Teaching students who play by ear

[amelia.lcd]

Hi!
I teach beginner group piano at a high school. The main issue is that many of my students are only playing the pieces by ear. What activity could I do to get them to actually read the music? We do a lot of note naming exercises already. I would know what to do if it were just a single student, but I'm not sure how to keep the whole class engaged while enforcing this.

[jamienc]

Tough issue with young folks who shun the idea of notation, but with good reason. It is a language, after all, and they probably want to just play what they hear in the quickest way possible. Learning notation can sometimes “restrict” the creative influences that govern the exploratory nature of learning music without the need for understanding it from a bunch of lines and dots. Heck, almost all of our cultural music in America was learned by rote, and then those performers just played what “sounded good” without the foggiest idea of the theory behind it.

Anyway, one of the more useful tools in a group piano class is the ability to pair students and have them collaborate. Perhaps have them work together as pairs or small groups to transfer what they know by ear to some simple notation of melody and lead-sheet chord structures so they can begin the process of documenting the things they hear and understanding how it looks on paper. One can take a small melodic phrase and try to figure out the rhythm and pitch arrangement, and the other can figure out the chords. Then as they progress, they can duet with one on one part and one on another. When finished, they can trade their chosen tune with another group to see if they can decipher the notation, learn it, then compare performances. It at least gets them thinking about how others may perceive the melody/chords and how their interpretation from the actual music relates to the ones who transcribed it. Hope this helps!

[ranjit]

With adults, I would probably just give them harder music which they can't play by ear. I don't know if that would work with children, though.

[quantum]

I would continue to develop their ear skills, and gradually introduce challenges in which the exclusive playing-by-ear may not be the best solution. 

Try introducing transcription by ear to your students.  Use music they have strong interest in.  Have them first transcribe without writing, meaning they will have to remember all the details.  There will come a point where trying to remember all the details of transcription will become overwhelming, or lead to inconsistencies in recreating detail.  At that point suggest learning to write things down, might make the task easier. 

You might also bring up the concept of collaborative music making.  What happens if a student wants to collaborate on a music project with someone else?  Being able to read notation, gives a common standardized platform for both musicians to work. 


Give your students examples of where having the skill to read music, has helped you in some way. 

[pianocavs]

In order to master the piano several knowledge and skills are required, such as:
   Knowledge of music theory.
   Knowledge of repertoire.
   Technical ability.
   Reading scores.
   Interpretation.
   Play by ear.
   Improvisation.
   Transposing the music.
   Composition.
   Etc.

My approach would be to make clear to the students that, if they only play by ear, they are having limited musical training.

In a music piece we can identify its “Theme” and its “Development”.
It is relatively easy to play an approximation to the theme by ear... but it is very difficult to play by ear the development of the music that the composer wrote.

Playing the theme by ear is equivalent to playing what the student understood.
Playing by reading the scores is equivalent to playing what the composer wrote.

A good idea could be to awaken the students' curiosity to understand what the composer wrote, and to contrast it with what they understood.
For this, the student will have to read the scores.
Surely the student will discover that the composition is, by far, much richer than what he thought at first.

Another idea is to motivate the students to cover all aspects of the piano, and not limit themselves to just one aspect such as playing by ear.
That could be a kind of challenge in search of excellence.