Today’s post features the second interview with pianist and piano professor Jan Loeffler. You can read the first interview in this series, here. In this instalment, Jan discusses piano pedagogy.
When were you first interested in the pedagogical side of the piano profession and when did you begin teaching the piano?
Prof. Matthies told me after starting my undergraduate degree that I should also enrol in the Instrumental Teaching Diploma degree, even though I had been admitted onto the Performance Diploma course. She said that no matter how far I would go in the profession, teaching would likely play a role in my life and that it would be very beneficial to have an understanding of instrumental pedagogy. She said the only downside would be that I’d have to take quite a few additional subjects on top of my instrumental studies, but she thought that the workload would be manageable – and so it was, she was right. As soon as I started attending lectures, I was hooked! Child and brain development are fascinating topics and affect us all, of course. These topics aren’t limited to instrumental studies but to everything we learn in life. I started teaching the piano aged 22 as part of my degree in which each student was allocated two students, one beginner, one advanced, and we had weekly supervised sessions. For these sessions we had to write lesson plans, student ability profiles, lay out our strategy for each student with clearly formulated targets and pathways. The whole pedagogy class then observed each lesson and afterwards we would critique each other in the round, supervised by Prof. Inge Rosar, our pedagogy teacher. It was tough, I’m not going to lie, but I came out of this degree feeling more confident about my ability to pass on knowledge and skills to the next generation of musicians. Whilst my current teaching work is mostly limited to very advanced youngsters and senior conservatoire students, the expertise we gained through teaching beginners is immensely helpful, also when teaching e.g. a Masters student, since it usually becomes obvious rather quickly what are the root causes of issues that present themselves, musically and technically. Having had that early-years, grass-roots pedagogical foundation, I’m reasonably confident that I’ve got solutions to offer to students. I’m not saying it’s imperative to have had that training, but I am saying that I personally feel a sense of reassurance to have some scientific backing rather than solely relying on tradition and trial and error, although there’s no disputing the fact that the former and the latter are undoubtedly important aspects of teaching, too.
Why is teaching the piano important to you?
Well, how do you explain love?!? I love music, I love being able to communicate with other human beings on a non-verbal level (can you believe that, given the length of my answers?!). I love feeling connected to individuals from many generations ago and I love feeling connected to the future through my students. The responsibility of passing on our society’s cultural traditions, the proverbial artistic baton, is a huge privilege and honour.
The piano is an instrument, and sometimes we can forget what that means: it’s a tool! And therein lies the cue, for a tool is a means to an end, to an objective which exists outside the process of its creation. This means that playing the piano in itself isn’t the main achievement, for it is what we try to achieve through playing the piano that matters!
The latter means that musicians need to have had some formative life experiences: music depicts life; it depicts the human condition, its struggles and joys, and if you haven’t experienced both, I would argue, you’ll find it difficult to express them in your art.
Teaching the piano is important to me because I want to provide young human beings with the chance to express themselves in a meaningful way, in a way that reaches other human beings without words, in a way which goes straight to their hearts and souls, to forge a direct, unmediated bond.
Music is the only art form which affords us the possibility to connect to the mental and emotional state of fellow human beings with an immediacy that, to my mind, is second to none. It is a form of time travel for me, as we connect with people’s souls that no longer exist on this planet, however, may exist elsewhere, who knows, and we connect with those not yet born when we leave behind recordings, and we connect through our students. Music forms a continuum which transcends space, matter and time.
On a more utilitarian level, I also feel that learning a musical instrument is a brilliant way for young people to be heard, to be listened to, and to gain the undivided attention of others, adults in particular. So often do we not really listen to our young generation – we talk at them, not to them – and I think that music provides a platform for the whole of society to come together and create shared experiences. By playing music from dead composers, living composers, and composers from different backgrounds we exchange ideas, concepts, and emotions, which arguably help us to better understand each other.
That’s why technique is important, and I come back to that now: as I mentioned earlier, the better our technique, the more accurately we can express what’s inside us; but I’ve already said that. What I haven’t mentioned yet is that people tend to stop really listening when it’s even only subconsciously evident that the performer isn’t in charge, as we assume a degree of randomness. I’m not referring to wrong notes, occasional mishaps, occasional memory slips, or the likes. Those are accidents and humans are accident-prone. No, I’m referring to e.g. the mixing up of voice-leading, questionable pedalling obscuring texture and melodic lines, or inconsistent articulation, for, amongst many others, these aspects are the building blocks that composers use to create works of art. The problem is that our brains like structure, and repeated events and consistency help our brains to recognise patterns which create said structure. Our senses are incredibly perceptive, and we can notice very, very small deviations from anticipated events. When these events are frequently disturbed in their regularity, they become less predictable, and so the pattern recognition is compromised, leading to the musical structures to fall apart.
David Owen Norris once said in a masterclass at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire that all musical performance is based on three principles: confirmation, surprise, and disgust. We can see that confirmation requires anticipation for something to be confirmed, and surprise would be the opposite, i.e. that an anticipation was not confirmed. Disgust, however, is at the extreme end of surprise, when an event is so outlandish, so unexpected, so out of the ordinary, that the listener won’t accept it. The latter is usually the result of the quantity and quality of divergence from the commonly accepted norm, which leads the listener to reject it.
To come back to your question of why teaching the piano is important to me, with all that being said:
I have seen flames of artistic expression, flames of artistic individuality and brilliance go extinct because of too big a divergence from commonly accepted norms, and I think the world is poorer for it. I’d like to help young people to be able to get their artistic voices heard.
You have written several interesting and influential dissertations regarding certain aspects of piano teaching. How did these manifest and what, do you believe, are the most important outcomes in your research?
There are several key take-aways for me personally. I’d like to preface the following by saying that when we refer to memory or memorising something, it applies to procedural memory just as much as to cognitive memory.
1.
Malcolm Gladwell’s popularised 10,000-hour rule to becoming an expert at anything, aka ‘practice makes perfect’, is an oversimplification. It’s the intentionality with which the practice is conducted that makes the difference. Practice needs to be deliberate; merely mechanical repetition isn’t going to yield the desired artistic results. The crux of the matter here is that one needs to have identified a goal in order to know whether the result you’ve achieved is desired or not. Based on the assessment of the result, you then need to adjust your execution in order to get closer to your desired outcome. In other words, my intention when teaching students is to get them to identify their practice goals in as much detail as possible, and then to strive towards them. The more detailed these goals are, the better the long-term outcome will be.
2.
Our brains assess whether to remember something based on two basic principles: prevalence (quantity) and impact (consequences). In other words, we either remember something because it happened often or because there were marked consequences to an event. What this means for instrumental teaching is that you need to repeat the correct version often and you need to keep any deviation from the desired outcome in any aspect as minimal as possible so that what you repeat is as identical as possible. If, for example, we practise something five times, and it’s incorrect twice, but we tell ourselves every time we play the three correct versions that this is how it should be, it won’t make a difference: our brain will still have had a 40% exposure to something we don’t want to repeat. In other words, we need to create the reality we want, we need to play correctly as often as possible.
3.
We need to be actively involved in the processes that constitute the execution of a piece. The more detail we actively commit to our memory, the more secure it will become and the deeper will we be able to dive into our memory during a performance, thus securing it. The process of grouping individual items together is called chunking, which is helpful in order to process masses of information, but the downside is that we don’t have (easy) access to what’s inside such a chunk once it’s been… well… chunked. You wouldn’t routinely be able to recall detailed information during a performance if you haven’t consciously processed this piece of information in your preparation. That is a prime example of how memory lapses occur.
There are three main ways to use this information:
- Don’t question in performance what you haven’t questioned in practice either!
- Scrutinise everything you have to learn and go through it with a toothcomb.
- The more individual, complementary pieces of information you can learn in preparation, the more solid your memory and execution will be.
4.
The Serial Position Effect means that we tend to remember items at the beginning and the end of a list more easily than those in the middle. For us instrumentalists this means that we need to break down our practice sections into short chunks so that their beginning and end points lie close enough together, which makes it more difficult to forget what’s in-between. We then vary these beginning and end points, thereby creating an overlapping effect, further securing both memory and execution.
5.
When I investigated the role of the teacher, observing many hours of piano teaching by some of the most successful pedagogues at the RAM, I found no consistency in methodical approach, however, there was one stand-out feature of their teaching: humour. There was, despite all serious study that was clearly taking place, a sense of commonly-shared joy and occasional mischievousness which kept both, teacher and student, intensely engaged in the lesson and its content. I think what is important to remember is that humans don’t only process information, but also learn and remember feelings associated with situations. By creating a very positive, warm-hearted and occasionally humorous atmosphere, students felt at ease and relaxed, which inevitably leads to better learning because the mind isn’t pre-occupied with processing what it perceives to be potential subliminal threats.
This goes back to what I explained earlier on with regards to how our brain discerns between useful and useless information and what it thus remembers, or doesn’t. In former times, the consequences of one’s playing, which may not have been up to snuff, might have been the teacher exploding in outrage, therefore creating a ‘memorable occasion’. Nowadays we need to create this ‘memorable occasion’ by different means, which is where humour comes in. Outrage and humour are two sides of the same coin, and I know which one I much prefer!
You started teaching at RBC in 2013 and have since trained many prize-winning young pianists, how has the conservatoire changed in that time?
The most obvious change is the new building, which is working quite well for us. The performance spaces are wonderful, and so are the instruments. We’ve got a couple of Steinway Model Ds, a Yamaha CFX, a Bechstein D282 (which Peter Donohoe loves!) and a couple of Faziolis, so there really is quite a selection of fine instruments available. In addition to that, we are home to some instruments from the 19th century (e.g. a Wieck and a Bösendorfer), which are insightful for students to experiment on. Having access to these pianos informs their approach to playing the respective repertoire on a modern instrument.
We’ve seen the average level of students rise over recent years, which is probably down to a mixture of factors, including the new facilities, but also the stellar work Julian Lloyd Webber did for us when he was at the helm, which our new Principal and former CEO of the CBSO, Stephen Maddock, is continuing in inspiring and proactive fashion. Additionally, our colleagues in the department do some fantastic work, and it really shows in the performances throughout the year when the transformation of the students’ playing is on full display. All of this contributes to an outstanding student experience, which is wonderful to see.
I think I arrived at a time of change in our department, when some former colleagues were leaving or had just left and some new ones, including me, started. This naturally meant that everyone had to get to know each other, and the nature of our work means that we’re not all in the building at the same time, so this ‘honeymoon period’ was somewhat extended. A few years in, and we’ve really grown together as a community that loves to share ideas and interact, inspiringly led by John Thwaites, supported by Daniel Browell and Katharine Lam. A lot of us talk to each other privately, too, to ask advice, share experiences, and to just ‘geek out’, as our students would call it, I suppose, over fingerings, rubato, and whether Debussy forgot to write a particular bar of music.
It’s a very happy place to be, study, teach and make music, that’s for sure!
You are on the faculty of both the junior and senior departments. How do you feel the training differs between these departments?
Wow, how long is a piece of string?!
The nature of teaching young students is that their bodies and brains are still under significant development, i.e. there is a constant element of change present, which is a good thing because it means that as teachers we can make a positive contribution to their development and steer it in the right direction. Their attention span, however, is not as long as that of a young adult student (although the prevalence of social media and screens everywhere has significantly shortened the attention span of the latter group, which also impacts their short-term memory), which consequently means that we have to find ways to adapt to that when working on long pieces and aspects of technique or musicianship which are more complex.
One of my core teaching principles at any age is asking students questions, supporting them to discover music themselves by guiding them through it, whilst also increasing their level of self-awareness.
The younger the student, the more important it becomes to rotate frequently between items that need to be learnt in the lesson in order to keep attention levels up. This is one way of ensuring consistent engagement with the lesson content.
Extrinsic motivation (aka ‘bribery’, but, of course, also specific targets, such as concerts, prizes or, indeed, exams) is often helpful in the initial stages of learning. In more advanced students, extrinsic motivation becomes intrinsic. Having said that, I encourage students to develop agency over their own progress as early as possible, which usually leads to them being intrinsically motivated early on.
The above is crucial, for I believe that only if students realise that they’ve got agency over their learning and progress can they take full credit for their achievements, which leads to a dramatic build-up of confidence. On the flip side, however, this also means them taking responsibility when things don’t quite go as planned, provided the teaching has been adequate. This isn’t necessarily bad news because it means that it is them who can turn things around and steer their progress in a different direction if they’re not happy with how things are going.
A further important aspect of teaching youngsters vs adult students is where the introduction of new skills occurs. The younger the child, the lower their ability to transfer skills, which necessitates us teaching these skills entirely in their lessons; between lessons they will then consolidate these newly acquired skills (‘practise what they know already’). The older the student and the more musically and technically advanced they are, the more we can ask them to transfer knowledge onto other aspects of pianism and musicianship themselves. Initially this will be, e.g., working with them on the exposition of a sonata and then asking them to learn the recapitulation by themselves. The more advanced the students are, the more you can ask them to use the knowledge they’ve gained in the exposition and to apply that to the development section, to give just one such example.
Further differences are an increase in the use of imagery with younger students, finding similes, comparisons with already known concepts, less explaining and more imitating because they don’t have the same cognitive skills yet, whilst at the same time ensuring that we give them enough cognitive tasks to engage their brains and to develop their analytical ability and self-reflection.
Younger students are also far less likely to have deeply engrained disadvantageous habits to deal with than older ones because of the plasticity of their brains still being higher, and because they have had less time to be exposed to, and live with, unhelpful habits, hence why there is less un-learning and re-learning to do. Helping children become sufficiently proficient early on so that when they hit puberty (when things they do need to be ‘cool’) they are good enough on the instrument to want to continue, is an important factor. In other words, we need to ensure that their musical taste, refinement, and demands don’t outpace their technical ability.
At a younger age, parental involvement will be higher. I’m very fortunate in that the parents of the Junior Conservatoire students I have taught over the years are without exception very supportive and very collaboratively minded, which means we really get on and work as a team for the benefit of their children.
I tend to avoid using words like ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in lessons whomever I teach, since I believe these don’t tell us anything worthwhile. They evaluate but don’t instruct. Time is valuable, so it’s best to use language which contributes to progress in an instructive and constructive fashion. Our brains don’t process negations (very well), so when speaking it is better to use grammatically positive language rather than negation. The easiest example is to use ‘play like this’ rather than ‘don’t play like that’. Additionally, the latter doesn’t instruct how to do it, it merely states that the version just heard wasn’t the one we’re after. Also, the phrase ‘it has to be like this’ isn’t helpful either as it implies that there is one way or one approach of playing something. I think if we want to encourage and foster artistic creativity, we would do well to ask students to play something in several different ways, then evaluate and decide which one is preferable.
Noam Chomsky’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a way of changing someone’s thoughts and behaviours to help achieve desired outcomes for them. It may reduce anxiety and improve overall wellbeing, and whilst I’m by no means an expert, I am mindful of the power of speech and am trying to be as conscious as possible in the use of my language with students, no matter their age.
Also, performing musicians need a lot of self-confidence to get up on stage and deliver. It is so easy to destroy their confidence with just one word or phrase, and it will take years of positive reinforcement and positive lived experiences to regain that confidence; so, we need to be very careful what we say to students, whilst being truthful and realistic.
Other important distinctions to make, especially for young students, is that playing the piano isn’t the same as practising the piano, and that how we practise something isn’t necessarily the same as how we will ultimately play a piece. I’m very keen for all of my students to understand that both, playing and practising their instrument, is vitally important, but that they need to be conscious of when they’re engaged in which, and what that entails.
Having learnt the notes, the rhythm, and the performance instructions is just the starting point for student and teacher to explore the music behind the notation. That’s why it’s so important that students are consummate readers of notation as early as possible since otherwise the mere process of learning all the objective information takes an inordinate amount of time by the end of which they will have tired of the piece already and have closed their minds to the wonders the music holds. Too often the written score is taken for the music itself to which the former is merely a portal.
I would like to mention a great musician who recently visited us at RBC for a masterclass, Kirill Gerstein. One of the students who played to him has enviable technique and is already a formidable artist in his own right. To Gerstein’s mind, his scales were too even (incidentally, Leon Fleisher made the same comment to a student at the RAM, playing a Beethoven concerto). I remember what Gerstein said like it was yesterday:
‘You spend your life being nagged by teachers telling you that your scales are uneven. You then perfect the art of playing scales evenly – and your scales were perfect, simply perfect – and then someone like me comes along and tells you that they are too even and that they need to be more uneven in order to be truly expressive’. The difference is, though, that the unevenness would be an intentional artistic decision, taken with the aim of being expressive, and Gerstein was referring to rhythmic inflection and gentle accentuation, i.e. shaping, rather than tonal inconsistencies and random accents.
‘But isn’t all great art somewhat, to some degree, distorted?’, I hear people ask. ‘Think of Picasso, think of Glenn Gould, Friedrich Gulda, think of Otto Dix, Keith Haring… the list is almost endless. These artists go to extremes, not depicting reality, and that’s what makes them great!’ But their skill, intentionality and consistency in what they did is noticeable, and that’s what matters. Picasso’s sketches and drawings from his teenage years are an incredible display of skill in having already perfected the art of drawing and sketching; no wonder he would venture ‘off course’ in order to explore what else was possible.
As you can see, I find exploring art, and our medium, the piano, fascinating and I love how it all hangs together. This is what I love about teaching the piano, exploring this world with my students.
I do believe that my ultimate job as a teacher is to make myself obsolete, to enable students to learn independently, and I think I can only achieve this goal by teaching them to ask those pertinent questions. This is obviously a lengthy process, but it’s a process well worthwhile. My guiding principle has always been philosopher André Gide’s aphorism ‘Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who claim to have found it’, for it mirrors closely many a composer’s quest for musical truth.
A danger I am mindful to guard against when teaching advanced students is to heavily focus on what their interpretations aren’t rather than on what they are. It is so easy to simply compare what they offer musically with what we already have in mind. I remember vividly all my teachers telling me to convince them musically, that’s what they cared about. I quite often heard the phrase ‘that’s not how I would do it, but I think what you do works, too, you’ve convinced me’. Sure enough, I was very proud on the occasions when I got that sort of feedback.
As a junior department teacher, I feel that younger students need just as much, if not more, focus and support in terms of developing technique and musicianship as well as performance opportunities. How do you feel about this, and what opportunities do RBC offer to their younger piano students.
I would agree with you that younger students need at least an equal amount of focus and support, but they probably need it in different areas than more mature students.
I have laid out a lot of my thoughts on teaching in the section above, but what I would say is that teaching junior department students offers an opportunity to focus on correct foundations from the get-go without the need, mostly, to unlearn already firmly established patterns, which is an opportunity not to be missed. Teaching a solid understanding of how technique and music influence each other is paramount, for it forms the foundation of any compelling interpretation.
I place a lot of emphasis on natural, ergonomic movements to remove any unwanted tension from our playing. I was approached by a colleague from the USA who saw me teach a masterclass in Italy. She asked me whether I was familiar with the Taubman approach, and I replied ‘no’, but evidently, she recognised some of its principles in my teaching. I later learnt that Taubman’s approach focusses on the fingers, hand and forearm being properly connected and moving together at all times for the pianist to play with efficiency and ease. I would say that I do recognise those principles as being fundamental to my pianistic approach, but I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I solely base my teaching and my own playing on them. Having said that, I have never sustained any serious playing-related injury, even at those times when I practised 5-7 hours a day, so I’ve never felt the need to seek help outside of what my teachers were able to offer.
It is thus that I am very keen to establish healthy working practices for my students, since I believe that prevention is better than cure.
A lot of our emotional setup is decided early on in our lives, and our experiences during our teenage years certainly play an important part in shaping it. As I have already mentioned, we don’t only learn pieces of information, we also learn emotions, and so for artists to have gained positive performing experiences is a vital stepping stone in growing in confidence. Sequencing is important since exposing students to too much pressure too early can have the opposite effect, so we offer different performance opportunities with varying levels of exposure. A weekly piano duo workshop raises the pressure slightly because pianists now work together with their peers, which means they need to play in front of each other but in a very low-pressure environment. There is an informal mini concert at the end of each session with the audience just being peers, but it’s a first step in the right direction. We also offer masterclasses with visiting teachers/artists, and we are looking into setting up regular performance classes akin to those taking place in the senior departments. Technical exams, departmental prizes, so-called instrumental performance platforms across the year, and external performance opportunities, such as the Coach House Piano Prize, complete the offering, which is crowned by the end-of-year concert in which there usually is an opportunity for a soloist to perform with our orchestra.
You cannot talk someone into being confident, but you can talk someone out of it so easily by making one careless comment. Building confidence requires positive lived experiences, and we’re confident that with the array of opportunities mentioned above there is something for everyone to take part in at their level of confidence and use it as a springboard.
Find out more about Jan, here.
Publications
Melanie Spanswick has written and published a wide range of courses, anthologies, examination syllabuses, and text books, including Play it again: PIANO (published by Schott Music). This best-selling graded, progressive piano course contains a large selection of repertoire featuring a huge array of styles and genres, with copious practice tips and suggestions for every piece.
For more information, please visit the publications page, here.
Melanie Spanswick 