1. Introduction
The Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (hereafter: KC) aims to prepare students to function in society successfully, by employing a variety of professional activities, such as performing, creating and teaching (“mixed professional practice”). These activities are ideally experienced as “originating from the same artistic source” in the sense that musicians use their artistic competences in all of them. Hence, the KC aims to provide students with enough capacities for all aspects of mixed professional practice, not only to start their professional careers successfully, but also to experience fulfilment and inspiration in all professional activities, thus enabling life-long learning.
One of my jobs at the KC is to teach piano methodology (“piano pedagogy”) to classical pianists in the bachelor program. This course lasts a little longer than a year, starting in the second semester of the second bachelor year and ending with the educational exam in April of the third bachelor year. It involves weekly lessons of approximately one hour. In connection with this, students perform an internship consisting of 25 lessons involving two pupils: one complete beginner and one more advanced pupil. Internship lessons take place within the building of the conservatoroire on a weekly basis. Participating internship pupils pay a modest lesson fee to the conservatoire. Piano methodology is part of the minor in education program, which is mandatory for classical pianists. This minor also includes courses in music psychology and educational pedagogy. Students get feedback on their internship lessons both from the teachers of subject methodology and teachers of music psychology/educational pedagogy. On average the group size of my piano methodology classes is three students: one third are Dutch and two thirds are from other countries.
One of the inspiring aspects of piano methodology is the difference in background between the students, not only in terms of language and culture but especially in the way they “grew up” musically. This is not only caused by the fact that they come from different countries all over the planet, but mainly by the wide variety of music teaching approaches that exist worldwide, even within one country. These various musical and educational backgrounds enable and trigger the debates and exchanges of ideas on piano pedagogy that frequently take place in the methodology lessons. The way students were taught in their childhood plays an important role (and is often easily recognizable) in their own actions as a beginning piano teacher.
The piano methodology course covers various aspects of piano pedagogy, such as auditory approaches, improvisation, keyboard harmony, practice strategies and knowledge of educational repertoire. However, the core content of the course is how to teach qualitative aspects of piano playing, such as articulation, dynamics, pedalling and phrasing. Within piano pedagogy there is a wide variety of pedagogical approaches to these pianistic skills. My aim is to enable students to acquire effective teaching strategies that suit their educational convictions. As a result, the course intends to offer students enough freedom and autonomy in order to develop a personal voice as a teacher. Students should experience that core values of their own musical upbringing are respected and can be maintained and utilized when they teach. At the same time, I intend to guide students towards effective teaching strategies that correspond to up-to-date scientific insights into motor skill learning and motor control. In an early stage of my career as a pianist and piano teacher, I became fascinated by recent scientific insights into motor skill learning and human motor control. I have been collecting information arising from these fields of science, incorporating it into my practice. I aim to make this body of information available and practically applicable to students of piano methodology so that they can use it to their benefit. In my experience, research on motor learning and motor control is potentially valuable for music pedagogy. It lends support to certain practices within piano pedagogy and puts others into perspective. All in all, I believe science may offer piano pedagogy new ideas and tools for evaluating current teaching practices.
In previous years, I have put together an over-arching vision on musical motor learning processes that is based on the aforementioned body of scientific information. Moreover, I have applied this vision to piano pedagogy and collected and organized practical examples of it in order to present students with concrete ideas of its application. I will discuss this vision and its scientific underpinnings in detail in chapter 2. Key principle is that motor actions in music are primarily shaped according to mental auditory representations of intended musical sounds (“musical imagination”). Pupils need to have vivid ideas of the musical sounds they intend to bring about by their actions. Therefore, movement, musical imagination and listening should ideally be addressed in conjunction by teachers. In addition, research on motor skill learning suggests that motor learning processes ideally take place implicitly, i.e. learners acquire little or no verbal knowledge of movement performance (knowledge of “how” they move) and focus their attention on the outcome of their actions rather than on how they move. This contrasts with current practice in music education, in which teaching strategies are predominantly explicit, providing learners with literal instructions how to move and suggesting them to focus their attention on how they move. Recent scientific research shows that explicit and implicit motor learning both have different outcomes. The advantages of implicit motor learning are, among other benefits, better performance under stressful circumstances, greater movement economy and greater attention for other aspects of the task, for example the way strategy is applied in case of sports. These advantages are very much relevant for musicians and music teachers.
During my observation of internship lessons, I noticed that students are doing a fine job with many aspects of piano pedagogy. Most notably, they exhibit a high sense of responsibility towards their pupils, often resulting in lessons exceeding their indicated length. Also, students are capable of quickly and accurately identifying pianistic deficiencies such as rhythmic unevenness, shortcomings in articulation and pedal flaws. Focusing on their instruction style, I observed that students tend to employ movement instructions that are not related to auditory musical goals: isolated movement instructions. In many cases these instructions were generalized and normative, literally suggesting to pupils “how one is supposed to sit or move”, without addressing which improvement of pianistic quality in terms of sound is intended. Considering current scientific insights into motor learning processes, this is a relatively ineffective teaching strategy. This notion is further supported by the observation that the impact of this type of instruction generally does not last long: once pupils start playing, the described “correct” posture or hand position soon disappears, causing frequent repetitions of movement instructions.
In summary, I observed a problematic discrepancy between the pedagogical approach to pianistic quality that I advocate in the piano methodology course and the pedagogical approach that students predominantly applied in their internship lessons. On the one hand, during methodology lessons students found it obvious that musical imagination is the primary agent in motor control and that listening is an important source of feedback on one’s musical actions. On the other hand, they seemed to find it difficult to put this insight into practice in their lessons and to treat movement, musical imagination and listening holistically. My research primarily aims to address this situation and identify which additional guidance I can provide my students with in order to acquire effective teaching strategies. The subsidiary goal of my research is to review relevant research from the fields of motor skill learning and motor control in order to underpin the overarching view on musical learning processes conveyed in my piano methodology course. Moreover, I intend to demonstrate the relevance of this body of information and to make it accessible to musicians.
Throughout this thesis, I will use the word “student” when referring to students of my piano methodology course and “pupils” to refer to their internship pupils or piano pupils in general. In the discussion of the contextualisation of my research, the word “learner” refers to persons who are learning a motor skill.
1.1 Research question
Based on the aims of my research, the main research question is:
How can I guide the students of piano methodology towards applying effective educational principles for achieving pianistic quality in their internship lessons?
Additionally, I formulated these subquestions:
A. Which educational principles for achieving pianistic quality can be derived from current scientific knowledge of motor control and motor skill learning?
B. Why do research-supported views on motor skill learning not typically match practice and opinions regarding motor learning, that are traditionally passed on in music education?
C. What are the conditions under which students of piano methodology can understand and apply their study material properly? Is my presumption that I should have more, and better instruction and training material correct? Are there other factors?
D. What are the characteristics of lesson material for the piano methodology course that aims at conveying research-supported principles of motor learning processes applied to piano pedagogy and enabling students to apply these principles effectively and independently in their internship lessons?
At the end of the first year of this research, I decided to implement peer-learning as an additional tool for developing effective teaching strategies. More specifically, I created opportunities for students to observe their own and each other’s lessons in a structured manner and provide themselves and each other with feedback. As a result, I added one more subquestion:
E. How can I facilitate peer-learning in the internship?
1.2 Relevance
This research aims at improving the conveyance of effective educational principles to students of my piano methodology course. I intend to discover which additional interventions help my students to apply research-supported principles of piano pedagogy independently in their internship lessons. More specifically, my aim is that students learn to address movement, musical imagination and listening in conjunction when working on pianistic quality with their pupils. In my experience, this is a relevant goal since it enables students to benefit from valuable knowledge arising from scientific research, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of their teaching. This in turn will increase the likelihood that they experience fulfilment in teaching and will continue to develop as a piano teacher throughout their career.
The subsidiary aim of this research is to show the relevance and potential applications in music pedagogy of information arising from research into motor skill learning and motor control. Based on conversations with colleagues I know that many music teachers are interested in acquiring up-to-date knowledge on these topics. However, most research involves non-musical skills and not much has been written about applications of this knowledge in music pedagogy. My discussion of the contextualisation of this research intends to review relevant research results and show its implications for music pedagogy in general and piano pedagogy in particular. I hope this will generate more interest in this body of knowledge among musicians and contribute to innovative teaching practices.