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And I don't want to embarrass anyone, but not too long ago, I was with a group of teachers, and I was the only one who was reasonably fluent at all 24 scales. They all had at least a BA in performance, most had masters.
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry Dann Full-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.com Certified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA
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Last time I counted there were 48 scales.
B.A., Piano, Piano Pegagogy, Music Ed. M.M., Piano
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Last time I counted there were 48 scales. Obviously you're counting minors as three each. But that kind of evades John's point, doesn't it? If you don't play the 24 (major and natural minor, I assume) fluently, you are unlikely to play the harmonic and melodic minors much better. It leads to a larger problem. If most piano teachers neither play nor teach the 24 simplest scales effectively, BUT do play and teach repertoire effectively (that may or may not be a big if) then is the importance of the scale less than claimed? And to a smaller problem. There are a number of people who claim that Hanon et al fingering simply imposes a fingering pattern on all scales regardless of requirements, and that a topology derived fingering pattern would put the topological requirements first. If scales are important, should you have an opinion on that argument? I just played a couple of familiar scales. I didn't have much trouble getting them to sixteenths at quarter = 168 (on the windup Seth Thomas), though they weren't as even as I'd have liked. Piano isn't my primary instrument, my practice time goes into trombone. Shouldn't a real pianist easily double my speed? HS of course, I don't work HT scales.
gotta go practice
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Tim,
I suspect we're talking oranges and tangerines here. When students are playing 4 octaves, they play sixteenth notes, ie, 4 to a beat. mm=210 is about tops for the finest pianists.
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry Dann Full-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.com Certified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA
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Last time I counted there were 48 scales. Did you have a bad night? Or just feeling ornery today? Actually, if you add in the modes and chromatic, the number is far higher than that, but as Tim points out, I was just generalizing at 12 majors and 12 minors.
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry Dann Full-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.com Certified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA
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Tim,
When students are playing 4 octaves, they play sixteenth notes, ie, 4 to a beat. mm=210 is about tops for the finest pianists. Four octaves? Oh, never mind! Yeah, I can play one octave at 168, 4 notes per beat, no problem, but four octaves would be a stretch. I've done that exercise where you do one octave quarters, two octaves eighths, three octaves triplets, four octaves sixteenths. Isn't that exactly backwards? The more octaves you play, the harder it is. So your top speed is limited by choosing the difficult four octaves, and you're never challenged below that. You should play one octave faster than four, and fragments much faster than that. Not that speed is necessarily the reason for scales. But it is easily measurable.
gotta go practice
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Not that speed is necessarily the reason for scales. But it is easily measurable. It is one of the more important reasons to learn scales. Evenness/smoothness being another reason. The ability to play scales in any common rhythmic groupings (2, 3, 4, or 6) is also important. Getting the thumbs not to accent is also important. Traditional scale fingering is important to internalize, but one must not be stuck with them, as context in repertoire often forces one to begin a scale passage on a strange finger.
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Evenness/smoothness being another reason. The ability to play scales in any common rhythmic groupings (2, 3, 4, or 6) is also important. Getting the thumbs not to accent is also important. Gieseking said (or maybe Leimer, I'm not sure who wrote what in that book) that playing scales with perfect evenness of tone and rhythm would teach the single most important and most neglected skill in piano, learning to listen. He also said this was impossible to learn HT, and insisted scales must be done HS. It also implies that scales done by rote while watching tv might not be useful for the beginner. But don't attribute that to him, I made that part up. Traditional scale fingering is important to internalize There seems to be considerable disagreement on that. Finger 4 on black, never look back!
gotta go practice
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There isn't a shortage of philosophies on this, for sure!
I'm very big on comprehension. For instance, I hate when math teachers present formulas without explanation, but as just "random" things to be memorized by rote. I want students to understand what they're doing, why it works, and why it's useful. This leads to higher satisfaction, and longer retention.
For this reason, when I teach scales, I don't teach them alone. I teach them as part of a larger unit which familiarizes the student with everything there is to know about the key, not just the scale. They understand its place in the "Circle", its relative minor, all the diatonic triads and seventh chords, and comping. The scale is is presented as the "starting point" for all these other skills/concepts.
Of course, this is not for beginners. With brand new students, I expose them to the C major scale very quickly (within the first few lessons) - just one octave, simply for the purposes of examining its "guts". Before two months have gone by, I like to make sure that they see the pattern of whole steps and half steps that make the scale, and I let them try "discovering" a few other scales of their choice on their own, just for fun. Even young children don't struggle with this very often.
After that, I usually just introduce scales as they're needed... Whenever we play a piece in a new key signature, I have them practice the scale it's associated with. We continue this process until the student is ready to start the more intensive unit I mentioned above (I call it "Key Signatures Boot Camp" because it really taxes their brain! But I love how super comfortable they become with the keys.)
But I've really enjoyed reading this thread because it's always interesting to me to see how differently people do things, and why.
Piano teacher & church musician "I'm not the best piano teacher. I'm the best piano teacher I can be right now."
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