Teaching music

06/10/2007 | 0 comment(s) | E-mail this article | Comment this article

This is a dangerous subject. I don't intend to discus generaly about musical training and teaching but I'll focus on the particular case of contemporary music, because it takes less place in the education than it deserves, when it's not completely "forgotten".

In conservatoires and universities, If you must study Beethoven's sonatas, Bach's fugues, romantic pieces, you're not forced to play Berio, Stockhausen, Manoury and so on... When exams are coming and a contemporary piece is in the program, students are stressed because they are not used to this music, or simply think that they can do what they want: nobody knows.

However, for us pianists, studying contemporary music is fundamental. It enables to get with anonther view onto piano, and especially to acquire all the possibilities of piano, of which precious little people are aware.

Teaching contemporary music, yes but how? There is the real dilemma. I'am against a special course for contemporary piano, because it would confine in its ghetto this music. But training teachers to sensitize their students, and guiding them in the way to play those pieces. But this big work upstream piano classes is missing. Indeed, rare are opportunities to read a contemporary text during theorical classes, and the piano teacher can't assume alone piano courses and sensitization to new repertoires.

If we can have some good examples (SBAM in Belgium), sensitizationis always punctual and therefore not so beneficial, and these target only students with a nearly achieved education. The problem requires us to get back to basics of the first years of education. Make listen to the youngest this repertoire, and Stop quarrels between teachers could enable a march. It is completely unacceptable that nowadays some teachers still consider a certain repertoire as unintelligible noise. We mustn't, as teachers, restrain the field of vision of our student, but widen it, guide and not impose. Today's music must be a part of studies as well as the others classical musics. It's up to students to like or not, we don't have to inluence them or truncate history of music.

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