How to b e a concer tpianist -- learning versus doing, Dave Thomas

[Bob]

Well duh, here it is.  I guess we missed this informative video the whole time.   Haha. 

Watching it now, but I'm not expecting much.

How to be a concert pianist - Learning versus doing | Dave Thomas | TEDxEastsidePrep
8,947 views

119

6

SHARE


 
TEDx Talks

[Bob]

Caught my attention a little more.  Basic performance ideas if nothing else.

[Bob]

Also a bit interesting.

Lots of people looking at you (on stage)... because you're prey.

[keypeg]

That's 55 minutes of videos to watch, without having any idea what they are about before watching.  I've seen the first one before.  The second, I skipped forward a lot.  What I caught was:
- work backward from the end (learned that already; useful)
- know the structure of your piece (if you don't know this, you should)
- dunnno what the improvising one's way out of Ah que dirais-je maman, renamed Twinkle, was meant to teach, because I didn't have time to go through the video.
I didn't watch the 2nd one.

The first one with the title about becoming a concert pianist: He is a computer programmer, says he teaches (programming?), no idea whether he plays piano. As he presents the findings of the commissioned researchers (why didn't they ask the pilots and those training them?  they would have had first-hand insights), it rests on assumptions about how people learn: first being told what to do, finally moving on to global pictures and intuition.  This is a very narrow view, as there are various ways of learning.  For one thing, there are global learners who are non-linear.  Despite the attention-grabbing title, it has nothing to do with becoming a concert pianist, or a pianist.  I also suspect that the conclusion is wrong, namely that concert pianists do their thing without thinking.  Yes and no to that.  The musicians I talked to, and teachers who teach at that level, all talk of putting thought and study into what you do, and that this doesn't stop.

Bob, can you mention a few of the things in these videos that you have found useful or noteworthy?  55 minutes is a lot of time to spend.