Wholistic Learning versus Component Learning

[Cheri Sykes]

I’d appreciate a discussion. My approach is always to break a skill down into manageable parts. I believe in scales, arpeggios, inversions in every key as required technique exercises. David disagrees! All skills are learned within the context of playing the song. Wow–I need to discuss this!

[David Haynes]

David simplifies things a little – the reality is somewhat different. First I think it’s important to remember that David’s really talking about a niche of piano playing: solo popular songs. I’ll just start this discussion and see if anyone else chimes in.

He does insist that you learn your major scales – not so you can play them but so that you can see them. And also so that you get some feeling for turning your thumb under as you move along the keyboard. Much of what’s going on as you’re working with his Method is that you’re looking at the keyboard and listening to the sounds. The fact is that as students get more practice working out voicings they find themselves grabbing clusters of notes, moving fingers around, and then, when they like the sound, writing out the fraction to document the voicing. The ‘rules’ occasionally give way to the ‘sound’ – as it should be. We’re not constrained by a score (or by a vocalist or bandmates, for that matter).

I’ll say more later about “a way” versus “the way”. Finding a path. Changing course. Choosing new destinations.

[nick]

Hey Cheri — good topic! What is it about scales, arpeggios etc that you ‘believe’?

I’ve tended to use a mix of both (I found chromatic ‘scales’ of diminished chords really helped my ability to quickly change chord shapes, for example. And three octave major scales helped me be more mindful of ‘efficient’ fingering.

But I do believe in Suds’s philosophy: learning in context is where you make the real progress, in any skill. It’s comparable to language learning — you can study verb tables and practice conjugations, but the truth is you only learn to speak a language by diving in and having conversations. (And it also occurs to me now that I’m usually being quite intentional about what I want out of ‘drills’. I don’t do them for their own sake.

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