Josephine Symons...

has been a musician and painter for many years. She was born and educated in New Zealand and studied piano with Janetta McStay at Auckland University. Since coming to Western Australia in 1967 Jo has become a much sought after pianist and teacher, and has recently extended her creative activity to include musical composition. In writing music for children she aims to provide interesting material to stimulate aural imagination and develop greater awareness of keyboard colour.

...On Teaching Piano

I have been teaching for just on 35 years and still cannot claim to have devised a 'method', because each student is an individual parcel of qualities and presents a fresh challenge. My approach has always been to seek ways to awaken, stimulate and develop their musicality.

One of the most important skills for students to develop---perhaps THE most important---is to be able to listen critically to themselves as they play. To this end I believe in training them to assess their tone quality constantly from a very early age, and also to listen for colour changes according to the modulations and textures. These aspects of study cannot be taught too soon, as they develop a sensitivity which encourages more musicianly playing and a more mature understanding of musical language as a whole.

Music must be understood as a language of the emotions and an expression of atmosphere and mood. There is a danger of restricting the repertoire to a safe and familiar range; there can never be enough choice for teachers in providing challenges and imaginative material for their students. Young students must learn to feel at home with music as a natural expression of their feelings and they need to understand the syntax of a musical phrase as easily as they understand a spoken sentence.

Building up confidence in keyboard geography needs to begin quite early on. There is a need to explore the extreme registers of the piano more---music for younger players tends to stay around the middle, and the colour and excitement of these outer registers is neglected. Discovering the colours in the varying registers is very stimulating for aural imagination.

Humour is also a quality which is somewhat lacking in student repertoire. Learning a musical instrument is necessarily a fairly serious business but the music need not always be 'heavy'. There is room for plenty of fun and imagination and, in fact, these two qualities have positive effects on the students' relating to the language. It is also beneficial to the student/teacher relationship if they can enjoy a humorous scene together. For instance, Ambling Along was originally written with a C in the left hand throughout instead of the now B natural. When my student first started to play this she kept on catching the B key by mistake, so we had a good old chuckle together and decided that it was far more zany and appropriate. (Thanks, Connie!)

© Jo Symons 1995

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