Many of us have no problem reading the notes of a masterpiece. We can certainly learn it note by note. If luckily the piece does not have more than four flats or four sharps, we might get through one page after half an hour. Then you go for a water break and have a snack and when you come back to the piano, you realise you do not remember most of the notes you played before.
Did you have the experience above? Or do you find your piano students are having such trouble? Some advanced pianists can sight read a piece of music and play it perfectly while beginner students can struggle on a single page of music even after months of practicing it.
Maybe you think after many years of playing we will be able to acquire the skills and get better. There is no doubt one will improve certain skills after practicing. However, if the direction is not right, we can end up spending a lot of time and making very little improvement. For example, spending a year playing one Beethoven sonata but still cannot confidently play it fluently or playing it up to speed.
Time is crucial. There are so many beautiful piano music composed by great composers such as J.S.Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Faure, Debussy, Ravel and the list can go on for pages. Each of them wrote books of music that if we or our students need to take months to just to go through one piece (a few pages), that means we are limiting ourselves and we cannot fully enjoy the colourful world of piano music.
The key is that we need to understand the musical language so that we can read music not just note by note but see the meaning of a piece given by the composer. I often use this analogy to explain to my students: Imagine we want to be a great actor or actress, but we have to speak a language that is not our first language. The first thing we need to do is to improve our understanding of that new language so that we are able to express the meaning of what we say and say it fluently from memory. Almost all great solo pianists gave their best performance from memory. Only a few would use music as a backup when they actually could play their performance pieces from memory. On the other hand, most of the performance anxiety comes from worrying about the fluency, remember what note to play, which key to press.
Nowadays piano lessons could be putting a lot of emphasis on the expression at the early stage. While interpretation and style are very important and they are the topics that interest us the most, let us not forget the importance of educating ourselves or our students to understand the musical language and be able to memorise a piece quickly.
