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Forgot to mention last week that I've started part 2 of the beginning piano course. There's 4, which you can take one per semester.

It's still elementary, although today we played a piece that -- gasp! -- had us moving one hand from the position it started to an entirely new position! Yay! One of my two goals for this semester is to be able to play off the home keys* and to be able to play several notes at one time, using both hands. Without having to stop and go "um, ok, now what key is this finger supposed to be on? And that one?"

As the course is also meant to be an elementary introduction to music theory, and as it's taught by piano pedagogy masters students who will probably end up teaching music to kids, sometimes I feel vaguely condescended to by the terms or actions they use to introduce concepts. (I have not asked any of the people in class who have no musical experience what they think. They may appreciate the metaphors more than I do.) Today, they introduced the idea that some pieces have parts that repeat at the beginning and end with a different, but related, thing in between. This isn't the thing at the end of the staff that tells you to repeat from some point in the piece, but more a restatement of musical theme. So the teacher said that we're going to find an Oreo - the bottom cookie is the first part, the cream is the second, and the top cookie is the first part repeated.

Um. Yeah. I'd rather be told "it's a restatement of a musical theme."

It didn't diminish my enjoyment of the class - the teachers, after all, are students also and learning to do this, and for all I know the other students learn better with this sort of metaphor - but it does, occasionally, leave me wishing that they'd start introducing the correct terminology earlier.

We are also learning a slightly more complex arrangement of the Ode to Joy than we did last class, which makes me happy to my toes. :) And the second book, which we haven't started yet, contains Fur Elise, which leaves me hopeful that I'll be able to work it out by the end of this semester's classes.

* As my brain calls them - the 10-ish white keys right around middle C. Although all you musiciaons probably understood that. XD

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Oh, man. I totally sympathize. I don't mind being told the weird colorful metaphory things as a supplement, for people who find that helpful, but I do object to that being all I'm told. I like knowing the right terminology because that way I can learn it faster and also look it up elsewhere. I mean, you (general you) try talking to musicians in general about Oreos and you'd just end up having to explain yourself.

Yeah. Before I left for class today, I was telling Toby what we did last week, about the 5-note progression where we did a whole step, whole step, half-step, whole step. And he said "Oh! You mean tone, tone, semitone, tone!" Argh. It would have been nice to have that terminology.

To be fair, I've seen both "whole step, half step" and "tone, semitone," but in this instance both sets are in common usage and I'd definitely teach both. It's not like (say) leaving the alto clef out of the line-up--the vast majority of people are going to be using soprano (G) clef and bass clef, and alto clef (and moveable clef in general) are more specialized clefs that a lot of people genuinely don't need to know (and if you need to know it, you know you need to know it: hello, viola!).

Um.

All of the piano teachers that I had as a child always used the correct terminology. They seemed to think that that that was one of the things I was learning. There was always some amount of musical theory along with learning to play, though the amount varied from teacher to teacher.

However, that was decades ago, so teaching methods have probably changed.

Yeah, I don't know enough (well, really, anything) about current piano pedagogy*, so it might be what's done now. Or at least done now by this particular program. We fill out an evaluation form at the end of each semester - I might mention that and how it comes across as condescending to adults. :)

* except that I like saying "piano pedagogy"

I definitely got theory, and my daughter seems to be getting it in her class (guitar).

We're having that issue as well. The piano books themselves are "easier to understand" than they used to be, which really just means that they're not teaching as much. My first piano books taught where notes were on the staff, what rests meant, how much each note was worth. Ben's first piano book (which came highly recommended by several sources) taught him ...umm... where A, B, C, and D were in ...the air? There were no staves in sight. He did learn to clap a rhythm with a rest in it, but there was no talk of quarter notes, half notes, etc. We'll be switching series as soon as I can offload this one.

We're teaching David from a much older series of books and that one actually teaches music theory alongside the notes. We like it a lot.

Yeah - when looking for elementary-learner books on Amazon and at a local music store so I could have some music pieces that I knew to learn to play in addition to the ones in the textbook, which were mostly composed for the textbook and SUCK as music IMnot-soHO, I ran into those and rejected them because I want to learn to read music in addition to learning to play it.

The books for class - Hal Leonard's Adult Learner series - start off with notes in the air with letters in them, but only for a few pages, and by the second day of class we'd started learning proper notes on the staff. I skip the beginning pieces when doing warm-ups.

Eesh, that kind of terminology would have turned me off pretty quick. Or made me hungry, heh. Between this post and rediscovering my old stack of sheet music last night, my fingers are itching for a piano. It's been years since I've played.