Learning Notes, or Learning Music?

In this week’s blog post, Ken Johansen discusses the importance of learning a new piece musically from the outset rather than focusing purely on learning the notes.

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I often ask the students in my keyboard skills classes at the Peabody Conservatory what they are working on at the moment. They tell me a Bach Prelude and Fugue, or a Beethoven Sonata, or a Chopin Ballade, and then they frequently add, “but I’m just learning the notes right now,” the implication being that the expression will be added later, presumably by their piano teacher. This statement is so common, especially among pianists, it seems, that it may not raise many eyebrows. Isn’t learning the notes, after all, the first task that confronts us when studying advanced pieces such as these?

Perhaps an analogy with another one of the performing arts – the theatre – can shed some light on this question. I don’t personally know any actors, but I can’t imagine that they start their study of a new role by first “learning the words.” The words are inseparable from their meaning, and the meaning is what makes it possible to remember the words. Anyone who has tried to memorise phrases in an unfamiliar language knows how much more difficult and time consuming this is than remembering phrases in our native tongue. Yet the approach that many students take in learning a new piece is akin to “learning the words.” But after years of study, shouldn’t music be a familiar language to them?

An important difference between spoken / written languages and musical language is that, thanks to musical notation, we are able to read music (and play it) without understanding its meaning. It takes a deliberate effort (and good training) to go beyond the notes and understand their meaning. What do we mean by musical meaning? Simply the elements of construction that make a particular piece what it is – its chord progressions, cadences, and key changes; melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns; phrases, sections, and forms; and so on. Music’s expressive meaning is not separate from these elements, but flows from them. The composer creates this meaning, but it is the performer’s task to uncover it and transmit it to others. Uncovering the musical meaning of a piece is a continuous, sometimes lengthy, process, but it should start right at the beginning of learning a piece, not put off until after we have learned the notes.

In addition to missing the meaning – the essence of the music – there are two big problems with “just learning the notes.” The first is that, if we do not recognise the patterns that give the music its meaning, it will take us much longer to learn new pieces and we will not retain them as long. A phrase that contains several dozen notes is much easier to remember if we realise that those notes are elaborating a mere handful of chords. And if that handful of chords represents a single common pattern that we recognise from prior experience, it becomes even easier to remember.

The other problem with learning notes separate from musical meaning and expression is that we are actually learning more than just the notes – we are learning a neutral, inexpressive way of playing them, which will later have to be unlearned. This further slows down the learning process, since it takes longer to unlearn the bad habits of our ears and arms, than to learn good ones from the start.

The question then is, how do we learn music, instead of just learning notes, especially as we begin a new piece? One way is to improve our sight-reading skill so that we are freer to think about what’s happening in the music, rather than putting all our effort into decoding the notation. However, given that most pianists play repertoire that’s more difficult than what they can sight-read, another useful strategy is to separate the various strands of the music, playing only the melody and bass, for example, rather than trying to play all the notes from the start. Blocking harmonic textures into solid chords is also an excellent way to learn the essential harmonic progressions without having to confront the difficulties of playing everything as written. These reductions of texture allow us to hear the harmonies and phrases better, and to respond to them expressively at an early stage in our study.

But the best training for studying new pieces musically is to assimilate the elements of the harmonic language directly at the keyboard, through the study of what is today called keyboard harmony (in earlier times, it was called thoroughbass, or partimento). If pianists devoted only a fraction of the time they spend practising scales, arpeggios, and other technical exercises to learning cadences, sequences, and common harmonic progressions in different keys, they would quickly develop a harmonic vocabulary that they would soon start to recognise in the music they play. Learning a new piece then becomes a voyage of discovery in which we connect directly with its musical essence, not just its notes.

– Ken Johansen