PLAYING THE PIANO.

1. Suppose that Jack, who knows how to play the piano by reading sheet music, says “I can play Mozart’s Piano Sonata number 16 and I am also learning how to play Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 1”. Then that would be fine. But if he, as someone who can read English, were to say “I can read ‘Pride And Prejudice’ by Jane Austen and I am also learning how to read ‘Bleak House’ by Charles Dickens”. Then that would sound odd. So does that mean there is more to playing the piano than just reading the music and playing? In general when we say: “Jack can play the piano” what are we saying exactly? What does that mean?

(I hear people say: “you don’t need to know how to read music to play the piano”. And then I think: well how are you playing it exactly then?)

2. In fact it could mean a few different things. (And so a few different methods of playing.) Some of which are:

(A) He can read sheet music and so can play anything that he sees written (on sheet music writing) on paper in front of him. In other words he can convert marks on paper into the corresponding keyboard pressings. (Although, as I said above, there’s more to it than just that.)

(B) He can play certain pieces from memory. This means he has memorised the keyboard key pressing sequences.

(C) He can ‘play be ear’. Which means he can convert real or imagined (in his head) notes into key pressings. It’s automatic. Like how people can sing or whistle a tune after hearing it. So this method means Jack can play anything after hearing it.

About method B.

3. On the internet you get videos saying things like: “learn to play the piano in 3 weeks”. But this depends on what they mean by “playing the piano”. I think a lot of these just mean being able to play a few simple tunes. So Jack could learn the key sequences for two or three short very easy to play tunes fairly quickly. Without knowing anything about note names or what the notes on the sheet music are. This would be using method B above. Then, at least for the next few hours, he will be able to play these tunes. Would we then say about him: “Jack can play the piano?” Probably not.

4. Of course, if Jack learnt to play all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas like this, then we should say he could play the piano. But he would need to play them regularly, otherwise he would forget wouldn’t he? This is all rather like being able to recite memorised poetry.

5. But method B would be better if he only wants to be able to play a few tunes. If he wanted to play all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas then it would be easier to use method A. Even though it would require him to learn to read music first.

6. For method B. note that the recall of the memorised key pressing sequences is not a conscious process. He does it without thinking. This is what is called muscle memory.

About method A.

7. If Jack was playing pieces on the piano by reading sheet music (method A above) then Jack won’t need to rely on his memory at all. He will then be playing the music in the same way that someone is reading aloud some written text of words in front of them.

8. Or maybe more relevantly the way a typist may be copy-typing some document. The analogy between piano-playing and typing is also shown by the fact that, if he is playing from sheet music, Jack must be able to press the correct keys without looking at them. (And will also probably need someone to turn the pages!) This feature is absent from the skill of reading text of words.

9. Here’s a variant of method A. He might memorise the sheet music. And then play that. This is like a cross between A and B.

10. If Jack is playing a piece according to method A then he doesn’t need to know note names. He is converting sheet music notation directly into key pressings. He doesn’t need to know that ‘F’ is the name of the note played by pressing the white key on the keyboard that is to the left of the group of three black keys. Or that ‘F’ is the name of the note referred to by any blob that is on the first space from the bottom on the stave of sheet music.

11. (Following on from point 6.) But the reading music that constitutes method A is not the same as the reading text that constitutes reading aloud. There is some difference. See point 1 above about learning to play a particular piece. But what is that difference? Compared to reading a text there is something more that Jack needs to do when he plays on the piano by sight reading. What is that something more?

12. It all reminds me of something I once heard about how people used to read written texts in the past. Texts used to have no punctuation or spacing or diacritics or even vowels. So reading a text wasn’t the straightforward thing it is now. You had to learn how to read texts one by one. Making your own annotations and suchlike for when you read the text again.

About method C.

13. If Jack was playing the piano according to method C then this would be like he had memorised some poetry, but from listening to someone else reciting it, not from reading it.

Learning to Play.

14. Because it’s not clear to me what being able to play the piano means then it’s not clear what I would need to do if I wanted to learn how to play.

15. Imagine Mary had a piano lesson from Jack. And he sat at the piano and said to her: “I’m going to teach you to play this piece”. And then he said: “OK first you press this”. And then he pressed some key or combination of keys. And then he said “and then next you press this”. And then he pressed some other key or combination of keys. And he just carried on like that for about 20 minutes. And then at the end he said: “There, I’ve taught you how to play this piece”.

16. Piano lessons are like the following. The lesson (whether from a teacher or in a book) says: here are the names of the keys on the piano. The names are which notes (A to G) they play. Then here are where those notes are represented on the sheet music five line stave. The ‘blobs’ on the stave represent notes. This is all technical information, the ‘music theory’.

17. Then the lesson will present a simple tune written in blobs on a stave. And the lesson will say: OK now you can play this tune because you know the music theory, you know which note each blob on the stave refers to and you know where the note that is referred to is on the keyboard. So you know which key to press. So you can play that tune.

18. BUT, surely the main thing a player needs to know is how to play “given the technical information”. Because, as explained above, there are a number of different ways of playing the keys given that information.

19. For one thing you could ‘translate’ the blobs into which keys to press and remember that. Suppose it’s 15 white notes which are EEFGGFEDCCDEEDD. Then you would memorise this note sequence. Either the note names. Or just the actual sequence of pressings on the keyboard. Then you could play according to method B above.

20. AND, I would need to know how to acquire whatever skill the method requires. So if I was going to play by method A sight reading I would need to know what the “something more” (see §11 above) was. Even if I knew how to read sheet music I probably wouldn’t learn how to do it by doing this: look at the stave, identify that the blob is E, find the E on the keyboard and play that. And then repeat this for each note on the stave. Constantly looking up and down. Or if I was going to use method B then how do I memorise?

21. Another thing is: would you need to know what fingering to use? Is there only one way sort of fingering to use for any particular piece. In other words, if there are two different pianists playing the same piece, then, if one plays some note with the index finger of their right hand then does that mean that the other pianist will also be using that finger for that note? Also: will it be the case that there is a one finger per key rule. By which I mean that whenever I play, for example, note middle C, will I always use the same finger for that? (I am thinking in terms of touch typing where it is the case that a certain key will always be pressed by a particular finger.) Some advice about learning says practice scales. But surely there would only be any point to this if the finger per key rule applied.

22. My point here is that these (so-called) lessons seem to miss out the most important part of what it means to be able to play.

23. You could play the piano by memorising the key note sequence (the EEFGGFEDCCDEEDD type stuff) and then have your keyboard marked with letters on each of the keys and then play like that. This would mean you would be looking at the keyboard throughout. You would also need to write your own note sequences based on sheet music, because sheet music is the standard way of writing out music, not note sequences!

24. You could play piano by reading, where the thing you were reading wasn’t sheet music but something which showed you pictures of the keyboard keys. So for each note to play there would be a picture of the keyboard with the keyboard key you need to play highlighted. The ‘sheet music’ here would look like those old style player piano piano rolls. (Like computer punched card.) It would be impractical for this to be on paper but you can get software which presents it on a screen instead. It scrolls down the screen the same way the player piano rolls does.

25. I suspect that the basic method of learning to play a piece of music is literally just using the brute force method of sitting there and memorising the key sequences. And playing by reading sheet music doesn’t change that very much. Because the function of sheet music (and being able to read that) is only to be an easier of way of communicating to a player what the key sequences are. It’s like a specialist language designed for that purpose.

26. Re §1 above. In the old days when there was no punctuation and spaces in text then you DID have to study a text first. You couldn’t just pick up and read. So then saying “I can read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen but not anything else yet although I am learning how to read Bleak House by Charles Dickens” WOULD make sense.

[February 2020]