The Audiation Revolution in Piano Lessons: An Outlier's Perspective-Part One

Studio by studio, teacher by teacher, lesson by lesson, child by child--Piano Education is changing.  If you peek into piano pedagogy facebook groups, you'll have a front-row seat to the transformation. The hot topic on the table?  Simply this:  Should children learn music by being taught to read it first, or should they learn music by acquiring audiation skills first, delaying reading until later. 

The term Audiation, coined by Edwin E. Gordon, who studied music learning extensively, means that, when music is heard, the brain is able to organize and understand it cognitively.  This isn't the same as just singing along, although that is a first step toward audiation.  Audiation means the ability to think, musically-- knowing why the music sounds the way it does when you hear it; knowing what tonal and rhythmic components it is made of.

This cognitive process can be compared to the one we use to understand spoken language, something we do every day without even thinking about it.  When someone speaks, we effortlessly take in the words we hear in the context they occur (the sentence or several sentence, or more) and understand the meaning.  No problem.

Language is taught to children by acculturation.  They soak it up for quite a long time before they even begin to babble and imitate words. And when they do this, it can be pretty inaccurate for a while, but they begin to notice subtle details and to discriminate between the sound they make and the sound their parents make. By the time they learn to read and write, they have already passed through many different developmental language phases, each a milestone readying them for the next.   

So...how are children taught to audiate?  Similarly and immersively. Movement with the full body through space, singing, chanting rhythms, singing tonal patterns in all tonalities, and many other activities that establish inside growing musicians' bodies and minds what music is made of.  From this, they experiment, play, create variations--all before they ever see notated music.  This approach for teaching has been called Music Learning Theory (MLT), also a term used by Gordon to explain how we learn music. 

Because I had studied language acquisition/education as my Masters, and subsequently taught intensive English at the university level for many years before changing my path to teach and work in music only--my perspective is that there is really no question as to whether this is how music should be taught.  It's a no-brainer (as my dad likes to say).

Because of Gordon and many pioneers who have put what he found in his research into practice in their teaching, there is an ever-expanding wealth of guidance and insight on how to develop true audiation in children, and in adults, too.

I don't consider myself an "MLT teacher" actually, as my teaching over the past 5 years has become narrower and deeply focused on chord fluency for those who have already started their music journeys, but I follow and learn from so many of the teachers who are forging the path with audiation being the most obvious and clear true north for music education.

In fact, I have had only one student who has been purely taught using this approach.  But the tremendous experience of witnessing this young student's unbounded musical growth, musicianship, and freedom has solidified my belief in it beyond anything I could have dreamed or expected.  

This combined with my very unconventional childhood music education as well as my unconventional career path as a musician, (not unlike Gordon's own), has prompted me to write my perspectives and add my voice to the many who are realizing the potentialities of what Gordon envisioned in music education. 

Stay tuned.