Turning Points in The

History of Piano Instruction

BY MARK ALMOND

Here is a full written answer to a music educator’s question

dealing with the main turning points in the history of music
education. This explains why piano teachers and music
educators continually jump to false conclusions about the Piano
for Life program. It also explains why at least two Juilliard
graduates and dozens of other piano teachers use our program
as a supplement that provides concrete practical materials
that lead to a more efficient and a more complete mastery of the
instrument.

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I have included his e-mail to me first:

Dear Mark,

I first came across your Piano for Quitters video when I was living
in New York about 10 years ago. I was just getting started as a
piano teacher back then, though I had played and taught drums
for many years before that. I had also trained as a music
therapist, and my experiences in that field had already shown me
just how limiting and stressful the conventional approach to
music teaching is. I found your video absolutely riveting, and I
still use some of your techniques today (with appropriate credit to
you and recommendations that people should buy your DVD!)

I am now writing a book on music teaching and I remembered

your words about the history of piano teaching, how Beethoven
and Mozart would have been taught the rules of harmony and
told to improvise using these, before they would have learned
scales and studied piano literature. You also made some very
telling points about the proliferation of written piano methods and
the subsequent decline in enthusiasm for piano playing. I am
wondering where you found this information. The limited research
I have done in this field so far has shown me that there is no
actual comprehensive history of music teaching in general, or
piano teaching in particular, and I wondered if you could point me
towards any reference sources that you have found helpful in this
area. I’d be grateful for any help you feel able to give.

Once again, congratulations on your method and your DVD.

Keep up the good work.

Best wishes, and thanks in advance,

Paul Cavaciuti

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Paul:

In a more complete answer to important questions about the

history of music education, here are some of the main turning
points in the history of piano instruction. While reviewing these
points, I have decided to add some clarifications as to how I
have hinted, in brief, at some of these things on my web site. My
site certainly must appear to be too radical for most music
educators.

Many years ago, while reading Schonberg’s history of pianists, I

well remember the impact it had on me to learn that virtually all
pianists, young and old, in the 18th and 19th centuries had the
ability to improvise and compose, in addition to the fact that they
could also read music. Until the 19th century the tradition in
performance was dominated by the practice of performing only
music that the performer had written. This is conclusive evidence
that harmony was taught on a much deeper level. This is easier
to explain than most educators can imagine. I do believe that it
has been a tradition all along to teach harmony using the
classical system (which is in fact overly complex once you
analyze the underlying elements). But I do not believe that it was
just Jean Philippe Rameau alone who threw light on the subject
by pointing out that all harmony was based on only two primary
building blocks – – major and minor thirds. Others must have
also had effective ways of breaking down the nature of harmony
based on the results of that period. Rameau, however, was the
very first to reduce all of the complexity in music down to its
simple essence in the most concise and practical way possible.
This changed the entire world of music education at the time.
The much harder thing to explain is how this tremendous insight
into harmony could possibly be buried by instructional methods
that do not work nearly as well.

Teachers and the students at that time lived in very different

circumstances minus all of the distractions we live with now in
the modern world. They had a level of dedication and

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focus which is harder for people to achieve today. This is one of
the reasons they mastered the subject and materials of harmony
even though the theoretical and text book material was
overly complex. In addition, all of the children who showed
promise, when the family could afford it, were given two teachers
– a piano teacher and a composition teacher. We must believe,
based on the results, that a percentage of the composition
teachers had the ability to introduce students to the massive
and convoluted “scales first – then the chords” classical
approach in a creative manageable way. It is also true that
sustained concentration over a long period of time will lead
certain individuals to the place of being able to see the design of
music even if the classical “scale analysis” of music is too
indirect and too detailed to be of much help in the early stages.

The main problem I have with the traditional classical system of

teaching harmony is that it is a horrible introduction to harmony
for students at an early stage of development. For more
advanced students, it is helpful and even necessary to see the
relation of the various chords to the layout of the scales, so I
have no problem with the classical method at that point. My
contention is simply that everyone is much better off by first
understanding that there is a “trunk” and also “larger limbs” to
the design of music. I believe that it can be demonstrated that
diving quickly into the detail of the “leaves” in disregard of the
actual underlying design of music is significantly damaging to
students and has many negative aspects that will lead to a
variety of problems.

Even in recent years, I have run into a few teachers who insert
very helpful insights into harmony, apart from the influence of the
Piano for Life material. We found one teacher who breaks down
the chords by counting from the root note: for playing major
chords he says Play tone 1 – Play 5 – Play 8 when counting by
1/2 steps (too complex, however, for a simplification!). A few
other teachers I have run into have seen, on their own, I presume,

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that all of the basic chords are simply combinations of the major
and minor third intervals. I maintain that this has been happening
all through history, like the example of Reisenauer’s mother being
able to explain the essence of harmony in one lesson, one of the
quotes we feature in the DVD lessons.

The biggest factor in moving away from effectively teaching

harmony was the gradual and major shift in the attitudes and
beliefs of influential musicians in the late 1800s. This worldwide
trend was questioning whether the rules of harmony had any
validity at all. This crescendo mounted until the early 1900s when
the vast majority of composers were openly breaking free of  the
“old fashioned rules of harmony” by criticizing how primitive,
limiting, and nonsensical they were. This was a much larger
factor than most people realize and it became pervasive to the
point that teachers were ashamed to be “old fashioned” and
ashamed to teach in a way that was perceived at that time to be
unenlightened. This more than any other factor explains why to
this day the main emphasis is on learning to read notes almost to
the exclusion of everything else. Method books were
dramatically influenced by this trend and mass produced on this
philosophy which was summed up in Piano for Quitters simply
as ” the mass production of teaching systems” since there is no
time in a short intro to deal with this controversial subject. The
method books after 1900 claim to teach harmony – but they do it
only through, and limited by, a note reading approach. Harmony
in fact is not taught in these method books because it is not
explained or illustrated adequately. It was not explained or
properly taught for decades because valid rules of harmony
were believed not to exist! The old system was viewed as archaic
and simplistic. It was described not just as unnecessary, but
actually as damaging to students! Part of this was for sure a
reaction to the unnecessarily complex way that harmony was
being taught, but overall this is one of the most extreme historical
examples of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

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What needs to be recovered and demonstrated is the reality that
music does in fact have a clear substructure that is tied directly
to the emotional reactions of human beings. What the
“enlightened” composers of the 20th century produced in terms
of “the new music” never took hold in terms of popularity with
the public because it was clever and intellectual only while at the
same time emotionally empty. Even today these pieces and
works, called 20th century atonal music, are performed only as
novelties and curiosities. Rachmaninoff, while criticized
relentlessly at the time as a relic of the past, is a great example of
a composer whose music has endured. He is today nearly
worshiped as a master of the “subtleties of harmony.” Liszt also
had this ability to stretch dissonance to its limit in a
musically effective way, but in the case of both of these
composers, practically everything they did was built on the
foundation of the traditional rules of harmony. In the Liszt B Minor
Sonata, for example, even the most dissonant sounds are usually
a single tone temporarily added to, or put against, one of the
common chords – but there is always a resolution to traditional
harmony in these phrases.

My goal over the years, since I could never find it anywhere, was
to flesh out a step by step demonstration of the nature of
harmony. Harmony has always been understood by at least a
small percentage of teachers all throughout history. If their
breakdowns and explanations exist, I have only been able to find
small snippets and individual descriptive comments about their
teaching. Liszt’s students have said that he emphasized certain
insights like “all complex structures in music have simple parts.”
This is a great statement and I am sure Liszt had many effective
illustrations to back it up. However, I have never been able to find
detailed practical illustrations by any composer or composition
teacher that would help to introduce these concepts at a realistic
pace. Even Rameau failed miserably to illustrate his basic insight
about thirds – as far as his book is concerned. What he may have
done by way of illustration in lessons at the time did not survive.

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What we can find in countless theory textbooks is a grueling
introduction to complex scale structures that in effect hide and
mask the simple design of every basic harmonic structure. The
real crime is that the underlying design of music, the basic tonal
relationships that create all music, actually make sense
immediately to everyone who sees a proper demonstration,
including very young children.

In my view, ironically, a clear introduction into the nature of

chords and chord progressions is a perfect introduction for
learning all of the scales – and for becoming more skilled as a
sight reader. Chords and scales can even be taught at the same
time. This is always what I do when I work with piano teachers. It
may not seem like it, but I view all of the various scales as
extremely important in their proper place. But I also believe that
reversing the natural order has been a devastating disaster from
an educational standpoint. This always sounds extreme except
to the very few people who are in a position to make
the comparison. Anyone with a solid background in composition
would certainly agree that mastering a classical piano piece is at
a minimum ten times easier if the harmonic structures, or
chords, are fully understood at the outset. Seeing underlying
patterns helps in all aspects of practicing.  We should see every
piece of music as a creative display of how chords can be used –
chords that we already know before we start learning any
particular piece.

Another great irony is that students introduced to the art of

aggressively playing chord progressions can actually become the
best sight readers! This will happen provided they are also given
practical tips and effective drills for improving their note reading.
The patterns they master mentally and physically while playing
chords are the same exact patterns they will find while reading
music. Fully half the battle has been won – while playing very
powerful music, without reading notes at all. Not to mention the
obvious fact that people who can play inspiring music, starting in

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their very first piano lesson, are much less likely to become
discouraged and quit.

Paderewski tells of how they could not find him a “real” piano

teacher as a child. They did find a man who could only explain
the layout of the notation system since he was not a “real” piano
teacher. Paderewski became a great note reader and I believe
this was a big part of it. Most often, the one thing that most
teachers don’t do is explain the layout of the staff as a whole –
which should be the very first thing we do! Sadly enough, a
constant recurring theme through history is how the “outsiders”
with no access, or limited access, to traditional instruction
became the top pianists. I have some pointed things to say about
that phenomenon! I can’t remember who said it, but one author
commented that Chopin’s originality would have been destroyed
by a traditional piano teacher – with which I completely agree.
How many “Chopins” have been destroyed? Perhaps more
important, how many can we help rather than hurt if we just have
the courage to question, analyze, and make needed corrections
to an entrenched tradition that operates like a giant ship with no
one at the helm.

The Piano for Life approach will always be perceived by piano

teachers and the general public as just another “chord method,”
some kind of plan B alternative in contrast to the established,
traditional, “correct” way of learning to play the piano. The actual
goal and mission of Piano for Life is to give full weight and due
respect to the true masters of the piano who have
always warned about the consequences of any approach that is
not complete. Music has clear structure and design. This can
be demonstrated in a very short period of time – minutes not
hours. This has momentous implications for brand new
beginners. For those who have built their pianistic ability primarily
 through the skill of reading music, a deeper knowledge of
harmonic structures has a dramatic impact. This is true especially
when the knowledge goes beyond the theoretical to the physical

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mastery by the means of playing chord progressions
aggressively.

There is a sensitive subject that is almost never dealt with.

Almost all piano teachers insist that students do not look down at
the keyboard when they are reading the music. By itself, this
really is a very important thing to develop as much as possible all
throughout your life. However, something radically changes when
students are asked to memorize and perform a piece from
memory. What are we looking at while we play from memory? We
are now doing something that we have never done because
we have been told it is a very bad habit. We are looking directly
at the keys while we perform. Students trained through a strict
note reading method are at this point out of their element on a
deeply subconscious level. History provides perspective on this
subject. The vast majority of the very top pianists, when it comes
to explaining their success in live performance, had a broad
background of experiences that went far beyond just sitting at
the piano reading notes. They all spent significant time at the
keyboard improvising, composing, and creating their own
technique exercises independent of music notation. It should be
no surprise that they had a tremendous advantage when it came
to performing from memory. This is strong historical evidence
that a deep understanding of harmony is also the central key to
performance skills. Even if some individuals only want to play for
their own enjoyment, they desperately need to know that there is
a realistic and practical way to reach their goals. The mastery of
harmony can and should be both mental and physical.
Seeing and understanding the design of music and then pushing
this through our fingers by aggressively playing chord
progressions is one of the central building blocks for overall
success.

I hope some of this is helpful in your extremely important work of

writing about music education! I hope you are wildly successful

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at reaching many people and leading them to a deeper
understanding of music.

Mark 

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