Piano? Don't Panic!, Part One
Mwahahahahahaaaa!
The prospect of having a piano in the classroom inspires in many of us a twinge of fear. We think that either the piano will be a chaos-inducing noise machine, or we are simply intimidated by it because, other than "Chopsticks" or "Heart and Soul", we have no idea what to do with it. So it takes up space in our classroom and gathers dust. To be sure, in the hands of an expert, the piano can be nice for accompanying songs (within limits) or playing music in the background when children are having lunch. But you needn't to be able to play the piano to reap the benefits of having a piano in your classroom. For the pianistically disinclined, having a piano can be a great way to get your children interested in music. Children with special needs can especially benefit from the piano, as it can be an aid to body regulation. For all the children, it can provide a window into music history, or just afford a tool for telling sound stories.
The piano can be a great way to help children with special needs find their way into music, and in so doing, find peace and joy in work. I often think about a boy in my class named Heinrich, who, after observing me and his other classmates playing piano, implored me to give him a piano lesson at recess time. Now, Heinrich was one of those children who was constantly on the move. He quivered in place, wiggled, talked quickly, made funny noises involuntarily, and possessed lightning flashes under his skin that made even holding a pencil difficult. I was a little freaked out. I mean, how was I to get wriggly little Heinrich on the path to having enough fine motor control to play the piano? Wouldn't he just get discouraged? I didn't want him to get frustrated and turn him off of music.
Hoping it would somehow work out, I agreed to give him a one-on-one lesson. We sat down at the piano. Heinrich wasted no time slapping at the keys, banging his fingers into them, and bouncing his hands up and down the keyboard making quite a cacophony. I thought, "My God. How is he going to...", but my thoughts stopped short when I saw the gigantic grin on his face. With each "PLONK!" he bounced up and down on the piano bench and laughed heartily. If I didn't know him better, I'd have thought he was pulling a prank, just goofing around. But the sounds Heinrich was making were making him so happy. I knew he was onto something.
Fortunately, Heinrich's racket reminded me of the chaotic, dissonant, plinky-plinky music of Charles Ives, Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, or Nicholai Medtner. Some of that 20th Century atonal piano music is so crazy, I thought maybe Heinrich had been influenced by it! So instead of trying to get Heinrich to hold his hands like neat little domes and play 5-note scales up and down, I just encouraged him to bang away and continue to enjoy himself, telling him that what he was playing was a lot like early 20th Century atonal piano music. He sat upright. "Really?" I told him he might be into that music and promised to make him a CD.
In the meantime, Heinrich decided he'd like to write down what he was playing. We came up with a way of notating his noises using graphic notation. We stuck colored stickers on the piano keys and then placed corresponding colored stickers in the order of Heinrich's choosing onto a landscape-oriented piece of paper divided into two halves, the lower half for the left hand and the upper half for the right hand. Heinrich banged away, then paused, recreated what he'd done slowly, sticking stickers to the paper as he went across the page. When he was finished, he had his own piano composition.
On another day I presented Heinrich a CD of the most cacophonous 20th Century piano music I could find. He loved it. His parents reported that Heinrich listened to it often at home, twitching and squirming. They considered it odd music for a 7-year-old boy to be listening to, but they understood the value in Heinrich having an outlet for his movements. (Later, Heinrich next discovered the fast, frenetic sounds of hard-Bop jazz.)
Heinrich liked to perform his "music" for the other children. Once we'd worked out how and when he could play, and once we all practiced the Grace & Courtesy around how to politely ask someone to stop playing if the music is bothering you, and how to politely stop playing if you're asked, Heinrich composed during our work cycles and accompanied our lunch times with his banging and plinking.
With (lots of) patience and a little creativity, a child who otherwise never thought of himself as a piano player, or even a musician, can enjoy just making sounds in his own way.
Next, I'll tell you about Brian, a child with undiagnosable learning disability who loved to dissect the classroom piano. But first, here's a link to a list of crazy atonal piano music that you might introduce to your classroom's resident energy ball:
More later!