Listening CDs

I have to 'train' my 9 years old son during our 6 weeks vacation, and his teacher gave him 4 new pieces to prepare during that time.

We have the CDs of all four pieces ( easy Bartok, or Schumann etc... ) and my son enjoys listening to the recordings before learning the piece.

He never told his teacher that he has about recording for all the pieces he learns.

Is it a very bad habit to listen to the pieces you are learning ?

No. A pianist will naturally tend towards the greatest playing he knows, which is all the more reason to listen to great recordings. It may take a while to gain individuality this way, but it will come.

The teacher will kill you both for listening to the CD of the pieces the kid must learn.

Especially for a kid. Kids cheat. Instead of 'deciphering' the piece, the rhythms (the values of the notes - the 'damned' dotted notes, the triolets, the trillos or mordents), he plays them by ear.

Of course, in time, we play pieces we already heared and liked, but kids are not yet allowed to do so. On the other hand the kid should be exposed to music of the same kind as, for example, antique dances if he is going to play Bach. One cannot learn to speak if he does not listen. Listening to music helps the kid understand 'phrasing', rhythm and , possibly, be a pleasant passtime for him .

Michel de Nostredame

My teacher doesn't mind. She actually plays the pieces I'm learning for me.

Which is not the worst rthing to be able to do. Of course, if you also want to learn to read music, don't listen, or perhaps listen AFTER you played the piece some times so you can spot errors.

Bye, Christof

Michel makes very good points. I was about 12 or 13 when I started with a new teacher and we agreed a 'policy' whereby I would not listen to a work while studying it (I may or may not have heard it in the past), but I could listen to works by the same composer, which he encouraged strongly. We would discuss various approaches of how bigger names would approach the work using specific passages

This would be very true if you want your kid to grow up and be a professional accompionist. Sight reading is a skill that some people develop very well. Learning how to play music is an art. If your teacher is mad that your child is listening to the music before he learns it, I would say it's time to find a new teacher, unless your child is using these pieces to develop the SKILL of sight reading. Some people, most of whom can't play by ear, think that if kids learn to play by ear that they will never learn how to read. This is simply not true. I used to be friends with someone who was 15, and made $30/hr accompaning choirs both on piano and organ. He could sight read better than most of the professional accompanists in the town that I lived in. He could sit down and play stuff he heard by ear too, and I garentee you that he listened to the mozart and beethoven piano concertos that he was working on at the time before he learned them.

Also, if the way you are learning how to read music is by 'deciphering' the notes one at a time, you are never going to be able to sight read.

Sam

Samuel, obviously my post was not clear. I was not talking about playing by ear versus reading music. What I was saying was that any kid can play by ear 'Allouette, gentile allouette', but if they did not hear it before, they would have a hard time figuring the rhythm. The first problem kids have is when they must play dotted notes ( and then the teacher tells them to count 'one, two and..bang'.

This is inevitable and I already discussed this sometime ago.

Why mix 'sight reading' in every post. 'Sight reading' is the ability to acceptably perform a piece at 'prima vista' (first view). What we are discussing here is reading and learning a piece. And I think I wrote that by 'DECIPHERING' I meant 'parsing' the lines, the rhythms, the values of the notes. If you heard Bartok Romanian dances that you could , from first trial play the first measures, otherwise it would take you some time to figure out the rhythm.

BTW, I also said in a past post, that people familiar with Chopin, play the 'ornaments' from their memory and do not take the time to make the 'mathematical calculations' needed. So they play them 'ala Horowitz' or someone else they listened to.

The end.

There you go again, Radu. TS

Chel, let's get down to earth. The 9 year old kid was assigned a few pieces to learn. He was given the score and was supposed to read, practice and learn the pieces. He must train himself in understanding the articulation, rhythms, dynamics. As written on the score. And not to come thirty years later to RMMP and ask what DC AS means,what is 'cresc.' or what is the snake before the chords, or what the number 3 means above a group of three notes . Or even if 'ritard.' should be Politically correct replaced with 'mentally challenged'. His assignment was not a 'critical review of different interpretations of Medtner piano concerto as played by Sonarat vs. Martin Paton'. If he listens to the recordings, a few times, how on earth would the teacher know that the kid does not play by 'imitation' ?

I have a 'real' example. My kids listened to some Beatles songs and learned to sing them. I bought them the complete Beatles book . What they played, with the score in front of them, had little to do with the written transcription. They used the score as a cue for the melody ( as 'neumes', but could not read and understand the actual written notes values (of course, the transcriptions are not always correct...). Moreover, in some Chopin pieces (Waltzes and Mazurkas), one gets carried away by his mental audio memory ( from CDs) and tends to skip rests.

Michel de NostreDame

I have to wonder to what extent these are so. In theory could attempt to learn to read/speak a language 'from first principles' by knowing how to pronounce each letter/syllable/word and then build from there to reading whole sentences. This would be 'deciphering' the language.

But it is clearly more reasonable, especially at the first learning stages, to hear how other people read the same text you have in front of you. It boosts your ability to connect the symbols to the 'product', which is the spoken word.

Intuitively I'd think the same should be valid for learning to read music. Sure, you learn what each of the symbols mean, and in principle should be able to decipher the whole thing. Wouldn't it be easier if you knew what it should sound like?

I can understand that one can take the approach of 'I know what this sounds like, therefore I don't really need to read it anymore'. But one could also say 'now that I know what it sounds like, I can learn to read it better'.

Hey, I do that too! If I don't have the CD handy, I go to www.prs.net and get MIDI samples. My teacher sometimes plays a little of each piece too.

After I am rather proficient with the piece and have made my choices on how to play it, I then sometimes listen to the recording(s) critically! I seldom end up using the recording as feedback which changes the way I play the piece - it is more of an educational experience for noticing the many nuances in the performance that I otherwise wouldn't catch (if I hadn't worked on the piece).

It helps me more on the next piece of the same kind that I approach rather than on that piece itself