Instruments: Turning On Students

The best way to teach the swelling ranks of beginning piano students in the U.S. is through class instruction. Yet music schools and colleges have for years avoided class piano lessons as much as possible. If each student in the room has a piano, the result is cacophony; if there is only one piano, the pupils waste time waiting for their turn. Worse, they grow bored.

A solution to the dilemma has finally appeared. Several piano companies, notably Wurlitzer, Baldwin and the CBS subsidiary Fender Rhodes, have developed electronic piano laboratories in which as many as 24 students, each with a piano, can be taught at the same time by a single teacher. All the students use earphones. From a master control panel at his own electronic piano, the teacher can speak or play to all or one of the students, or can listen to one or all over his own earphones. What a youngster plays is usually heard only by himself except at those moments when the teacher happens to switch him on to offer individual ad vice. If the instructor wants to give the class practice in playing the same piece together, he simply throws a switch and away they go.

The obvious advantage of this method is that it makes easier the instruction of fundamentals—scale fingering, rhythm, sight reading. It also enables the students to spend most of their class time actually playing. The benefit for the teacher lies primarily in the fact that he is spared having to repeat lesson plans and general principles over and over to each student.

Those are the advantages that led Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music to run a six-month pilot study of the program earlier this year with the Baldwin version of the electronic piano. Says Dr. Dean Boal, dean of the school: “We had a kind of 1984 apprehension about the system when it first arrived. But not any more. Though it gives a good approximation of real piano sound, though its touch is reasonably realistic, obviously it will never replace the conventional piano. You can succeed with it only if you do not ask it to do things it cannot. When the student and teacher come to style, interpretation, nuance, touch, then clearly they will have to work at a real piano.” As far as Boal and most music teachers are concerned, however, the concept is sound for the teaching of certain basic skills. By that measure, the electronic piano is an unquestioned success.