After a delightful breakfast prepared by Amy Chaplin,
we began day two with the passing out of a few door prizes—useful items carefully chosen to enhance the piano teacher’s toolkit. This was followed by Joy Morin modeling for us how to teach a piece by rote, or imitation. As she sang the tune, she said, “Do what I do.” And so it began…the grand adventure of learning how to develop audiation in one’s students. She directed us in moving to the rhythm. Once that was established, she played the piece a few times on the piano, leading us in chanting the resting tone of the piece. Once the rhythm and tonality of the piece was determined, she invited some volunteers to follow her lead in playing the piece, completely by rote, no note-reading involved. All were successful.
This was all in preparation for us to role-play teaching each other a piece by rote. To aid in selecting pieces for that, supplemental teaching books were passed out for the teachers to review. It soon became apparent which pieces were more useful and which ones were not so much. Once again, the attendees paired off and each teacher had the opportunity to actually teach their counterpart how to play a piece completely by rote, using all the tools and steps learned earlier. (Did I mention that there were five keyboards in addition to a grand piano?) My partner was Annette Hoverman, from Ohio, who taught me how to play “Green Frogs” from Repertoire by Rote by Dennis Alexander and Amy Greer, published by Alfred Books, and I taught her how to play “The Roadrunner” from the same book, using the steps outlined for us by Joy. We each had a lot of fun pretending to be five- to six-year old students. With a little coaching from Joy, we felt very comfortable with the idea that we could also teach other pieces using these steps.
Outside, rain began to fall, watering the verdant lawns neighboring the house, where inside, Joy continued watering our minds with knowledge from those who have and continue to pioneer Gordon’s Rote Song Procedure, sharing two articles, one on the benefits of rote teaching, by Dr. Julie Knerr and Katherine Fisher, the creators of the Piano Safari method books, and another on teaching a rote piece, by Anne Katherine Davis.
Of course, the goal of all this is to develop audiation in our students. Teaching pieces using rote song procedure is the doorway to that development. Not all students, even those who show musical aptitude, are ready to begin with note-reading as they learn to make music at the piano. As the student matures physically and developmentally, note-reading is then integrated into the lessons. The suggestion was made by one of the teachers that using rote learning occasionally can even help a student who is struggling with a certain type of pianistic skill or passage(s) in a particular piece.
Joy also walked us through Marilyn Lowe’s Keyboard Games, which looked to me to be a very useful book in providing meaningful musical experiences centered around the piano for even the youngest children, whose tiny hands may not have developed sufficient dexterity to play using individual fingers. She also stressed the importance of listening daily to pieces selected by the teacher for teaching listening skills, by asking questions about the music they’ve heard. These pieces are then taught through rote, or imitation.
The rain outside came and went, and a hummingbird darted by outside the window as we wrapped up the afternoon by reviewing Music Learning Theory (MLT) Sequencing in Piano Study. We listed the five vocabularies of listening, speaking, thinking, reading, and writing, We reflected on whether we would actually ask a young child NOT to speak something unless they knew how to read it first. Highly unlikely. But isn’t that what we often do in music education? We also reviewed Gordon’s Skill Learning Sequence and pondered whether or not most piano methods of today follow his findings or, if not, what sequence do they follow, instead? Lastly, we reminded each other how to get our students audiating rhythm and tonality and how important it is for us to help our students develop the skill of audiating context.
Once again, after supper, everyone gathered on the patio for conversation and dessert. However, the chairs were still wet from the afternoon rain, so a number of us gathered in the living room and unwound to a hilarious game of Wise or Otherwise.
