Should learning be PLAYFUL?
- Liam O Byrne
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Since I started teaching (over 20 years ago now) I’ve always had my doubts about inherited conventional ‘wisdom’ on what is the best way to learn to play music.
When I think back to my early years of playing, the predominant emotion that I feel is…anxiety.
First it was to earn the approval of my teacher and parents - this became my primary motivation to practice. Then it evolved to include performances and graded exams. Every time I sat down to play I had a future reward in mind. Moments where I was carefree and playful - just playing for the joy of expression - became fewer and further between.
So, as a teacher, I’m always thinking about how much I want my own students to have positive associations with the piano and to really experience the joy of expressing themselves through music.
On the whole, we have accepted that learning music is a largely tedious, repetitive task. Like working-out at the gym - you have to put in the reps to see the results.
And the rewards we offer for this ‘work’ come mainly in the form of external validation from others. (Which then becomes internalised as we get older so we end up playing to impress ourselves). The carrot and stick method.
But what if there was another way? This is the question I’ve been asking myself for decades. My kindle library is full of books on teaching music, unlocking the inner musician, skill acquisition, theories on talent etc. etc. while these days my Youtube history has more of the same. Something inside me has always felt ‘there must be a BETTER way’. A way that teaches the skills of piano playing while at the same time embracing our natural curiosity and enjoyment of learning. A way that empowers us to express ourselves instead of making us feel awkward and unintelligent - endlessly striving to ‘get it right’.
In February of this year the Youtube gods (algorithm) saw fit to suggest to me a video about ‘musical fluency’ and how it was something we all naturally possessed. The idea that but appreciating music we already understand it - it makes sense to us. Whereas the traditional method of teaching it tells us that we DON’T understand it and to understand it requires training.
It turned out the video’s author (Phil Best) was a piano and singing teacher based in London who’d been developing this method for most of his life.
The approach is beautifully simple in that it takes all the ‘figuring out’ out of playing music while putting self-expression and fluency at it’s core.
The method is centred around learning where every sound on the piano ‘lives’ so that it becomes like an extension of the body. Music is then heard and comfortably reproduced at the keyboard without the need for ‘figuring it out’ either through notation or otherwise. Music reading is also covered but in a more natural, intuitive way so that reading complex scores becomes fluent and effortless.
I realise the last couple of paragraphs may look copied-and-pasted from a sales pitch but, having used this method for the last few months myself, I can fully vouch for it’s effectiveness.
It has helped me unpack so many of my own blockages around playing and brought everything back to the reasons I started to play in the first place.
I’ll finish with a link to one of Phil’s videos that initially piqued my interest in the method.
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