Welcome! Learn to play professional-sounding songs – fast!

Below is a collection of three essays from David Sudnow, probably from  around 1999, that prefaced his CD-based course of that period (with a couple minor edits to align with the current seminar delivery)  -dmh

The Broken Piano Lesson

Don’t feel bad if you had piano lessons and can’t play. Forty million living Americans had keyboard instruction and no longer touch the instrument, most likely the biggest educational fiasco in history. Worldwide figures are probably staggering.

The reason? Of course there’s a big decline in household sociability, gathering around a piano, say. Ever since radio, TV, the Internet. Some grieve the loss. These are powerful trends. But we’ve been long rendered resource-less against the commercialized shaping of leisure time. Pianos are a noteworthy example. Had lessons been good, had we really seen to that, as we most certainly can, many more would play. Everywhere there’d be yet another alternative to Channel Four: Homemade Music.

We should’ve better respected Art  if it set us off from other creatures. Yet we’ve devised an economy that makes no room for aesthetic educations that stick. One must consume, work to gain leisure time that’s then spent consuming, watching TV, surfing the Net, so on. Just sitting around and playing piano, making rather than buying music? Bad for business. Obviously we can’t teach music well or pay players decently. Happy musicians prefer little else (a risk you might take). So too many pianists pose a definite hazard, which is why we’re kept in dank little holes in the ground. And, as you’d expect, piano lessons are preordained disasters, designed, in detail, to fail.

Disregard dusty apartments, horrors of one-on-oneness with a stranger at age seven, like at the doctor’s. Forget rulers, nasty nuns, barking dogs and halitosis. (Our culture has piano teacher tales like it’s got mother-in-law jokes). Piano lessons fail because of what’s taught, and how.

The teacher gets a referral. Thank goodness. Make the lessons last. There’s no great surplus of prospects. Use a slowly grade method, like the red John Thompson books.

John Thompson. The very words may nauseate millions. Organization Charts, Policy Manuals for a Quasi-Profession of Frustrated Pianists, Ethnographic Artifacts par excellence, reflecting as they help define a family’s typical evening.

Of course an official assumption is that each silly little piece provides a basis for the next, cultivating early phases of what will become more intricate classes of maneuvers.

In fact, the transfer from piece to piece or grade to grade is rarely substantial, if clear enough at all, to warrant the intolerable elongation of material common to all “graded” programs. At each new “level” (time for a next Gradebook) it seems you’re starting from the beginning. Bach feels as different from Chopin as Ping Pong does from Tennis. Because it is.

These serialized, graded, lesson inspired and intended pieces are so dreadfully slow they become unbearable and few stick it out with the likes of them for long. Teachers thus have frequently reconstituted clienteles. Naturally, piano store owners don’t complains. Teachers make brand/dealer referrals to patents, and piano stores pay teachers a sales commission, often quietly. Teacher to Sell ­ – recently our leading pianomaker’s slogan. To grasp the full context for the massively failed lesson one must appreciate its role in a strategy the piano industry devised for selling our third costliest item, after house and car: lessons lasting long enough to make a sale; an age-graded scheduling of when it’s legitimately decided that they ought to start; a small number of teachers; replenishment of new buyers with a regulated dropout.

So we’re all stuck with pianos just sitting there far out of tune, covered with lamps, doilies and pictures of servicemen. Ten million abandoned Chevys.

You get graded method books. Then there’s the lesson itself. So much time is filled filling the hour, much of what’s done right or wrong and why as obvious to you as to teacher, nearly all of what officially goes on more ritualistic than necessary. There are unconcealed glances at the watch , and completely commonsensical “wisdom” routinely passes as Expert Advice: “Start over from the beginning.” “This time go slower.” “Put just a touch more feeling into those last three chords.”

Bless their hearts, sharing a major occupational hazard with psychiatrists – “How to stay awake through the hour?” These kids study their childhoods away, sticking it out despite the system, by age ten having more or less given up everything for the piano. The youngest career choice possible alongside gymnastics, only to find, ten years later, fifty openings and 100,000 candidates for concertizing, or other barely decent jobs. So they go on to college for what’s gotten to be called a “Piano Pedagogy” degree, which gives them rights to put up their lesson advertisements on laundromat bulletin boards.

Now they sadly lose their grasp over those sophisticated pieces learned in school, having these marvelously well trained hands for very quickly acquiring new routes that are only rarely called upon once education is completed. Not required to play for students, seldom asked to play for others, they get rusty at reading scores, particularly as sight “reading”, rather than “memorizing”, was rarely stressed from the start. Unable to improvise, since taught in this century, many teachers, bitter and perplexed, eventually become more or less incapable of playing, except perfunctorily. Like you can recite the opening of the Gettysburg Address if you’re over fifty.

Years of practice end up with these stretch-it-out-by-keeping-the-learning-confined-by-the-lessonbook-lessons, for several million Johnnies and Susie’s each year. And a dozen openings at Julliard.

With no malice aforethought, societies having ways of working without respect for what we think we’re up to, if the inane method books don’t get you the Piano Teachers of America will, ensuring you eventually drop out by insisting, as a condition for a teacher’s certification, that you’re to play increasingly complex music up to Guild Certified Standard.

Here’s the rub: To sustain a half hour of adult level classical performance, not just three or four minutes of a recital but a half hour’s worth, enough at hand that you may sit down and play that much whenever you want more than a minute’s pleasure – they paid thousands for our thirty year old three bar remnants of Chopin Waltzes and Bach Fugues – to maintain just that much of such adult classical music played such ways? You’ll practice many hours a day. Forever. Teach classical-professional modes of music-making to would-be amateurs and they won’t possibly attain lasting satisfaction because the practice needed for such ways of playing doesn’t fit the work or leisure economy. The Piano Program is designed to fail, these get-it-perfect-and-then-forget-it pieces for on factory financed uprights (strange objects, pianos standing on end with the sound facing into the wall!).

They’ve rationalized the whole failed process: “you’re a good parent if you provide your child the ‘sense of discipline’ piano lessons bring”. Playing is never conceived as a value in its own right. (God forbid the kid really takes it seriously). Taught under the aegis of such a massive deception – how do you reconcile “discipline” with a huge dropout? – who’d expect good teaching?

Teach Yourself to Play Standards

Piano lessons are badly broken, and must be fixed. We must preserve two-hand keyboard play. No instrument stands alone as well. Available staring at $100 everywhere in the world, hardly anyone in the world knows what in the world to do with them, their multitude an ironic comment on desire and failure.

Hold it in mind that human hands employ more brain matter than any other body part, so complex their axes of movement and sensitivities of touch. And musical keyboards employ these brainy hands, both thumb rotations used by no other implement, more than any artifact. Simultaneously “evolving” for hundreds of years – keyboards and brains – we mustn’t let that instrument go extinct through dis-use, as hands everywhere atrophy to mere mouse-button pushers. How to fix it?

First, change the music. Over fifteen thousand, from Governors, Movie Stars and Admirals, to Grocers, Mechanics and Ad Reps, have taken the short seminar from which this little book with its CDs evolved. And I’ve chatted about piano study with over 40,000. With such data, I reliably report that when adults imagine themselves playing piano (widespread dream) most, by far, choose Standards as a favored form of music – Kern, Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen, Styne, Jobim, Lennon, Mancini, Joel – our century’s international folk music.

To repair broken lessons we need avocationally maintainable music. Not the European classical tradition, but the far more standardized Standard is perfect. One maintains skill with minimal upkeep. And playing such tunes well, on any sort of keyboard, is within anyone’s reach in months, starting at any age. My data documents thousands of such accomplishments.

Second, get rid of lessons. Avoiding awful inventions unemployed musicians adopt to get through hour after hour after year of lessons, sparing you absurdities like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or the John Thompson series still prevalent in this world, I’ll have you up and running on your own two hands far sooner than the institution of ongoing lessons allows, it always having itself to take care of before all else.

Because 100,000 get Degrees in Piano only to find 50 jobs for performing part-time, doesn’t mean we should go through another 100 years of suffering while so many of them continue to teach piano and mess it up for us, rather than switch careers.

The Uncle Who Never Had a Lesson

In a great many colloquial tales about piano playing in our culture, there’s this guy who never had a lesson yet could just sit down and play anything Didn’t study a day in his life but you call out a tune, any tune at all, and he’ll knock it off straightaway.

I’ve deciphered the myth’s origin. This folkloric piano genius (usually someone’s “uncle”) actually took “lessons”. But he lucked out, happening upon that one in a hundred practitioners of a craft able to clearly show and tell, with a minimum of fuss, just how to best learn. Disdaining drawn-out instruction, knowing it all happens in solitary practice, they say: “You want the facts? Here they are. Now go practice.”

This ubiquitous uncle met someone like that and got a good account of all basics of song playing in a nutshell (where they’d fit in). He cared about learning, went home, and did the only sensible thing to do. He taught himself. Pretend I’m the guy who taught the uncle who never had a lesson.

With a year’s worth of study as a kid, I started learning piano in earnest in my 30s, left a university post in another field in 1975, and by 1982 was teaching song playing. I devised a seminar and have given it in all of the major cities in the country. I welcome you to this new CD/Book version of my method.

With the exception of introductory remarks made in Phoenix before a large group of )mostly senior) students, most of this seminar was recorded in Chicago. About twenty folks from 17 to 70 were present on that occasion. I’d just learned NBC was to do a spot on my program for The Today Show. I wanted a home study version for their viewers.

Of numerous sessions of the seminar I’ve since recorded, this remains a favorite, for its coverage, clarity and pace.

While I suggest a few rest stops, mostly to read this or that in the book ( the material in the book is now incorporated into the videos – editor), please don’t do much of that. The Method wasn’t designed for it. Take in the seminar in one dose before going to the instrument at all. If you start practicing before understanding the overall approach, you’ll do things that aren’t needed or worse, interfere with your learning. First grasp the overall gist, get a general sense of what the process will entail. There’s time to review later. Get started learning “Misty” as soon as possible.

 Hearing the first hour, some of you with prior experience will find ourselves saying, “But I know all of this already”. If you cannot sit down and play any tune well, without using two staved notation, using rich, full, two-handed chords – if you can’t do that, then by the time you’re finished with the entire seminar you’ll have a whole different sense of what this Method yields. Please tolerate your familiarity with certain basics, but take up with my way of defining terms for the tasks at hand, and keep listening.

The beginner is not expected to really learn much in detail on the fly. Gaining a first sense of the concepts and a detailed grasp on how to start Misty – that’s the goal of a good first listening.

 Now have a cup of coffee, sit down in a comfy chair with your laptop or your tablet and go to the first video. Try to watch and listen to the first two lessons right away. Better yet, pretend it’s the kind of weekend it really was in Chicago that year, with three feet of snow on the ground, a way, way below zero temperature, and a thirty mile an hour wind from the northeast off the lake. Make believe, and then stay home and listen to the whole course. After all – you can’t wait to get to the piano!

There are two membership levels available to you: basic and advanced.

You can simply go to the store to purchase your course and get started right away. Once your purchase is completed, you’ll automatically have access to your own student page, the seminar lessons, additional resources, and the student forum.

If you’d like, you can check out the frequently-asked-questions page for visitors here – or listen to some songs from existing students here.

But, if you’re really committed to learning songs on the piano, what are you waiting for? Join us and have the time of your life!