Music as a Language - Reading Together - The Teaching of the Piano

In this chapter, Home addresses how to teach piano. She is of course, assuming that this is after the students have had the music training she has advocated for in the previous chapters.

“From the very first [the student] will be taught to analyse a piece before [he] begins to play it—[he] will find out the key, time, cadences, sequences, passages of imitation, modulations, etc.” (loc: 606)

“Every child, however apparently unmusical, should be given its chance, at any rate up to the age of twelve years. During this time, the stress should be placed, for the unmusical child, not so much on perfection of technique, but on the ability of playing easy pieces really well, and to read at sight such things as duets, song accompaniments, etc.” (loc: 621)

“What we want, if we have an educational end in view, is not so much to give the few musical children in a school the opportunity of gaining experience in playing in public, and indirectly of showing their progress to an admiring audience, but we want to give every music pupil in turn the same opportunity.” (loc: 654)

note: I'm reading this book from through my Kindle app, so quotations are shown by the location in the Kindle document.

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