6. Directions for future improvement
This research is focused on qualitative aspects of musical imagination, more specifically on the role musical imagination plays in the learning process of pianistic skills. However, musical imagination also relates to musical syntax, in the sense that musical intentions are (also) anticipations of intended musical outcomes in terms of rhythm, melody and harmony. Additionally, both the perception of musical syntax and the “online” generation of musical structures (for example in improvisation) take place in the brain as a result of predictive processing: the brain continuously predicts “what comes next”, based on prior experiences (Schaefer 2017, 31). More importantly, learners need to develop links between perceived or imagined pitches and actions on their instrument (ideomotor learning). Put simply, pianists (also) need perception-action couplings for enabling them to quickly and accurately translate physically perceived or imagined music into playing gestures (“hitting the right keys”). As Harris and de Jong have demonstrated, improvising musicians exhibit activation of dorsal connections between auditory and motor cortex, whereas score-dependent musicians activate ventral pathways (Harris and de Jong 2015). In conjunction to these findings, improvising musicians have been found to outperform score-dependent musicians in playing by ear (Harris, van Kranenborg and de Jong 2016). Dorsal connections between auditory and motor brain areas have been hypothesized to allow for quick transformation of perceived or imagined musical sounds into motor control (Goodale and Milner 1992). Based on these findings, Harris advocates improvisation and playing by ear for the acquisition of (implicit and procedural) knowledge of musical syntax, rather than the (for classical musicians) traditional approach which generally starts with extensive declarative learning (such as factual knowledge of scales and intervals) (Harris, 2017).
I believe that the syntactical aspect of ideomotor learning in piano pedagogy is such a complicated phenomenon that it should be studied on its own. Therefore, I have decided not to include this topic in my research. However, the acquisition of musical syntax is an element of my piano methodology course. More specifically, the course includes information about how auditory, song-based piano pedagogy can be organized, and how improvisation can be applied as a tool to discover the musical language. Given the difficulties students experience in applying auditory teaching strategies and improvisation in their internship lessons, I intend to enhance this part of the course in a similar fashion to the topic of this research in the near future. Concretely, I aim to develop extensive lesson material and deepen my knowledge of this topic.
As mentioned in the conclusions, the main point of improvement for my piano methodology course is to create learning opportunities that broaden students’ perspectives on strategies for teaching and learning and trigger their creativity in applying them. There are several additional interventions I intend to perform, aimed at achieving this. In the first place, I aim to integrate the lesson plans that students design into the discussions of internship lessons. The discussions can thus be focused on the lesson goals and teaching strategies that students formulate in preparation of their lessons, evaluating whether these goals were relevant and logically connected to the teaching strategies. Secondly, I want to develop a wider variety of observation sheets, in order to cover several aspects of didactic quality. For instance, I think it would be helpful for students to observe and evaluate how they provide pupils with demonstrations of target pianistic skills. Most importantly, I intend to arrange for peer-learning with students of other musical genres, in order to present students with a wider variety of strategies for teaching and learning than those they know from their own experiences. Luckily, these intentions coincide with the development and introduction of a new program of music educational subjects that will be implemented in the bachelor curriculum of the KC as of September 2019. Peer learning will be a core element of this program. Furthermore, it will allow of opportunities to couple students of classical piano with students of jazz piano and/or early music keyboard instruments in the internships. More specifically, these “mixed” duo’s have to cooperate in the sense that they alternately teach the same pupil(s) (the non-teaching student has the role of observer) and have to develop lesson content together. Their goal is to arrange for a wide variety of repertoire and not limit themselves to their own musical genre. My colleagues who teach methodology of jazz piano and early music keyboard instruments support this approach to the internships, and we have already made preliminary plans for it.
As for the syllabus, as mentioned in the conclusions, I intend to add more opportunities for students to come up with their own applications of educational concepts. In addition to this, I plan to include information on fine-motor control. I believe that knowledge of this topic may enable students to further identify which teaching strategies promote fine-motor control playing gestures, and which strategies might hamper this.