Dear KL,
Thank you very much for your post!
As a classically trained musician I should disagree - as a person who almost quit piano at the same age as you were about to quit, I see your point.
What we all mean by saying ‘classical’? Let’s be on the same page! For Russian and French school of music Solfeggio is a classical training course that teaches to sing by sight-reading, write music dictations (they play you music 7-8 times and you should write it down by ear), transposition (to play music in different keys), chords (to pick up chords to any melody) and much more skills. In fact, all what your friend from Philippines was able to do is within the scope of classical solfeggio training course.
So, I think that by saying ‘classical’ you were referring to classical music notation.
Unfortunately, with heavy solfeggio training in Russia many students fail to be as good as your friend from Philippines. Solfeggio is absolutely necessary for music training, because it uses speech repetition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_repetition After that beginners have gradually natural step. I call it ‘from speech to pitch’
For this very reason teaching the order of music notes and piano keys involving Solfeggio vowels is the step in the right direction. But is this step sufficient? This is the question.
Music is a written language. Therefore, eyes of any students also should be trained to be able to decode the music ideas. Otherwise, we will blindly follow just the information that we perceive through our auditory channels and overlook the rest.
I think the problem of the music development is the ‘user unfriendly’ visual interface. Our brain works a lot like a computer. If one program corrupted in it and have a ‘bug’ – the rest will be affected accordingly.
Simple example: if you in the process of learning how to drive a car, it is hard to enjoy the view outside the windows. Brain as a computer processor has no room for it.
Music notation is not fit for the physiology of our eyes. This is a bug in the system. Even Russian school of music that has Solfeggio as a very foundation for the music education fails a lot of students because of this bug. Students love exams and challenges, if they CAN. With this ‘bug’ you have to have exceptional music ear for a start. It means that we destined to grow the plants just from the seedlings – not from any seeds.
Here I created some pages that explains the written above:
http://pianolearningsoftware.com/pages/report-3
Digg
