Simpedia

Robin Keehn, Washingtion

I have learned over time (and repeatedly) that arrangements must be given in very, very small doses. The temptation is to give students more–because you are having fun or because they are or because they are really “getting it” in class and they want to know more. Especially if students have previous experience, you can easily fall into the “trap” of giving them more because they are picking it up so quickly.

What I keep learning is that I should only give one RH sentence or a LH chord or something small. My goal is to begin the process of exercising and growing the memory muscle. I do this by giving regular, small projects of arrangements.

What I am routinely fighting is the belief that most adults have (adult coaches and adult students) that they have a poor memory. Adults want to take notes so that they can remember, but that defeats the purpose. So, in order for students to experience a success, I can only give a small amount. That amount can grow over time as students gain more confidence and as their memory muscle strengthens. The last thing I want to do is give students too much of an arrangement so that they really cannot remember and experience a personal “failure.”

There are a couple of issues here. First, students with previous experience can be very quick learners in class. It is easy to teach them a whole arrangement during class. However, without any notes or support, it is common for those students to have no recollection of the arrangement the next day. Why? Because they didn’t really learn the arrangement by apply learning tools or strategies to the components. They probably just learned it by ear or by watching you.

What you really want is to give students an opportunity to apply learning tools and strategies to the arrangements and learn it and memorize it that way. By seeing shapes, patterns, sentences, fragments, chords (because you have specifically pointed them out), they will begin to “see” music in those terms, and when they have completed Reading Rhythm and Notes and start Time For More Music, they will see written music in those terms. If they have learned the components of an arrangement using those tools, they will be able to remember.

Another issue is what to do about the Arrangements when you are teaching them to a child and not to the coach. How are the coaches supposed to remember the arrangements so they can prompt their child? Basically, they are not supposed to prompt their child. The teaching of an arrangement is between you and the student, not the coach. Frankly, I don’t really want my coaches to prompt their children on the arrangement more than reminding them to check it on their playlist! I tell coaches that this is a project between their student and me and that they shouldn’t take notes or support the process. So, what happens when a student forgets an arrangement? The goal is that the arrangement goes on the playlist and it is maintained on a daily/weekly basis so it isn’t forgotten. It is another piece in the repertoire and it came at a higher cost than the Foundation Pieces so why make it less of a priority to play? I think that this is an area that most teachers find challenging.

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

This is a very, very common issue with students, especially adults. I recently found an old post of Neil’s 2003 that addresses this. It really answers your question, straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Hope it’s okay to ‘re-share’ this:

Learning Arrangements Without Using Support Materials
From Neil Moore

I would like to respond to both of the following questions. (And having read through my own response, wish to apologize in advance for some of my long, wordy sentences.)

Question 1: “….. are we allowed to photocopy the music of the Arrangements to give to the students?….”

and

Question 2: “… How are students supposed to remember the Arrangements since there’s no guidebook or tape?…”

One of the many aspects of the Arrangements Program is to provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to map strategies directly on to the keyboard. In addition to this, we can use it as a tool to support students in developing their ability to memorize music.

More accurately, it is not students’ memory that we are developing, but rather the ability to benefit from their already, highly developed memory, and the learning of how to focus it in a particular way and towards a specific function.

In an attempt to be clear, here’s how I see things.

All human beings have a vast capacity to memorize. Our ability to memorize extends far beyond our capacity to use that ability. Routinely (and without one second’s thought), we function all day long, every day, doing tens of thousands of things, and all of which flow seamlessly and invisibly from our memory. We need to know this so completely that it lives as a ‘truth’ for us.

And from the moment we awaken it begins – demonstrated in our knowing how remove the covers from the bed; knowing in which direction the bathroom is; whether the door handle turns left or right; whether the door opens toward you or away from you; how to remove the lid from the toothpaste; how to brush your teeth; how to shower yourself; how to shampoo your hair; how to shave; how to put on your socks; how to tie your shoe laces; knowing the difference between hair spray and insect spray; knowing how to do up your shirt buttons; knowing where the kitchen is; knowing where the cereal bowls are kept; where the cereal is; where the milk is kept; how to peel an orange; how to make juice or coffee or scrambled eggs, or any one of the vast multitude of things that we are doing at any given moment, minute by minute, hour after hour, every single day, on and on and on it goes, relentlessly and reliably drawing from our vast, vast, inexhaustible memory.

In concert with this, all human beings are pattern-seeking, memory machines that have been set to music. We are steeped in rhythm and intonation in our gesture, motion, functionality and communication, and we would lose our ability to operate in the world were we not.

That some people believe that they don’t have a ‘good memory’ is quite amazing. It is as much an illusion as is believing that we are unmusical. And as we know, no person has the capacity to communicate their belief of being unmusical, without doing so via the use of complex variations of rhythm and pitch that are embedded in the very words that they use in an attempt to communicate their lack of musicality!!! Truly a vaudeville parody!

I, quite simply, do not believe that it is our memory that is the issue. The problem emerges not as a result of what it is that people are trying to memorize, but more so the way in which they go about trying to memorize.

When Simply Music was first being ‘road tested’, I was teaching about 120+ private students a week. These students, of all ages and various degrees of musical background, were clearly no different than the types of students that we all come across every day.

At that time, my entire focus was on teaching people how to play. They received no music, no student notes, no Playlist, no audio CD, no video, no anything! They had a 25 minute lesson per week and that was it! They all had to rely on themselves, and I had to learn how to find a way whereby I could rely on their ability to rely on themselves.

I am certain that the results they achieved were less impressive than what we can achieve today, however, there was a definite advantage in students having to discover how to absorb material, knowing that there was no support system outside of themselves.

These days, whilst much has been gained, something has been lost. And interestingly enough, as time has gone by and more and more support tools have been provided, the more people have begun to rely more so on the materials and less so on themselves.

One of the declared goals of Simply Music is to produce students who can self-generate. This means far more than equipping students with the ability to read and ‘figure out’ music on their own. In fact if we were to merely achieve this, in some respects we wouldn’t be doing much more than what any good teacher achieves already.

Erroneously, we too often have our sights set on the playing of pieces. I believe that too quickly we forget that we are first and foremost responsible for teaching students a way of learning. Learning to play our entry level pieces, whilst initially satisfying to a beginning student, soon becomes a rather empty experience if the student is not conscious of how they are learning, why they are learning, what they are learning, how to use what they are learning, how to cross-pollinate their learning from one piece to the next, etc.

Ultimately, we need to form a partnership with our students whereby they know that they too are responsible for their ‘learning a way of learning’.

We often don’t communicate this clearly enough when we talk with potential students who have come from a traditional background. Oftentimes students, or their parents, make a judgment call regarding the appropriateness of this program, based on the ‘look’ and/or ‘sound’ of the complexity of the pieces.

When this happens, it is more than a misrepresentation of the program. It falls profoundly short of providing even a glimpse of the multi-sensory, single thought process, dynamic and comprehensive learning opportunity that this program fully offers.

I am committed to supporting teachers in producing students that have not only learned, but have learned about how they have learned.

Part of the process along the way to achieving this, is to provide developmentally-appropriate opportunities for students to test themselves and measure what they are learning. We need to provide situations whereby students can discover how to put to use what they have achieved as a result of immersing themselves in learning pieces via patterns, sentences, fragments etc., etc.

The Arrangements Program was partially designed as to support this very goal. My intention was to provide very little to the teacher, and nothing to the student other than their existing skill level – no music, no audio, no video, no notes, no anything!!

I recommend presenting the Arrangements to students in such a way as to allow them to realize that the absence of support materials is part of the design. Learning without any support materials is fundamental to developing the ability to self-generate.

We must also know that students always mirror the unspoken concerns of their teacher. Consistently, those teachers who struggle to memorize, end up surrounding themselves with page-reliant students, and routinely find that their students’ parents are pressuring them to introduce reading!

Understandably, if a student has had a more traditional experience, and has typically relied on the page for instruction, then every step towards shifting this needs to be developmentally appropriate. The key to this is found in the words ‘developmentally-appropriate’, and this falls to the shoulders of the teacher who will need to make judgment calls. Giving students an arrangement that is too advanced, or giving them too many arrangements too soon, will undo the intended benefit.

For that matter, presenting any piece whereby the teacher is not absolutely clear about the playing-based strategies is a precarious thing to do. Doing exactly this is far more common when the teacher themselves is relatively new to the playing-based environment.

So as a strategy for moving forward, several things must be included – some being clear and practical, and others more vague and harder to grasp.

Most probably, it first begins with the teacher coming to terms with the fact the they themselves are as ‘memory-perfect’ as they need to be, and that all people are. It also includes knowing that they have not only the ability to successfully teach students to amass a vast repertoire of pieces, but equally important, the ability to self-generate.

At a more tangible level, the next step includes approaching the subject from the perspective of a fundamental question, that being: “… How do I have students connect with their ability to remember pieces of music, and do that without having to provide them with any external, material support?…” This question should remain as a background from which to come, and subsequently propel the teaching strategy.

And for every piece of music that we play, we should spend a significant portion of time looking at how it unfolds on the keyboard. We need to be asking ourselves, “… How can I learn this? Are these sentences or patterns? Do I fragment this? Are their obvious shapes? Are there not-so-obvious shapes? What thought processes are taking place, and how can I distill these into fewer thought processes? What is the relationship between the position of the right and left hands? What are my hands doing in their rhythmic relationship to one other? Are their rhythmic patterns, and can these be diagrammed? How do I use Mapping? …” Etc., etc.

Ultimately, these questions become the field of action. The process of processing the questions, becomes the source of instruction.

In a nutshell, don’t copy and provide the sheet music. More important than the copyright issues, is the fact that you actually lose the point of the exercise. And regarding how to teach the Arrangements without a guide book or tape, the question is far better to be asked and contemplated, than answered.

Kind Regards,
Neil Moore

Sheri R., California

Thanks Laurie for investigating. It’s always great to read and re-read words of clarity and wisdom.

Here’s something I do in my studio. To further students becoming more aware and connected to what they are learning in the overall “learning a way of learning” environment we are all trying to create for them, I have a five-step process that I tell my students will help their memories. It has to do with reinforcing new material many times as soon as it’s learned. Sort of like telling jokes – if you don’t tell a new joke to a few people right away chances are, if you’re like most people, you’ll forget it. You know, use it or lose kind of thing.

I also try to teach new arrangements at the beginning of class and then throughout the class I’ll ask who remembers Honey Arr. 2? If they can “bring this back up to the desktop” so to speak (Neilspeak) then they are on their way. If they forgot, reteach, (everyone will exclaim “oh yeah, now I remember!”) If they remembered, have them briefly describe it as many times as you bring it up. Do this a few times in class and it helps cement that learning. That is part of the first step in fact. Here’s the five step process:

1. Describe aloud in the lesson: In a shared lesson everyone says something very specific until we’ve described everything about it, not things like you put your hand here, but more like RH is positioned on middle C and a chord is played, as in Honey Dew, with the addition of the 2nd finger, or the same arrangement can be described as play all 4 fingers on the RH but leave finger 4 out. I’m sure you can all guess what arrangement that is! I like to get a few students to even describe the same event or series of events in different ways, but creating their own ways and also by using clues and tools they already know. They might even say, as far as that last description, that you could use 4 as the learning clue, sort of like we use 2s in Night Storm.

2. Describe aloud in car before driving away.

3. Play just the new material as soon as you arrive home.

4. Play just the new material just before bed.

5. Play just the new material just before getting on with your day after you’ve slept.

Each one of these steps should take merely seconds or up to a minute. Reinforcing the new material in the first 12 to 24 hour period after the lesson really does increase the likelihood that students will remember. And if they forget anywhere along the way, like before they get to their car as happens, especially with more inexperienced students, then they can call someone in class.

Sheri R. , California

This one can be tricky, and sometimes I teach other arrangements interspersed with this one along the way. So if it takes longer than 2 or 3 lessons for this one I really don’t have a problem with it since they are moving forward in other areas as well. Physically it can be a challenge at first to play the second chord so just give it as a little chunk until it feels easier, maybe weeks of playing it a minute a day.  It’s not necessarily a piece at first, just something to sort of do to get their hand familiar with the shapes.

If it takes a few weeks or more to learn verse one, it’s okay. Just keep encouraging them! If you’d like to try others first that is okay too! There’s the physical aspect of this one and the memory aspect. Have students away from the piano look at their fingers and how it’s not a normal thing for them to put that space between fingers two and three. They can try it in the air and I joke about how we don’t wave good-bye like that or hold a drink or really anything and they have fun seeing how true that is and then trying it, opening and closing their fingers.

Later have everyone wave goodbye to you with their fingers outstretched–being outrageous helps the memory!

Cindy B., Illinois

I had a lot of trouble with Dreams 1 for quite a long time, especially with adult students. What I’ve discovered is that, rather than teaching the arrangement in order, I teach components, just like in the foundation version. With adults, I automatically go into homeopathic mode. (an almost microscopic dose to take home and remember.)

I teach chord 1 the 1st week. chord 2 the second week, while continuing to maintain chord 1. Chord 3 the 3rd week, while maintaining 1&2. Then I have to decide whether or not to teach the left hand similarly, but by verse. Verse 1 is the same 2 notes. Verse 2 is the only busy part of the whole song as far as the left hand goes. Then I might consider putting the hands together for the “think I’ll make my dreams come true” sentence at the very end, which is the only place chord 3 happens, and not touch the rest of the song until that last sentence is mastered. etc.

Remember – The first arrangement taught is always going to be difficult, because no one is accustomed to remembering without support materials. I believe that the Dreams 1 arrangement is an excellent piece to tackle 1st because:

1… being difficult to learn makes it a perfect complement to a rather easy foundation level. Most students whiz through Level 1 foundation, and could use some challenge in the “new way of learning” and not become dependent on the materials.
2.. Experiencing a victory at learning Dreams 1, and then getting some breathing room with an easier arrangement next is a common technique in Simply Music – if the lessons are always going to get harder, the student has nothing but an uphill climb to anticipate with no “easy” time.
3… you, the teacher, need to be able to assess your student’s abilities early on, and there’s no better way than to tackle a relatively challenging arrangement.

Samali D., Australia

I have found handling the awkward movement in the RH of Dreams arrangement one much easier if you show just the movement of fingers 3 & 5 by themselves first.

Add fingers 1 & 2 the next week – much easier!

I have also found a similar approach that I described below to work well with Bishop Blues.

You can teach the RH chords omitting finger 5. Students seem to grasp moving this shape in their hand much more easily. Once this is handled with hands together I then ask them to add finger 5 to the lot. Very much simpler!

Students have had such success with the above approach that I routinely do this will most/all of my students these days.

Mark M., New York

In addition to offering additional training / teaching suggestions, Gordon Harvey’s TWS audio on Arrangements 1 and Arrangements 2 offer suggestions on how to coordinate timing of each arrangement with the Foundation program.

Satauna, New York

Without written notes, how do you break arrangements in to smaller chunks that students can retain after the lesson? I don’t have a big list of when to unfold what, but here is some information about where I’ve chosen to begin thus far. I start arrangements after students are very comfortable with Honey Dew. Having a memorized Level 1 accompaniment piece under their hat will help them begin to work through arrangements with greater ease.

Introduce the Honey Dew variation that adds the index finger to all of the chords. This is Track 5 on audio 2. I call this “Honey Dew With Pointer Too!” That title also gives the student the clue of what to play. This variation has no new learning in the lh. It simply requires that the student add the index finger in to all of the Honey Dew chords. This gives them the success of being able to play a full arrangement with the audio at home. In shared lessons, other students can sing along. As a teacher, I might play the melody in an upper octave with them while they play the accompaniment. We can discuss how we might slow the piece down slightly or play the chords softer to alter the mood. It’s even possible to play the piece through with only the right hand accompaniment, then add the lh in the second time round for more depth.

If the student also already knows Amazing Grace, I will have them use this index finger addition in that song, too. Immediately they’ve got two pieces they can play with this variation.

Once Honeydew With Pointer Too is mastered, it’s easy to jump into the first arrangement of Dreams.  Students will already know the first chord. Teach them the second chord and just have them play Dreams with the rh and sing along, have someone else sing, play along with the audio at home, etc. the LH doesn’t require much new learning here, either. Have the student play Dreams as the Foundation piece as an instrumental, then transition into the accompaniment variation and sing along.

From here you might choose to teach the next arrangement of Dreams. This moves the chord shape the students have been working with in the rh to the lh. For a small chunk, just teach the first chord in the lh. Then either you, or another student in a shared lesson can improvise the rh using five fingers over five white notes with the thumb starting on D. Now, we have improv and arrangement tied together! Cool! Keep that improv project going as you teach the next two chords to this variation in the lh.

Another option is to teach the first chord in the lh and then have the student play the chord in the lh and rh at the same time. Sometimes having the lh mimic the right at the same time makes the task seem less daunting. To add an improv layer to this idea, you might have them write a simple lyric or read a poem over this chord.

This second arrangement changes the mood of Dreams into a minor key and puts the melody back in the rh–terrific if you have students who are getting tired of doing arrangements that are accompaniment pieces. When teaching the melody, there isn’t any new learning, except that the hand position is moved up by one white note. Students can just play the rh for awhile if that helps. They can play rh while you (or another student) plays lh.

Ethel S., Arizona

It seems my adult students really seem to “need” extra notes for the arrangements, so I am trying to get them to use the tools that we have already learned rather than write extra notes. In order to help my students, I thought it would be nice to have a Learning Strategies worksheet for the arrangements also.

My daughter, Brianna Smith, is also a fellow SM teacher and she reformulated Joanne Jones’ Learning Strategies page for Arrangements 1.