D is for Do It!

I came across a cool interview in the Monthly Aspectarian with a revolutionary in the music learning field. Apparently this guy has people reading music and slowly playing Bach after one weekend, and writing their own songs after two weekends. I haven't gelled with an instrument in a satisfactory way since middle school, so this was nice to read. It's never too late to become a rockstar.

The interviewee, Duncan Lorien, also discusses the resistance he runs into from people who think that it takes years to become a good piano player, and there are no two ways about it. That makes enough sense. A prolonged study leading up to competence is the expected norm for non-savants. I'm not convinced it has to be that way though. While acknowledging that there are people who have thought about this a lot more than I have and would disagree with me, and that these statements don't come close to describing all teachers, I see these issues with some conventional music lessons:

1) Boring.
"Today we'll start with scales, and if you get those, I'll show you 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.'" It's really not much harder to teach someone three blues chords and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

2) Elemental over Logical.
Lorien points out that learning piano generally starts with middle C. It was probably around my 3rd or 4th piano lesson that I could identify middle C consistently on my own. Not bad, but here's how Lorien introduces the keyboard:
If you look at a keyboard, you have white keys and you have black keys. If you look at the black keys, they are arranged in a pattern. Groups of two, three, two, three, all the way up the keyboard....
Now imagine a group of two black keys. When I say a group of two, I mean two. A group of two as opposed to two taken from a group of three. If you imagine a group of two and now look at the white note in between that group of two black notes, the name of that note it D. D for Duncan. Now what is the white key to the left? C. What’s the next white key to the left, B and so on.

"This is Middle C," is an isolated fact. The D pattern is consistent and recognizable. Minds are into that shit.

3) Sequence of learning tailored to piano not student.
That's an unfair generalization to many, but perhaps not enough.

All this is not to say that piano education is flawed (it is, but what I'M trying to say is) if there's something you've wanted to learn but you've been convinced that for you it is unlearnable, give it another look. It may have been the process, not the processed. You now have one less excuse to not be a knitter/neuroscientist/rockstar.

(I'd like to be all three, and knitting honestly looks the most daunting to me.)