Dear Reader, If you also like music or the piano, I occasionally write piano-related posts on my Typepad blog. You are welcome to read the first such posting here. Enjoy! Dawn
Piano Orientation
http://dawnreyes.typepad.com/blog/2012/07/piano-orientation.html
OK...you have a keyboard (whether it is 88-keys or not) and you have me in the form of this friendly manual teaching you how to crack the code and pay it forward to the next one. You are free to do with this information whatever you wish.
Personally, I have found part-time piano teaching to be my bread-and-butter for the past eleven years, but ultimately, music and music performance have been an abiding passion since taking my very first piano lesson at the age of five. For that, I have to thank my mother and the high-minded music culture fostered at the Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore and the creative hothouse that is The Walden School for Young Composers, a summer camp offshoot of the Musicianship program founded by Grace Newsom Cushman and fostered by Pamela Layman Quist.
But let's get back to how this book can help you. It is a collection of metaphors and notions that have guided me in understanding the piano, its cognitive and physical demands, how sound and rhythm is organized, how technique is developed, and how it may accompany your own life journey. Do it for fun, do it to build confidence, do it to have friends singing or humming alongside you.
FINDING MIDDLE C...BLINDFOLDED
Middle C is not necessarily the most important note on the piano, but it is the fundamental organizing principle. By the end of this lesson, you should be able not only to locate Middle C, but all the other Cs on your keyboard. Position your bench or chair so you are seated at the middle of the keyboard. Just like a good orchestra student, you should sit at the edge of your seat (feel your "sit-bones"?) so that your feet are squarely planted on the ground. If you are not tall enough for your feet to touch the ground, then kindly ignore what I just said. Your arms should be able to hover parallel to the keys.
Look at your keyboard. Close your eyes and, pretending that you are blind, run your hand languorously and luxuriously over the length of the keyboard, feeling its many "bumps." The fact that there are many notable blind pianists should give you pause. This tells you that there must be significant tactile features to the instrument for the musician to feel his or her way around. The keyboard consists of mostly white keys with alternating sets of 2-black keys and 3-black keys thrown in relief. Each C on the keyboard is located immediately to the left of the set of 2-black keys. The Middle C is the just that: the C that is located at the middle of your keyboard.
This is how you find all the C's blind. With your eyes still closed, feel around for the groups of 2-black keys (distinct from the groups of 3-black keys) and kind of pinch them together so that you are aware of the spatial difference. Once you have pinched one set of 2-black keys, the next set will follow after one set of 3-black keys, and so on.
FINGERGAMES: Bunny rabbit ears and koala ears
At this point, I usually ask my student to show me two fingers on one hand to signify "2." I call this hand gesture "bunny rabbit ears." Then, I ask my student to show me three fingers on one hand to signify "3." I call this hand gesture "koala ears."
Try this: take your bunny rabbit ears and place them on any set of 2-black keys. Then, let the first of those fingers (the index finger) slide just slightly off the key, to the left. The contiguous white key is C. C!!!! You found it!
HOMEWORK: Please locate all the Cs on your keyboard using this organizing principle. If you have 88-keys, the answer should be 8. (If you only got 7, then imagine that the keyboard was not cut off so abruptly at the top. If another set of 2-black keys would logically follow the set of 3-black keys near the top, then the white key at the very top would be a C also.)
If you enjoyed this lesson, just wait further down the road when I teach scales!!
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