piano from scratch and advance to a reasonably skill.  I don't mean to say that virtouso pianism or an extremely high level of skill is due to just having an ability to find notes fast - but I think that always has to come first.

[m1469]

Yes, ...okay.  I would be interested to hear more thoughts, developed further?

Just a thought here...

I would be highly cautious of, and actually deterring one of, thinking about learning any part of the topography of the piano in terms of fingers matching up to certain notes (as well as relying on finger numbers).  This may work for the trumpet, where there are only 3 valves, but the piano has 88 keys.  Even if we played with all of our toes too, we could not give athoritative finger (or toe  ) assignments to play specific notes.

Mental map must be estbalished in suitable increments before giving a command to the fingers (or atleast simultaneously).

Perhaps you would elaborate on exactly what you are trying to say?

m1469