Simpedia

Barbara G., Massachusetts

Last night I had some of my students performing at an end-of-the-school-year piano concert. Ages were 1st graders thru 9th grade. What fun! We had duets on the piano, piano and solo singers, accompanying audience sing-a-longs, original arrangements, etc. One little girl played 2 of her pieces on the church’s pipe organ. It was great!

Some of the students asked me if I was going to play. I told them “yes” but didn’t know what to do. I was a traditionally taught, paper-bound pianist before Simply Music. Previous concerts I fell back on to my traditional background and played from the written music, but this time I wanted to play some of the upper level SM pieces for the students to hear. Letting go of the written page is HARD, but I took the plunge and played “The Gaz” and “Ballade” from Level 6. My playing wasn’t perfect, but I got thru. What in the past seemed to be an impossibility for me, I can now do: play without written music. And not just playing from rote memory, but playing with understanding of how the piece is put together, where hand positions need to change, when black keys are needed, etc. I feel so much more connected to the real music.

I am looking forward to talking with the students about the concert this week, and getting feed-back about playing in front of an audience, “covering mistakes”, and “keeping going” when they occur.

Several of the people in the audience were accomplished musicians from traditional backgrounds. They were commenting over and over about how much they enjoyed the performances, the musicality of the playing, the feeling of the music and the control of the subtle phrasing the students had. Mind you, there were plenty of misplaced fingers due to nerves and whatever else throws us off when we play in a different environment, but the over-all performances were nicely done, with confidence.

If you are from a traditional background, do not feel rushed to have this change from note-reading to playing based occur. It will occur! I have been doing SM for 3 years as a teacher and 1 year before that as a student. Everyone learns at their own pace, but if you are faithful to learn SM the SM way and not look at the music, you will play from seeing the patterns and shapes on the keyboard. Even some of my old pieces that I could not play from memory previously, now translate to the keyboard using SM’s playing based methods.

The other night in about an hour, I was able to take a piece called “Allegro” by Haydn, that I had played many times before but couldn’t play from memory, and move it to the keyboard from the written page. This is astounding to me. After 40 years, playing without written music, a wish come true.

Thank you Neil & Simply Music!