Ears and Note Part 1

For a time I have been thinking about the idea that here, in my area literacy is overrated when it comes to teaching young children English. This reminds me of the way playing musical instruments is taught.

A childhood memory

When I was a child we used to visit my mom's cousin, Aunt Olga and her family for a couple of days every two months or so. Aunt Olga had a daughter, who had a piano, which I just loved. I enjoyed playing it. After a time I was able to play tunes familiar from TV, children's songs were so easy for me to play, adults around were amazed. No wonder my parents decided to buy me a piano and enroll me in the local music school.

The first year was a preparatory year, it was called solfege. We actually learned folk songs, solfege, we clapped different rhythm patterns, and we learned to read and interpret notes, I mean musical notation, sheet music.

It was in the second year when I started to attend piano lessons. I was able to play music on the piano and I enjoyed making music then.

My very first piano lesson was the total disappointment. I had been practicing hard because I wanted to show my piano teacher what I was already able to play. To my surprise she was not interested.

First thing I was NOT even allowed to open up the fall board of the piano, I was NOT allowed to touch the keys!

After this first shock there came the others. To cut a long story short, in the third year of my piano studies I decided to give it up. I hated to practice, all I got was just the notes on the paper, the five lines. My initial enjoyment of music was gone.

Now I know that learning music from musical notation is very important. I am absolutely sure the process of learning how to turn sheet music into an order of pushing different keys with my various fingers contributed to the development of my early childhood brain and all, but what I lost was music. Wasn't it music to be learned? I don't know.

About two decades later I met a beautiful young pianist, mother of one of my students. She occasionally took one-to-one English lessons with me and once I asked her about her career as an artist. It turned out that she had the very same piano teacher as I used to have, causing her the same feelings of disappointment. She was an extremely talented little girl, so she was not discouraged at all. She would put the storybooks on the piano and played the pictures of the stories. She did NOT lose music.

Now jump to my rebel teenager years. I fell for heavy metal music, consequently I wanted to play the guitar.

of course I had my electric guitar, later an over-driven amp and no sheet music. All we could rely on was our ears. It WAS music, as much as thrash metal can be labelled music. This was something to enjoy. Later of course I took classical guitar and jazz guitar lessons whereby my skill of interpreting musical notes was an advantage, but the clear aim was to play real music and that was definitely characterised by using ears! Just to make sure I started learning classical guitar at the same time (I was convinced that the traditional way is necessary). My classical guitar teacher didn't even play the piece to be learned, not once did I see him play the guitar! (I admired him anyway, he was a contrabass player as well and he often played some jazzy tunes on the contrabass.)

Surprisingly I haven't become a popstar, not even a jazz guitarist, but an English teacher.