Music lessons out of tune with talent

WHY do most students learning a musical instrument give up? Is it really true that they just don’t have the ‘talent’ for it? Take the piano: for the first two years, they play nursery rhymes from an archaic book and if that doesn’t bore them to tears, then they are ready for exams. Starting with Grade 1, they learn three short pieces. For Grade 2 one year later, they learn another three pieces. By Grade 4, this boring process of playing three songs a year and never forming a connection with music can end with the student stopping, much to the dismay of their parents, who have invested in a few years of lessons. Worse still, they are unable to retain anything they have learned because they only replicated notes for exams as if the piano were a typewriter. The music exam system is broken. Grade 8 is seen as a status symbol, when the reality is most youngsters who get that far still wouldn’t be able to play Happy Birthday by ear at a friend’s party. A functional, more connected musical training is needed. The music industry bears no resemblance to how music is taught. Success across all genres consists of a rare artist who was lucky enough to go their own way. Be it Elton John, Jools Holland or finding out what Ed Sheeran has in common with Vivaldi, piano exams don’t reflect what really happens in music. The way Elton scribbles his chords above Bernie Taupin’s lyrics to create memorable songs is a revelation of musical creativity that can be studied. The same applies to classical music. Chopin used to jam on the piano in saloon bars and Mozart would improvise for long periods, like a jazz musician, in his piano concertos. If Mozart were to show up at a piano competition today, he would be so experimental that the gatekeepers would kick him out. Likewise, Chopin wouldn’t win his own piano competition these days. The real barriers to playing a musical instrument have been created by an outdated system. This was one of the reasons why I founded the Contemporary School of Piano a decade ago. This is not a counter-culture argument. The design of the piano reveals clues on how it can be taught. Ask a Grade 8 piano student to jam on the E flat blues scale and they would most likely say: ‘I never learnt jazz.’ Yet the E flat blues is all the black keys with an added A. Try doing it the next time you sit down at a piano and you’ll impress your friends. Chopin used to teach the B major scale first because it’s a better shape for the hands. But education today puts theory ahead of practicality, so intuitive scales have to wait until Grade 5 onwards, when many students have already given up. That’s a lack of strategy, not talent!