How many piano teachers are there? I am certain that nobody knows or could even
hazard a realistic guess. Teaching piano
is about the most comprehensively unregulated profession in the world, and
amassing realistic statistics as to how many people do it is made all the more
difficult because it is also a leading contributor the black economy in many
(most…all?) of the countries where piano teaching takes place. But while a great many piano teachers collect
fees for teaching the piano of which the taxman remains blissfully unaware, the
issue is more to do with intentions than finance.
In short, why is there such a huge and international
demand for piano lessons, and why has that demand not abated as the piano has
lost its once ubiquitous place in society?
When teaching amateurs to play the keyboard began – we
can pinpoint the date to around 1716 when François Couperin published his L’Art de toucher le clavecin, the first
written tutor to give guidance to teachers – society was in a state of
change. In the main, before then, those
who played a keyboard instrument had served an apprenticeship, either with
their own father or a master at the court to which they were, by virtue of
birth, attached as a servant. Under the
reign of Louis XIV making music had become a respectable pastime amongst the
nobility, and people began to learn to play for pleasure rather than for
employment. Over the next century, the
ability to play the keyboard was seen as a valuable addition to the armoury of
young women about to enter the marriage market, and the ability to play became
an essential in the world of aristocratic and noble daughters.
The world has changed.
It’s a good few years since I last went a-courting, but I doubt whether
today’s young men, spotting an attractive girl at a disco (or wherever courting
is carried out today) is going to go up to her and say “I fancy you. Do you play the piano?”. It never crossed my mind all those years back
to enquire whether my prospective bride had pianistic abilities? I knew she could sing because we used to
spend evenings in the karaoke bars. (Be
fair! In deepest Sarawak, once you had
traipsed for hours through a mosquito and leech infested jungles to stare at a
flowering Raffelesia and savour its unique aroma of rotting durian, visited the
orang-utan sanctuary and attended feeding time at the crocodile farm, there really
wasn’t much else to do!) So I doubt that modern-day piano teachers see their
role as helping to improve the marriageable prospects of young women.

In the 19th century playing a keyboard instrument was recognised as a useful social skill, a way of whiling away the long evenings in formal Victorian drawing rooms. But the invention of first wireless, then television, then the internet and finally social media (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one – engaging with social media is a solitary activity and one which actively discourages social intercourse) has thrown the piano into another anti-social box; you go and play it on your own, in isolation and usually careful not to be overheard by neighbours or friends. You even learn it on your own, closeted in a room with nobody other than the teacher, while for many in south-east Asia, the focus of their lessons is to play it on their own, closeted in a small room with just a visiting examiner (and the day when people will wake up to the potential hazard of this situation cannot be far off).
So if learning the piano is no longer a means to
secure employment, to secure a wife or to engage with society, why on earth do
we bother to teach the skill to young people?
Innumerable surveys have been conducted which have
shown the beneficial effects of a practical involvement in music. We are told of its power in developing brain
power and motor skills, fending off dementia, of its therapeutic value and of
its role in helping channel emotions.
And all of that is true. A survey
we did many years ago to mark the centenary of the ABSRM saw us contact major
captains of industry and leading figures in political, military and civil life
in the UK. It revealed that a
disproportionate number of successful people had, in their youth, learnt the
piano. (We did not delve further to see
whether we could prove a correlation between pianistic ability and success in
public life – it was enough to hint that, if you did your ABRSM Grade 1 you
stood a more than average chance of becoming Prime Minister!) And I am totally convinced that there are
huge benefits – beyond musical ones – in learning to play a musical instrument
and in studying music in general.
My interest is the focus on the piano, and why that
focus, perhaps explained in the past by the piano’s social status, remains even
in an age where the piano is largely irrelevant to society, and indeed, has
developed a certain anti-social stigma.
Attempts by imaginative and eager advocates of the piano to bring it
back into the social foreground by placing pianos in public areas and
encouraging anyone to play them, seem to have attracted much attention, but I
have yet to see some conclusive evidence that this has resulted in anything
more than people seeing a piano and playing it, regardless of who is
listening. I am not aware that there has
been a significant shift for the piano to regain its once dominant social role.
So again I ask, why do we teach the piano? It remains the most taught of all musical
instruments, to the extent that when people talk about “music lessons” they
usually mean “piano lessons”. People who
learn the violin, the cello, the trumpet, the flute, the harp, the drums, the
organ all have a clear goal; and that is to play their instrument in an
orchestra, church or some other social environment. (Harp teachers tell me that the wedding
market has done wonders to their income levels.) Yet still these are the minority
instruments. A vast majority of people
who learn a musical instrument learn the piano.
The motor skills required in piano playing – finger dexterity,
hand/eye coordination – do not actually have much use outside playing the
piano. I used to tell my piano students
that, if they did not end up playing the piano, at least they had the necessary
physical skills to become good typists.
But now type-writers and word-processors are ancient history – as are
the finger and hand skills they require – and written communications are by
means of two thumbs on a tiny touch screen or voice activation. So pianistic skills seem largely confined to
playing the piano.
The piano has a huge repertory, yet since the
instrument has only been in existence since the early part of the 18th
century, a knowledge of the piano repertory is hardly sufficient to broaden one’s
eyes to the vast scope of social history which is open to those who study music
history. Similarly, while a familiarity
with the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, precisely defined on a piano keyboard,
is an inevitable consequence of learning the piano, few other instruments have
such a clear black-and-white distinction between pitches. Pianists cannot comprehend the myriad micro-tones
and subtleties of intonation which are the basis of string and wind instrument technique. Listen to a pianist conduct an orchestra and
you will invariably notice how little effort is made in tuning chords – a string
player, on the other hand, will devote a lot of time in rehearsal to this
aspect of a performance.
We might suggest, in the light of all this that learning
the piano enables the student to detach themselves from society, to indulge in
a wholly solitary pursuit which, in its complete inability to relate to other activities,
is a self-sustaining occupation of little worth. But it’s not.
It cannot be. Why else would so
many the world over indulge in it? Are
we really teaching people to exist in their own unique capsules, detached from
their fellow men?
A good piano teacher will use the piano as a catalyst
for a whole world of other things, using the piano to arouse pupils’
consciousness to listening, imagining, thinking, feeling, reading, relating and
society in general. You can learn more
about the history of the world, and you can learn more about how society has
developed by touching a piano than by reading any number of academic books. All you need is a good piano teacher. The trouble is, in such a widely unregulated
business, who is good and who is bad?
And I remain completely in the dark as to what those bad teachers think
they are doing when they teach their students to play the piano.
No comments:
Post a Comment