An 8 year old boy has just started taking piano lessons with me. He has learn't previously for about 3 months with a student who has now returned to university. It is a very unusual situation.

He can play for example the 'full' version of The Entertainer (i.e. not an easy version) straight through with no problems. However, he doesn't really know he's doing. He doesn't know note names, rhythms etc. - well, not as confidently as he can play. I'm guessing that he's been taught where to put his fingers in order to play the pieces. He's very musical though.

I don't want to have to go back to a beginner book as that wouldn't be very fair on him - any suggestions of where to go? He likes jazz and classical.

David

Sorry I can't help you directly on this one, but your story is similar to one of my own experience. I know a young chap (in his late twenties I suppose) know who can actually play a repertoire of Rachmaninov, Chopin, Beethoven et al but cannot read a note of music and has never had a formal piano lesson in his life.

When I asked him how he learned these pieces he said it was pure mimickry; slowing down the score to almost a few bars at a time and just copying the sounds on a Roland digital piano.

He said it usually takes him around four months to learn a new piece (subject to difficulty).

The ironic part of this is that he wants to learn from scratch, both music theory and piano keyboard /sight reading skills. But how do you start on grade one with someone who can already demonstrate quite eloquently, a performance of a Chopin Nocturn or a Beethoven sonata.

Maybe you could work through a few theory workbooks, sightreading workbooks, flashcards, games (like musical pairs , measure up , musical dominoes) might help with reading. Not sure what I'd do about pieces, someone more experienced than me might be able to offer advice on that....

Hope this helps anyway....

edit: what if you were to continue teaching pieces as he had been learning them before, but introduce the score of the music he's playing once he has a fair grasp on it and continue the work with the score.Could ask him what he does/doesnt understand in the score and go through that....No idea if it would work or not, only 1 year of teaching experience myself.......

Not exactly the same but it might help...

I teach a 13 year old boy who had 'learnt' to play by rote from a computer programme from which he just copies where to put his fingers and what the pieces sound like. He does not play them with any degree of musicianship, more like just a party trick I suppose. We started from the beginning with note reading and playing from music and now, after about 3 months I am giving hiom things which a little more advanced than where he really is up to alongside the easier stuff.
This slightly more challenging material we are taking time over and he is learning partly by rote but the level of reading is not TOO far ahead so that he can use the copy as a reminder. I encourage him to play from memory as he plays the computer learned things from memory already and is quite good at this. This is keeping him more interested as we slowly bridge the gaps and work on playing more musically.

If he likes jazz, would it be practical to start him out with jazz improv and stuff to satisfy that liking, and also to give him more advanced stuff to work on wihout him having to be able to read music etc (assuming he has some ability to play by ear?) whilst going more back to basics with the classical side of things? Or maybe introduce the notation in things he has already learned to play away from the music?

No experience of this I'm afraid but just a couple of things that occurred to me.

Speaking from experience if the pupil is keen (especially since he's only been rote learning for three months) then back to the beginning is the way to go. I could play pieces of that standard before I started 'learning' to play. I did it through a combination of playing by ear from a recording and reading the music, but not as in sight-reading or the normal way one would read, but just working out what the next bit was from the music then remembering it (I knew how to read music, I just couldn't do it efficiently). I also found this left me in the bizzare situation that I didn't find an easy version of a piece any easier than the full version. So going backwards isn't too much of a problem in this case as it's almost as challenging to learn any pieces.

I was determined when I started lessons to go back to the beginning and learn 'properly' even though I could play these harder pieces (reasonably musically, I don't claim I was brilliant but I could mimic a CD to probably the standard someone who was really that around grade 6 pass standard could play things, but didn't have the understanding they would). Whilst I was learning like this I just felt like a fake and I wanted to be a real pianist so I wanted to start from the beginning and make sure that I worked slowly. There's a big difference between actually being able to play something and inwardly understanding what one is doing, as you have noticed. Four years later I'm now playing pieces the same standard I was before I started there's a huge difference internally to what I'm doing: I can read, understand what I'm playing, correct errors much more efficiently and the end result is better playing too.

I guess what I'm saying is that if this person will at all be willing to go back to the start take them there; if not the start then as far back as you can. The way of learning pieces needs to be unlearnt and re-learnt, and this won't happen unless the pieces are easy enough to learn in a different way: give them a hard piece and they'll learn it in the only way they can. It's completely different to learn in these ways and I believe that learning one way doesn't really help with learning the other way: i.e. if one rote learns grade 6 pieces that won't make one any better at learning even grade 1 pieces 'properly' never mind grade 6 pieces. I don't really think of it as 'going backwards' so much anyway: the true standard of the person is what they can read and how nicely they can play; not the hardest piece they can learn by rote. Convincing your pupil of this could be a hard job, but it's by far the best way to do it in the long run, otherwise your pupil will end up feeling, as I did for quite some time, that they're not a 'real' pianist. Keeping a close check on how well their sightreading standard is keeping up with their playing standard is a good way to make sure they are learning properly: after all only they know what's going on inside their head.

AP is right that that's the ideal solution, I think. I guess it at least partly depends how keen your pupil is to be able to play properly and not just from rote learning. If you can incorporate other things and play to his strengths to soften the blow of starting from the basics you will make life more interesting for him, but encouraging him to keep learning the same way won't do him much good in the long term, I would imagine...

His parents say that he really enjoys it and looks forward to coming. I have to be honest and say that I haven't really detected those vibes yet from him!

David

Best to trust the parents, otherwise it could be a bit disheartening.

Do you think he'd be up for trying improvisation, if he likes jazz? It could be a good way of surreptitiously (sorry I can't spell today...) improving his aural skills, AND be fun, and possibly be something more advanced and fun he could do whilst getting the basics fully under his belt in other pieces.

"He doesn't know note names, rhythms etc. - well, not as confidently as he can play"

Strikes me that if he *does* know them then at least you (hopefully...) aren't starting from real basic books and "this is middle C" - more of a case of improving his sight-reading and confidence in reading both notes and rhythm? So maybe you could find some basic but interesting stuff? (duets maybe? often simple duets sound better than simple pieces, if you see what I mean, so it's not so much a case of "oh my this sounds really dull!" - also means the fluency has to improve if he's to keep up...)

I'm sort of shooting in the dark to be honest, being neither a piano teacher or much of a pianist but hope some ideas might turn out to be useful

Being totally nosey but what have you been doing with him so far/what has he responded well to/is his sight-reading & fluency with reading notes and rhythm improving?

At a guess are his aural skills quite good? Can he play melodies back to you by ear? This is the way a lot of people manage to play harder pieces without being able to read (particularly rhythms) so well: I know I used to be like that, play a melody to me and I could play it back; but put the music in front of me and I would just freeze up and not even believe that I could possibly do it.



Yes, indeed 'right to the beginning' might have been a bit misleading: I didn't actually start from beginners' tutor books just from pieces of around grade 1 standard and gradually transitioned from one way of learning to the other. I also did a lot of work on grade 1 level sightreading and have always really focussed on sightreading ever since.