Hello,
Can anyone help.
I am an experienced woodwind/piano teacher with a daughter of 7 who has been learning the Violin for just over a year and did Suzuki piano for two years previously but gave this up as it was deathly boring.

She has talent, has very good ears and physical dexterity, likes to get her own way and stubborn at times.

She had a bad year as far as lessons go - teacher became ill in November, replacement not until February, this person left at the end of the Easter term and the original teacher did not come back until a few weeks into the Summer Term. Now we hear that there is going to be a new teacher this term - to start this week!!
Could this have been disruptive as I did try to keep her going through these gaps?

She's mentioned giving up as "it is not fun" and "it is hard" and so I have stopped doing any practise with her for now to ease things and wait until she gets another lesson but she has started going to orchestra on Saturdays so this is giving her something to do.

I think the Suzuki experience on the piano has made the reading difficult as she finds learning the tunes by ear easier and reading the notes is slowing her down and frustrating.
I could teach her the tunes by ear but I would not be doing her any favours.

There are times when she does enjoy playing - I was playing an accompaniment to one of her pieces and she joined in by improvising a tune on top!!
SHE IS VERY RELUCTANT TO TRY OUT NEW TUNES. She is also an experienced listener (Classic FM etc) and therefore coupled with good ears she gets very frustrated if she can't always play something correctly and in tune with good tone. I have to really pick the right moment with her to get her to play without getting mad with it all. There is also an element of mother/daughter here too I suppose.

I would like some help with how to help her with learning to reading without making it too simple and boring. She has ability, is naturally rhythmic, musical and creative and knows when she is out of tune as she often tunes her own Violin as she has an excellent sense of relative pitch. Thanks

Hi kjpt99

There was a thread about this recently, that led to a lively discussion. View it here for your interest.

Steve

Yes you would! She's only 7 and to be able to play tunes by ear is a heck of a skill to have for someone so young - it's a skill you should cherish in her. My son learnt saxophone by ear and only learnt to read music when he was 11 and going off to secondary school, and I insisted his teacher taught him so he could play in the school band.

I took on a previously Suzuki-taught violin pupil aged 9. He was reluctant to read music at first and would learn new tunes by listening to me play them and watching my fingers. After a few months I insisted he learnt to read music as he wanted to take Grade 4. His mother backed me up, and he learnt quickly enough (over about a 6 month period) -he's now a good reader. Hates scales though! He's 3 years older than your daughter!

Remember where music came from? An aural tradition. Notation came much later and so it should be for children though it rarely is, more's the pity. We learn to speak years before we learn to read, so why should learning to play music by ear make it impossible to learn to read music a few years on?

Let her carry on as she is, introducing very simple notation bit by bit - she'll learn it soon enough if you don't overwhelm her with it. By the time she's mastered it she'll be ready to jump in at grade 3 or more.

Violinia

Hear hear! People find it incredibly difficult to play by ear - I have just spent an hour teaching two adult beginners who can sing mary had a little lamb, but really found it very hard to play it on the piano. People really should be able to do stuff like this before they learn to read music - it makes them listen, which people often don't do when worrying about reading notation.

Your daughter will probably learn to read music when she's ready to be independent...

There's nothing worse (I think) than being asked to play at a party / gathering or whatever and not being able to because I don't have my music... there doesn't have to be notation for there to be music, the notation is just a tool.

Hence a very good reason - for those who read music - to commit pieces to memory.

With all due respect towards the aural tradition of music, is it not likely that one's sight reading abilities would be improved by starting to read music at the earliest convenient opportunity? Language is a spoken, aural, tradition but children begin learning to read at an early age to improve their abilities and provide the greatest opportunity for practice.

I do think playing by ear is important - it amazes me that some musicians have various high grades, but can't play a simple tune without a score. That said, I've never had call to play by ear in anything other than a recreational capacity: I think mostly at parties when I was younger, playing the popular tunes of the day, that sort of thing. If I'd had poor sight reading skills, though, I'd have been stumped on numerous occasions - five hymns with no time to practice at church services, playing tunes that I didn't know and had never heard in a retirement home, playing the continuo part at sight in the university baroque ensemble, .... Aural is important, but as a practical skill I find fluency in reading music far more useful.

Having said this, and this is something I've been pondering over for a while: sight-reading for piano is more difficult than for other instruments but is, at the same time, more necessary - it is far harder to reproduce a piece on piano by ear than it is on, say, a violin. Partly, I think, due to the expectations of the listener: when asked if I could play a given tune on piano, I'm sure it would be met with disappointment if I played just the melody line with my right hand.

AmandaL - yes, definitely .

I have had some success lowering the 'learning to read' barrier by teaching students how to teach themselves tunes by ear from the score. Instead of trying to 'sightread' at a recogniseable tempo and flow I have the student decode just a few notes, teach themselves the notes, and then move on. I know some very good musicians who are slow at music reading, but make up by a excellent memory so they only really read the music once. That said, I do not consider note reading important enough to risk putting anyone off music, and trying to teach anything until the student is ready and willing to learn is often unsuccessfull.

This has been my experience too. Most people need a reason to learn something.

Steve

Children do indeed start learning to read at any early age, but especially in this country, with quite possibly detrimental effects. What could be wrong with playing by ear for a while and then adding notation a little later? After all, we don't learn to read words until we've been speaking for at least a couple of years, and in Europe they learn to read and write much later than we do to no ill effect whatsover.

If a child starts learning the piano at, say, 7 - and learns notation at the age of 8 after a year of learning to play by ear, he/she will end up with both skills. To be taught notation from the very start doesn't bode well for the development of aural skills unless sight-singing is also taught. The trouble with playing from notation and not by ear, and not being able to sight-sing, is that the pupil may very well not hear the music in their head as they play, and this cannot be a good thing!!! It's not enough just to see symbols on a page and immediately know which fingers go where - to really play music you need to be able to play it in your head as well.

Violinia