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Guest post by Anthony Hardwicke

Instrumental Music Teachers as Individual Learning Coaches

In Episode 4 of his A Land Without Music? podcast series, Julian Leeks collected lots of evidence that a musical education can benefit our children. However, he stopped short of claiming that learning a musical instrument can boost a child’s progress right across the school curriculum. I believe we can and should make this claim, and the reason is simple: when children are given piano lessons, they get weekly one-to-one coaching on how to learn. 

Learning how to learn involves acquiring a key set of skills, such as planning, repetition, memorising, listening, feedback loops, etc. Once encountered, these can be deployed to help master other academic disciplines. Learning to learn has been championed in the past by academics such as Professor Guy Claxton. The main takeaway is that if we focus more on making children better learners, they can use their ‘learning muscles’ to make a success of other areas of their lives. 

In a weekly one-to-one piano lesson with a peripatetic teacher, the child will experience a wide variety of different approaches to learning to play the piano. The teacher might discuss the most efficient strategies for effective practice, explain how to memorise a piece of music, talk about how music theory relates to a Mozart sonata, or they might give the student an impassioned pep-talk about how interesting and exciting Beethoven is. Perhaps they might not even intend this as an outcome, but the piano teacher might find themselves auditing that individual child’s learning skills in a way that a classroom teacher simply hasn’t got time to. I really do see the peripatetic instrumental teachers in a school as a super-motivated, highly experienced team of personal learning coaches.

What nobody talks about is how easily these useful learning approaches can be applied to learning about STEM subjects (and indeed other academic subjects). To memorise eight different chords to let you play 20 pop songs, is a very similar proposition to memorising the formulae of eight different ions so as you can work out the formulae of 20 different ionic compounds in chemistry. 

Teach a child to play the piano and you will almost certainly additionally grant them regular access to an inspirational teacher who will coach them and rehearse the priceless skills they need to learn all other school subjects. In most cases, because the lessons are one-to-one, the teacher will diagnose which skills the child individually needs to develop and move forwards their ability to learn effectively. 

Whether you’re a parent who wants your child to have a competitive advantage, or a politician pondering how best to invest for future society, we must have more music education.

Anthony Hardwicke has been a classroom science teacher for nearly 30 years and is a dedicated amateur pianist. 

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Guest post by Ann Martin-Davis, pianist and teacher

‘Dum diddle diddle dum dum dum.’

How can it be that this simple tune that we all know isn’t counted in three? Yes, you heard me, not in three, but in fact in four plus two.

Try it out right now in your head – go on – and then go through all those other Baroque minuets that you have been humming for years and you’ll see that the shape of the melodies and the articulation that follows fall into the same pattern.

Now fast forward 200 years to Ravel; Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, the Sonatine, Menuet Antique, and you’ll find the same patterns, and why? Because this is how it’s danced.

Learning the dances of the Baroque period doesn’t just sort out your understanding and playing of these composers, but it can inform pretty much everything else dance related that you might be involved with.

I’m with the dancer and historical coach Chris Tudor, and I’m joined by harpsichordist Sophie Yates, and Bach specialist, Helen Leek. We’re here to learn some of the basics and after intros in our ‘comfortable clothing’, we’re warming up with a simple hand held chain called a linear carole.

Caroles, or carols as we now call them, always used to be danced and sung, but at some point we lost the dance element. The origins go way back to the ancient Greeks and to the choros, or circular sung dance. Remember the dancers on Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad? The magic of the shield creates a moment of escape from the pressures of reality and of the battle; I too quickly forget my parking battle off the Euston Road and settle into the conviviality of it all.

Next up is a renaissance dance, the Branle, which Chris tells us is a surreptitious way of introducing some of the steps to a minuet. We take one step to the right, close, then one step to the left and over with the right. Always rotating clockwise as we don’t want any negative energy.

We make swift progress and then I drop the bomb.

‘How about a Courante?’

Chris grimaces a bit and at this point I suddenly have a flashback to a grade exam, where I galloped through a Bach Courante and landed with a grateful ‘ta dah-like’ placement of the final ‘G.’

Sophie steps in and tells me that the Courante was fast in the Renaissance, but by the time J S Bach got busy with it, the metre had moved to 3/2 making it one of the slowest of all of the Baroque dances. She continues, ‘it could be apocryphal, but gossip colomnist in Chief in Versailles, Titon du Tillet said it slowed down because of Louis XIV’s long-toed shoes, meaning an extreme turn-out was necessary.’

So the Courante gets us talking about the ‘cadence’ of a dance which can relate to two ideas. We have cadence, as in the cadence of your voice, the qualities of the dance (a Courante has a noble and stately quality), but there is also the exploration of the cadences in the music and how these are going to relate to the cadences in the dance.

This is blowing my fuses now, so we all agree it’s time for coffee…

‘Dancing with Bach’, hosted by Ann Martin-Davis, with Chris Tudor, Sophie Yates and Helen Leek is a one-day workshop for pianists exploring the dance forms familiar to Bach that he used in his Partitas, Suites, and throughout his other collections of keyboard music.

Saturday 22nd February at St Mary-Le-Savoy Lutheran Church, London WC1H 9LP

Find out more here

Bring your dancing shoes!

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Guest post by Charlotte Tomlinson

January 2025 will mark the 3rd anniversary of the Oxford Piano Weekends, and the thirteenth weekend. I can hardly believe that what started on the back of an envelope in late 2021, has developed into such a fixture in the piano course market that pianists return again and again.

We started in 2021 with the legacy of Covid and all the social and musical anxiety that came with that. It was essential to find a way of getting people to know each other quickly so I devised a mini workshop to be held before supper on the first evening, in which people get into pairs to chat about a particular musical and performing issue. Within a short space of time, the conversations are animated, social anxiety disappears and people feel relaxed and comfortable. By the time we start the evening session, a united and supportive group has already established itself.

It can’t be underestimated how important this group bonding is. A good number of pianists who come on the Oxford Piano Weekends struggle with performance anxiety and physical tension, and feeling emotionally safe within the group is essential to move through these issues.

I used to have crippling performance anxiety and now I really enjoy performing, something that would have been previously unimaginable. The weekends have helped me immeasurably.

Right from the start, Oxford Piano Weekends have had a wonderfully diverse pool of advanced and committed pianists taking part: bankers, medics, piano teachers, lawyers, choir directors, pianists returning after many years, battered and bruised pianists from a legacy of harsh teaching, students preparing for final recitals and many, many more. Pianists come from all over the UK, as far afield as Dublin, Finland, Malta and most recently, Canada.

The weekend is a chance to reflect deeply on your playing with expert guidance to take away and improve your practice.

On any one Oxford Piano Weekend, the numbers are kept deliberately low with six or seven as the ideal. Each pianist has twenty minutes teaching within the group, in rotation over the weekend, and it’s extraordinary how much can be packed into that short time. I listen to each pianist to see what they need, and then make sure that my response is valuable not just for the pianist themselves, but also for the group. Participants learn so much from watching and listening to each other, seeing their own challenges reflected in other pianists and then observing that pianist transform in front of their eyes.

A truly wonderful weekend. Charlotte is so caring, and teaches with such empathy, understanding & musical knowledge and expertise.

And what’s more important than the meal times? Homemade, tasty, nutritious food with free flowing wine in the evenings, the now-famous homemade flapjacks for coffee breaks, all provide a wonderful back drop for lively, stimulating conversations among like-minded people. They truly are full and rich weekends, and I, for one, come away at the end of each one feeling exhilarated and all ready to go for the next one.

Next weekend: January 17th -19th 2025

For more details go to: https://www.charlottetomlinson.com/oxford-piano-weekends

Watch a podcast with Charlotte Tomlinson and The Cross-Eyed Pianist

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In this episode we discuss gesture in piano playing – when it’s useful and when it’s most definitely not!

Find all previous episodes here

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