Sensory education is a wonderful research topic for Suzuki Piano teachers. I would like to focus on the importance of the touch sense in teaching long sounds and it’s application to teaching Twinkle B where a long sound is first introduced.
When you touch something, it activates the neural receptors in the fingerpads. These neural receptors provide detailed information to the brain about the environment they are touching. Educational thought leader Dr Maria Montessori said:
“The hands are the instrument of human intelligence.”
The Montessori educational materials are manipulative and many involve the sense of touch such as the sandpaper alphabet letters that the children trace with their fingers.
In learning to play the piano it is useful to use this same kind of tactile learning to feel the length of the sounds and connect this with the aural sense.
Doris Koppelman talked about the correlation of physical movement and feeling the long sounds in her book Introducing Suzuki Piano.
She said:
“Since pianist need do nothing active to make a tone continue after first making it sound they frequently have an inferior sense of the duration of notes as compared with string players, who must measure in advance and plan for the amount of bow needed, or wind and brass players and singers, who must do the same for the amount of breadth needed. “
The connection of the long sound with the touch sense allows pianists to have the same kind of experience as other musicians. You could call this ear-hand coordination.
There are three points I would like to discuss about teaching this connection between aural and tactile in playing long sounds:
The first is developing the aural awareness of the length of the sound
One way to do this is to play a sound and ask the child to listen and raise their hand when the sound stops. You can let the sound completely dye out. The children enjoy this and it develops concentration on the sound.
The second teaching point is to develop the awareness of touch sensitivity in the ready position. This includes a tactile awareness of the keyboard with the black and white note positions, and feeling the smoothness of the key. Also the touch awareness includes recognizing finger numbers by touch (not only sight). This way the student can feel the ready position, and not need to see the finger on the note in order to feel secure. The most sensitive part of the finger is on the pad, not at the tip, so that the hand is in a relaxed and balanced position in ready.
The third step is then to associate the touch sense with the sound. The way that I teach is to integrate the sound and touch senses so that the movement of the fingers corresponds directly to the length of the note. So, as the notes become faster, the movement becomes smaller. Doris Koppelman demonstrated this concept of progressively smaller movements in her video by clapping quarter notes, then eighth notes, and then sixteenths. Naturally the size of the movements for the clapping become smaller as the notes become faster. This is same with finger movement. At this point we are working on one note and one pattern at a time. As the groupings and phrases become larger, we are involving the whole arm and use of the whole body which is not in the focus of this presentation.
For both students I am directing their attention to feeling the long note.
For the first student I also play an accompaniment to Twinkle B and direct his attention to hearing the long note even after the accompaniment chord. This is a good way to further develop keeping attention on the long sound:
The touch sensitivity enables students to directly feel the sound, and essentially feel the music they are playing.
“Learn to feel it” is one of the three rules for Deep practice that Daniel Coyle defines in his book The Talent Code. He correlates “feeling it” with concentration.
He tells about how he observed students in a class called “How to Practice” at the well known Meadowmount music camp. They are asked to listen to a violin playing first in tune, and then out of tune and connect with how it feels. He quotes the teacher saying:
“If you hear a string out of tune, it should bother you, it should bother you a lot. That’s what you need to feel. What you’re really practicing is concentration. It’s a feeling. “(1)
In playing piano we want students to connect this feeling of
Concentration with producing long sounds, and ultimately also in producing different attributes of tone such ringing tone, clear sound, what Dr. Suzuki calls heart tone.
By bringing the awareness of touch into learning from the very beginning, we engage the student, enable them to focus, and to express music with feeling.
Dr. Suzuki said:
“The ability to feel music means understanding the human heart.”
