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Why Johnny Can't Play Piano
Why Johnny Can't Play Piano is a satire on a famous book in the 1950's, WHY JOHNNY CAN'T READ.
This book launched a public furor that was largely responsible for the introduction of phonics into American public schools. Prior to phonics, American children were taught by a ridiculous system developed by the huge textbook companies, mainly Scott-Foresman.
This system contained the immortal and lovable characters Dick and Jane. But it did very little to help American kids learn to read.
I was one of them. There were many other reasons why Johnny couldn't read in the 1950s, just as there are reasons that Johnny can't play the piano today.
We should make clear that we don't mean children in general have difficulty with the piano.
Unless their introduction is stressful and conducted by a disciplinarian, most kids take to the piano easily. Properly introduced, the piano has a well-earned reputation as an infectious toy that commands interest from kids.
Piano Is Easy
Most Kids Get Terrible Piano Teachers
Most kids don't get the brilliant, creative piano teacher they need. They get Mr. Noodleman, let's call him, with sincere apologies to any actual piano teachers named Noodleman. Mr. Noodleman thinks that playing the piano involves only reading music. He doesn't believe in playing by ear, by eye, by brain, by anything other than the "old school."
And, frankly, he's right. Yes, the musical conservatives are right in this sense: unless you learn to read music, you are helpless and illiterate in the giant world of music. You cannot fluently speak the lingua franca (reading music) and will have to have everything spoon fed to you in words of one syllable, if you can find someone willing to do so. But little kids starting the piano need exactly that, to be spoon fed at the beginning to get them interested.
Conventional Students Quit
What these musical "conservatives" don't acknowledge is that the students of such conventional methods will quit the piano. Long before these kids have any chance to reap any working, usable benefits from the piano, they will have quit the piano in frustration with the ancient methods.
Is a piano method usable if there are no students that can endure it? It's like a kamikaze army, who defeat themselves with every battle. That's what childhood piano lessons are like with average piano teachers.
Kamikaze Piano Teaching
Mr. Noodleman has chosen the Kamikaze method of piano teaching because he was taught that way. If you don't learn, tough luck, you die (quit) and another kamikaze takes your place.
Now YOUR child gets to attend these expensive ritual meetings. Ostensibly they are intended to get the child interested in expending years of hourly effort.
The Average Piano Teacher
Instead what they get is Mr. Noodleman, who really wants to make his mortgage payment more than finding that subtle key that will unlock your child's fragile mind. A piano teacher is supposed to get kids interested in the piano enough to do a little self-directed work.
Mr. Noodleman has a curve on which he grades, and if you don't measure up, there is really no direction for you but out of the lesson room. It's not that he wants to lose a client and the income therein. It's that his method only allows for a certain reaction (blind obedience) from the student.
When Noodleman doesn't get that reaction soon enough, he will turn cold and ugly. Soon, your child will figure out that the piano is not for them.
Your Child Loses
Noodleman can still find any number of six year-old kamikazes willing to pay his mortgage, so he doesn't need the complexity of Johnny's sensitive case folder.
In other words, he doesn't care. What Noodleman doesn't understand as a teacher is that every child's case folder is sensitive and difficult.
There is no "norm" at the piano unless you are trying to get to Carnegie Hall. If you're trying to do that, you're crazy.
But your child is not without guilt in this j'accuse, since we have been so brutal with poor Mr. Noodleman.
Kids Have Piano Problems, Too
Here's Johnny's problem, which can easily be solved with a patient, creative piano teacher: Johnny is too young to understand effort. Waited on hand and foot by Mom, he knows how to do almost nothing for himself.
Johnny's only mechanical skill is with computer games, an activity that sharpens motor skills even as it eats away and destroys any creative impulse. Nintendo does it all for you. So there's no need to be creative.
Johnny's Tech Enemies
In the same sense, the television is doing the same thing for Johnny. TV asks you to not think, just watch the stories and the fun commercials and everything will be all right. But it isn't all right, in the sense that computers and television ask the child to do nothing creative that hasn't already been mapped out for them.
There's no feeling a child has during a television program that hasn't been carefully crafted by a producer, a director and a team of professionals against whom the child's mind has no defense. I'd rather have my child spend a half hour with the thoughts of Beethoven than any one of the predatory "educators" churning out the garbage at Disney and the "culture mills."
The piano is never passive, and is much like driving a car. You have to be aware every second or risk injury. The piano requires the opposite skills that computers and modern empty digital activities require. You have to do everything, every time. There's no "automatic," there's no escape.
Yet most piano teachers serve as destroyers of interest rather than nurturers.
Someone should help Johnny play his piano. Johnny's piano teacher is too busy paying his mortgage.
REFERENCES
Music History
What Killed the Golden Age of the Piano
Carl Tausig Cooks His Cat
I Meet Aaron Copland
George Sand Killed Chopin
Why Brahms Must Have Been Fat
Artur Rubinstein Was A Vampire
Igor Stravinsky Loses His Cool
Vladimir Horowitz Goes To The Racetrack
Beethoven Was No Beauty
The World’s Largest Blue Danube Waltz
Was Mozart Murdered?
Beethoven’s Rage Over A Lost Penny
Franz Schubert, The First Bohemian
Chopin’s Singing Piano Tone
Stravinsky’s Good Luck
Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Fan
Hector Berlioz and the Orchestral Train Wreck
Piano Lessons with Papa Bach
Piano Lessons with Frederic Chopin
The Great Piano Craze of 1910
The American Piano Wars
Why Hugo Wolf Went Insane
Rachmaninoff and the Evolution of Pop Songs
Musical Feuds
Piano In The Past Was Better
The Master’s Hands
Einstein’s Piano
Einstein’s Violin Improvisations In Gypsy Style
A History of Piano and Numbers
Ryan Seacrest’s Piano Concerto #2
