My affiliation with the piano…..
Playing the piano has always been a childhood dream until two years ago, when I took the big first step to making it a dream no more by purchasing a piano to sit in my then-newly renovated and spacious studio unit. An original exam-grade Yamaha, it looks so brand-new that it is hard to believe it is a 25-year old second-hand percussion piece. Its fetching exterior only amplifies the beautiful sound it produces, one that is stately, steady and seductive in its own right. My piano … is simply a love at first sight.
Things then fall into place quite naturally with the ownership of such a handsome piano. One of my ex-students JM who holds a Grade 8 certification, visits me during Chinese New Year in 2010 and enthusiatically volunteers to be my piano teacher when I announced that I was looking for one.
My first lesson was the best, not that my piano teacher slackened in the teaching efforts later on, but that first class provided the confidence and affirmation I needed to tell myself that I can and will soon fulfil a long-time childhood dream.
Learning the piano has proven to be a great learning journey for me. From the merry kick-off of the first lesson, what followed was a fruitful quarter-year of picking up fingering basics, scales and chords, and simple sightreading. I was making rather good progress, moving on from playing familiar songs like Joy To The World and Scarborough Fair to more challenging pieces like The Entertainer and Amazing Grace less than a year later. In my second year, under the tutelage of another piano teacher – a very experienced one (after my ex-student went MIA), I went on to learn longer classical compositions like Fur Elise and familiar Richard Clayderman’s pieces.
The science of piano
For every piano piece I have learnt, I could memorise the fingering and sequence of notes and could play without looking at the score. How am I able to accomplish this? Well, it is really a simple case of pure brain and muscle memory. Thus my left and right fingers move across the keys in a synchronised sequence that the brain remembers and after rounds of practice, it becomes something like a conditioned reflex – or “autopilot”. It’s very much like learning to ride a bicycle or swimming – wonders of the human brain!
There is thus no need for me to sightread ie. to read the notes, interpret the score and play them there and then. However, when I ventured into contemporary songs a few months ago, I hit steep learning barriers. The notes in such pieces do not form much of a recognisable regular pattern whatsoever, so it was difficult to remember their sequence and much less the associated synchronised fingering. I have to rely on sightreading, which I am poor at. It turned out that I could only play the pieces at half their normal speed, which was demoralising. My piano teacher advised that I should learn to sightread without relying on memory.
Whilst endeavouring to connect with my “musical” side (if it exists at all) through the piano, in retrospect, I have as one trained academically in science, marvelled at and pondered over the power of the human brain in its ability to synchronise the simultaneous reading of two different lines of notes (one line for the right hand – the melody, and one for the left – the chords) and simultaneously translating them to different fingering sequences in both hands that operate in synchrony. How is the human brain capable of such a feat?
History has evidenced the rise of music geniuses like Mozart, and it is generally accepted that such geniuses are not born but made – from early childhood, or are they? if the former is true, does it mean we can nurture our children to be music prodigies if we expose them to music from a very tender age, or even before they are born.
To throw light on these issues, brain research is necessarily the key.
In my search for answers, I came across this online book called Fundamentals of Piano Practice that provides piano learning material free-of-charge, and claims its contents enable learning of the piano at a rate 1000 times faster than any other method. My interest aroused, I explored the book and found a few interesting sections that linked piano-playing to other knowledge realms.
In one section on Principles of Learning, it relates the lesser ability of adults to pick up things like language to lower degree of adaptability of the adult brain as “wiring systems are finalised” whereas children aged between 2 to 8 years learn new things faster because their brains are still developing as synaptic connections form and if nurtured properly, will demonstrate a huge absorptive capacity. In this regard hence, the brain plays a major role in the acquisition of psycho-motor skills like piano-playing.
More to come ……
syenp76 