Muzine, Op. 97, No. 1: Beginning Music Study

The Questions:

Amateur musicians are often quite content to make music without the benefit of professional help. For many, though, there comes a time when they feel the need for formal training, for themselves or, perhaps, for their children. At that point, many or all of the following questions will present themselves:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each instrument?
How do I find a good teacher?
How do I find a good instrument?
How much will it all cost?
How long will it take to learn to play fairly well?
How serious am I about developing my skill?

Ideally, the last question should come first; its answer will influence all the others. Let us attempt to deal with these questions, then, beginning with the last:

How Serious Am I?

Very few of us expect to become world-class performers, yet no one is likely to embark on a course of formal study without some expectation of noticeable and sustained improvement; the question is, how much? Am I inspired enough to muster the time and patience it's likely to take, or am I just a dabbler who will waste a teacher's time? Most answers will fall somewhere between these two extremes, and each person has to decide his or her own degree of commitment, but in any case it is important that we reconcile ourselves in advance to facing a certain amount of tedium and frustration. As with anything worthwhile--dieting, aerobics, tennis, or whatever--a period of sustained discipline is inescapable.

At the same time, it must be said that often we simply don't know to what degree we can commit ourselves until the enterprise is given a good try. This is especially true of children, whose level of ability, interest and perseverance may be unknown quantities at the onset of study. So a good strategy for both children and adults would be to agree on a realistic time frame for giving formal lessons a chance, at the end of which the situation can be reevaluated. But the student must be willing to make an honest effort during the trial period.

What Instrument?

The individual preparing to begin music lessons may already have an instrument in mind, but sometimes this is not the case; for example, parents may wish their child to have some kind of artistic experience but have not chosen a particular medium. What's a good way to decide on one? Consider these questions:

What has been your prior experience with music? Do you or your child attend concerts? Listen to or watch musical events on radio or TV? Hear a church choir, school orchestra, or community band? Participate in some form of music making in the home? Do you have friends or relatives who are musical? Do you have a piano or other instrument in the house? Maybe a family member already "plays a little piano", sings in a church or school choir, or owns an electronic keyboard; or perhaps acquaintance with a trained musician, or simple exposure to music, has whetted the appetite for making the move from passive listener to active participant. All of these considerations can help determine an initial preference for a particular instrument, and point the way to the decisions necessary for beginning formal training.

The remaining questions posed at the beginning of this article will be dealt with as we consider individual cases. Only the standard acoustical instruments will be considered here; those interested in electronic media will find a wealth of information in the series Music and the Home Computer, by John Zeigler and Nancy L. Ostromencki, which begins elsewhere in this issue. For the present purpose, we will attempt to evaluate the traditional musical instruments, in terms of the following criteria:

General description
Popularity and usefulness
Cost
Repertoire

.....and to shed some light on the practical aspects of studying them. It goes without saying that our evaluations and recommendations must necessarily be very generalized and perhaps quite subjective; comments and suggestions will be welcomed.

The Piano and Its Ancestors:

Piano is the Italian word for "soft"; given the racket it can make, how did this thing ever get a name like "the soft"? The answer is that the piano's full name is not "soft" but "soft-loud"--pianoforte; piano is simply a modern--and not very logical--contraction. But why call a musical instrument "the soft-loud", either? Can't all instruments play soft and loud?

Well, they couldn't in the seventeenth century--not the keyboard instruments, anyway. The piano's immediate forerunners were the clavichord, harpsichord and organ. The clavichord was a small home instrument that produced a sweet but rather weak sound by striking thin strings with a tiny metal blade mounted on the back end of the key; and while the changing pressure of the player's fingers could vary the degree of loudness somewhat, the clavichord had a very limited range of volume and was not useful in even a moderate-size concert hall.

Harpsichords, on the other hand, could be made far more powerful. They frequently were much bigger, often approaching the modern concert grand piano in size, with multiple sets of strings and even several keyboards. The harpsichord produced its sound by means of a keyed mechanism which plucked the strings with a decisive twang, and was capable of considerable agility and brilliance. But this very mechanism prohibited any control over volume by alteration of finger pressure; the sound could only be varied by adding or subtracting different sets of strings.

The pipe organ suffered from the same limitation. While great variety and color could be obtained from different sets of pipes, the player's finger could do nothing to change the volume; striking a key merely opened a valve which admitted to the pipe a stream of air at a fixed pressure.

It remained for an established Italian harpsichord maker named Bartolommeo Cristofori to apply to a keyboard the same degree of volume control that could be obtained from a string player's bow, a wind player's breath, or--more aptly--a percussion player's mallet. Sometime around the year 1700, Cristofori replaced the harpsichord's plucking device with an ingenious hammer mechanism that struck the string with an impact directly proportional to the force of the finger stroke, fitted it to one of his large harpsichords, and gave the resulting instrument the unwieldy name "Big Harpsichord with Soft and Loud" (gravicembalo col piano e forte), later shortened to pianoforte, or sometimes--just to be perverse--fortepiano. In either case, it was this all-important control over volume, long desired by harpsichord players, that engendered the piano's very name, and incarnated it as a totally new instrument.

(For more on the fascinating story of how this invention came about, see the author's article The Why of the Piano on The Piano Education Page.)

The Piano's Development:

Over the course of the next century and a half, the piano underwent numerous improvements by German, French, English and American manufacturers, reaching essentially its present form by the 1850's. And the list of composers who wrote extensively for it reads like an index of the greatest names in music history: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofieff, and many, many others. For at least a hundred years, up until the mid-twentieth century, the piano was far and away the most popular instrument in both home and concert hall. Its usefulness is still unrivalled, for unlike the wind and string instruments and the human voice, it can sound many tones at once and thus produce a complete harmony or texture instead of only a line of single notes. Add this capability to the touch control made possible by Cristofori's marvelous invention, and it is easy to understand why virtually all other instruments, as well as the human voice, depend on the piano for assistance when performing in a solo capacity.

The Modern Piano:

Piano types range from spinets the size of a small desk to concert grands ten feet long; new prices can be anywhere from $2000 to more than $166,000. If you should be considering the purchase of a new or used piano, please give serious thought to the following suggestions:

Do some homework first! Read a good source of consumer information to acquaint yourself with the basics of pianos and the pitfalls of shopping; by far the best is The Piano Book, by Larry Fine, now in its third edition and kept up to date with annual supplements. It offers a thorough education in what to look for in new and used pianos, brand names and pricing.

Consult a skilled piano technician before you buy. And if you are purchasing a used piano, take him with you to appraise it. Look in the Yellow Pages for technicians who display the logo of The Piano Technicians Guild, a long-established and respected organization of experienced professional men and women who must pass rigorous tests in piano tuning, voicing, regulating and repair.

Steer clear of private newspaper ads which offer old pianos for $250. You stand a better than even chance of coming home with an instrument that is untunable or unplayable without extensive repair.

Find a reputable dealer. The best ones are not likely to sell pianos in one corner of the store and microwaves, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners in the others. While there are very few left who can make ends meet by selling pianos exclusively, the better piano dealers will handle other musical items: home organs, band instruments, electronic keyboards, audio equipment, sheet music and the like. A piano faculty member at a nearby university can be of help in recommending a good local dealer, and perhaps a good technician as well.

Consider renting. Many piano stores have a pool of good used pianos which can be rented at a nominal fee on a monthly basis; they may also rent new pianos, with rental fees applied to the purchase price if you should decide to buy.

Piano Music:

As for available repertoire, probably more music has been composed or arranged for the piano than for all other instruments put together. The mountain of literature for players from tiny tots to skilled professionals, the vast choice of study materials and methods, the innumerable piano arrangements of every conceivable kind of music--orchestral, band, vocal, choral, songs, folk tunes, show tunes, or what have you--all constitute a staggering wealth of publications; it would take a lifetime to browse even a sizable fraction of it. But any good music store can provide a great variety of piano solos, duets and arrangements, and if they don't have something you want they can probably get it for you or tell you where to find it. Moreover, a few music publishers now have sites on the Internet: G. Schirmer, Theodore Presser, Boosey and Hawkes, and J. Stein Co. are presently online, as are a number of retail sources such as Sheet Music Online and Juilliard Book Store.

Piano Lessons:

Now, what about actual study? How hard is it, and how long will it take, to learn to play the piano? It's surprising how often this question gets asked, as though there were a single level of attainment applicable to everybody. The simple answer, of course, which applies to most other instruments and indeed to any worthwhile skill, is: the piano is quite easy to play badly and very difficult to play well. But translated into practical advice, a good answer would include the following suggestions:

If you would really like to accomplish something, don't try to teach yourself. It's true that people often develop various skills on their own without benefit of formal instruction, and there are many self-help books available to guide you, but in the the long run there is simply no substitute for a good teacher.

Steer clear of quick-and-easy methods. Late-night TV is rife with infomercials that bombard you with the cheery promise of astonishing your family and friends after ten easy, fun-filled lessons. These methods are about as effective as magic diet pills at doing anything but separating you from your money.

Seek out a good teacher. Shop around. Ask different teachers whether they take beginners, including adult beginners; ask if they have student recitals you might attend; find out what the teacher's level of music education is, whether they have university degrees in music, and how many years they have taught; look for membership in Music Teachers National Association and National Guild of Piano Teachers; note if the teacher is also a performer and, if so, go listen; and don't be shy about discussing costs--the best teachers are not necessarily the cheapest. [For comprehensive guidance in choosing a good teacher, visit The Piano Education Page and read the section Learning to Play the Piano.]