Why do Students Write In Letter Names?
Have you ever had the experience of walking through your piano lab class and seeing method books with letter names written all over? This is one of the most common concerns I hear from piano lab teachers. How do I get my students to stop writing in letter names? Understanding why students write in letter names is the first and most essential step to addressing this issue. How can we solve this problem, if we don’t understand why it’s happening?
One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen is that students write in letter names because they’re too lazy to learn to read music. In fact, I would argue that the opposite is often true. Students write in letter names because they actively want to play the song you’ve assigned well! They simply believe that writing in letter names is the most likely way of doing this successfully. Students write in letter names when there is a gap between their desire to play the song correctly, and their actual or perceived ability to do so.
While there’s no quick fix for this issue, there are a few things we can do. So let’s take a look at some common note reading approaches, as well as a few tips and tricks you can implement in your classrooms.
How to Approach Note Reading
The Case Against Mnemonic Devices
As a professional musician, when was the last time you used Every Good Boy Does Fine to identify a note? What about Good Boys Do Fine Always? And what is the memory trick for remembering which mnemonic device applies to the treble clef and which applies to the bass clef? Mnemonic devices like these create the impression that letter names are assigned to lines and spaces randomly and your only hope of learning them is to memorize a grammatically dubious sentence. Of course the reality is far from true.
When looking at the lines and spaces together (as in fact we do every time we read music) the notes are in order! They’re in alphabetical order! And, they’re in order from low to high! Mnemonic devices take notes that are already in order, remove some of them to give the impression that they are not in order, then ask us to remember the new mixed up order. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to just use the alphabet as a mnemonic device instead.
Intervallic Approach
The benefit to the Intervallic reading approach is that it teaches the whole system of the staff, not simply letter names. The staff is a very well organized system. Notes are arranged from low to high. As the notes move up on the staff, they move up on the piano, and vice versa. Notes that are close together on the staff are close together on the piano and vice versa. It’s very intuitive. The intervallic approach highlights this intuitive nature by asking students to learn intervals rather than letter names. Students learn to recognize first steps, then skips, then leaps. In this way they follow the melodic contour of the music rather than learn individual notes.
The drawback to the intervallic approach is that it often takes students longer on this approach to recognize individual note names without the context of seeing them in a melody.
Pattern Based Approach
The pattern based approach asks students to memorize groups of notes that frequently appear together in music. For example, students would drill the notes C, D, E together as a group. Then when they saw that pattern in music, they would recognize and repeat it. The benefit of this is that students learn notes in the context in which they’re most likely to see the notes, rather than as an isolated piece of information. The drawback is that it still relies on student memorization rather than an understanding of the entire notation system.
The Piano Laboratory Approach
The Piano Laboratory Textbook uses a combination of the intervallic reading approach and the pattern based approach. We start by asking students to memorize three landmark notes. Then we use the intervallic approach to teach students to look at the direction and distance away from a landmark note to determine the next note. Once students develop a big picture understanding of the notation system, we ask students to start memorizing notes in commonly used groups or patterns.
We feel this is the best approach for the high school piano lab classroom specifically because students receive the benefits of both systems. Students first learn to understand the staff as a system, not isolated data points. By understanding this system, we give students the skills to puzzle out notes for themselves. However, many piano lab students only take one year of piano. By switching to the pattern based method part way through, we speed up the memorization process that typically takes longer on the intervallic approach. By the end of the course, students have two ways of identifying notes. They have a plethora of memorized patterns, and they have an understanding of the staff system.
Additional Teaching Tips
Strengthen the Skills Surrounding Note Reading
It’s important to remember that note reading is not the only skill pianists need. As professional musicians, it’s easy to forget just how much information is necessary to read a simple melody on the staff. Yes, students need to know what letter name they’re looking at. But they also need to know where to find that letter on the piano, how long or short to hold that note, what finger to use, and artistic information like dynamics and tempo. That’s a lot. Sometimes, students who can identify letter names on flash cards stumble when asked to identify notes in the context of a song because they are missing one of the other components. Consider adding drills like note identification on the piano, and rhythm clapping to your classroom if you haven’t already. This will strengthen these other skills, freeing up brain space for students to think about note identification on the staff.
Move Hand Positions
Be wary of assigning too many pieces in the same hand position too many times in a row. When students get comfortable in one hand position, they may abandon letter name identification for finger numbers. This is a big mistake of course because pianists don’t generally keep their hands in one position most of the time, and it won’t take very long for the method book to move to a new hand position. The good news is that this is an easy fix. Alternate songs in different hand positions to avoid students getting too comfortable in one position.
Teach Students When and How to Write In Letter Names
Musicians mark their scores frequently and for a variety of reasons. This is a good practice when used wisely. I tell my students that they can write in letter names under the following circumstances:
When they’ve played a note that they should know incorrectly more than three times.
The first time they see a new note they don’t know yet.
This approach has worked for me because it acknowledges the real reasons students write in letter names to begin with: they want to play the song well. By showing them how to do that in a way that scaffolds note identification rather than replacing it you are teaching them that yes they can learn their letter names on the staff, but also it’s ok if they haven’t already learned everything in this moment.