At the core of my teaching philosophy sits the Integrative Approach: a way to understand and practise music from the top-down.
Traditionally, music might be taught by first learning a scale, then applying it to a piece. You might learn what a D minor triad is, and then use it in a piece. You might learn about the VI - V - I progression, and then apply it in music. I propose a different approach, where we start with the music, start with the sounds, the emotion, the meaning, and then dig deeper and notice that it is made up of a major scale, or a D minor triad. Learning music that way, we understand the whole before the parts. We don’t need to learn how they integrate, that’s just how they are. We learn how to break them down.
Music is best understood as the decomposition of a whole into smaller parts.
Perspectives
In order to truly understand something, we need to view it from different perspectives, we need to break it apart, see how everything fits together. There are countless ways to approach a passage of music, below I outline a few general perspectives to keep in mind when working on and investigating a musical passage.
Technical
Playing piano is an awkward dance in the beginning; we have to coordinate our fingers, hands, arms, and feet in order to produce sound from an instrument. Piano technique can be taught as a set of primary movements that combine to make more complex and realistic movements.
You should be able to break down any passage that you learn to those fundamental movements. Even if you aren’t struggling with playing it from a technical level, it will still be useful to practise purposeful movement on real music to produce a musical phrase.
Technique does not exist in a vacuum. While it is a set of mechanical instructions, those movements are to produce music, not simply to move efficiently.
Viewing passages from a technical perspective means you experiment with different fingerings, different movement combinations, variations on movements. It means you find what works for your anatomy.
Theoretical
Information is best retained when abstracted and connected. Connection between concepts is the core of the integrative approach, but how do we abstract knowledge of music? The answer is with theory.
Music theory is a collection of ideas to understand music. It is not a set of rules or best practices even though we can those them as such. These ideas can be used from the perspective of creation, but I think they are better thought of as tools for abstraction.
When we learn a passage, we should be aware of the scales, chords, rhythms, and form. We should understand if the passage relates to the theme of the piece, or how it has been developed from it. We should understand if the composer is using a common chord sequence, or if they are developing their own sound through their own perspective of music theory.
Some composers have their own concepts, like Debussy and Ravel with modal music, or Stravinsky and Schoenberg with 12-tone music. You should know enough about the composer to be able to notice these things. We can also make theoretical connections between composers or genres which would rarely be thought of in the same space. Bebop, a type of jazz, has a lot of similarities with the music of J.S. Bach. If you have analysed the music of your favourite composers, if you find recurring patterns, you will be able to connect them to more than the music of that one composer.
Musical/Emotional
Think about your overall artistic image of this piece. How does this passage fit in it? Is it a high point or a low point? Does the mood change for this passage? Maybe you found something interesting when analysing from a theory perspective that you would like to highlight in a musical way – what would that look like?
From this perspective, you are considering the real and musical implications of everything else you have analysed. This perspective also feeds into the technical perspective as the decisions you make from a musicality perspective will influence the technique and movements you use.
Meta learning
Learning is about recognising patterns. The Integrative Approach narrows your field of focus in order to highlight these patterns.
While learning a passage, consider what are the wider implications for learning piano. Maybe you are learning a passage containing ornaments, and learning about those will be a useful transferable skill. Maybe you are learning how to play trills from a technical perspective and you learn a way to space your training such that the movement is engrained faster.
This comes back to the student/teacher perspectives: if you consider learning as teaching yourself, you will find many opportunities to make your learning more effective.
Creativity
Now that we have restricted the bounds of what we are looking at (i.e., we have selected a particular perspective), we can operate creatively to design exercises to help us deepen our understanding in a domain.
Here are some examples:
- [Theory] Learning a scale: compose some scale patterns, learn the common chords, combine those chords into interesting progressions, move between this scale and another scale you know, write some melodies, etc.
- [Technique] Learning a basic movement: write some music to practise it, find other pieces you know in which you could practise this movement, compose a passage inspired by the one you are working on to keep the musical interest of repetitive movement practise
- [Musical] Learning about a musical movement: if the piece you are learning is in a particular stylistic movement, listen to more music from similar composers. Listen to more music from the same composer. Find out about what else was going on in the world at that time. What else was going on in that composer’s life at that time?
I find this part of practising to be the most fun. You get to design exactly the kind of practise session you want to have, and by doing so, you get to form your own musical identity.
Curiosity
One of the most important qualities you can have as a self-learner is infinite curiosity. You should be passionate about music, your playing, and how to get better.
Make an effort of regularly going deep on a subject. Learn from masters. Watch online lectures, and videos. Read books and scholarly articles. Share what you learn. One of the best ways to solidify learning is to teach. There will be other people who are interested in the same things as you, and by learning and distilling knowledge, you are not only benefiting yourself, but also others. You are entering the larger conversation of music.
If you stay curious, you will never run out of things to learn.
