Colourful Keys is primarily a blog for music teachers. However, this article is part of a series for PARENTS of music students. If you’re a music parent, read on to learn why your child is learning pieces by rote and how you can help at home. If you’re a teacher, feel free to pass the link to this article on to parents in your studio.
Are you worried that your child is just copying the teacher for a lot of their music in their lessons, instead of reading it from the page? Never fear! They’re actually doing something pretty cool called “rote learning”. Here’s why it’s awesome.
On the surface, rote learning may look like your child is simply copying their teacher or perhaps imitating by watching an instructor’s hands in an assigned video.
Technically speaking, that’s true.
But underneath this imitation, a lot of incredibly important development is going on.
Benefits of Rote Learning
Rote pieces, often called “pattern pieces”, are by-and-large pieces that are easy to play but difficult to read. Students of any age can benefit from learning these pieces by rote.
Exploration
When just starting out, it’s going to take any student quite a bit of time before they’re reading anything that sounds big and cool. They’re often limited to just 5 or 6 notes, sitting in the middle of the piano (or the equivalent of any musical instrument). And it takes enormous concentration for students to focus on even those few notes on the page, eliminating brain space for anything else to occur.
Learning a rote piece, however, allows students to explore the full range of their instrument. They can focus on being musical instead of deciphering the greek on the page.
Whether it’s figuring out how to make sounds that are loud or soft and high or low, being able to tell a story with their music or learning to navigate their instrument, rote learning sets up a foundation for music instruction that will last a lifetime.
Ear Training
Sometimes we forget that music is an aural art. Developing the ear is key.
When learning by rote, your child will hear the piece many times before they begin learning it (and oftentimes, while they’re practising it, too).
Once the sound of a piece is internalised, rote learning helps students connect the patterns that they hear to the patterns they play. Later, this in turn helps them connect the patterns to the music they see.
Good Technique
Playing any instrument is a full-body, physical pursuit. If done methodically and purposefully, developing good technique will help your child progress more quickly, create a beautiful and musical sound and prevent long-term injury.
Many rote pieces are designed to help your child investigate what it feels like to play short, staccato sounds or smooth and connected sounds in the right way without the added pressure of having to read the music.
Music Reading
It sounds counter-intuitive, but rote learning can be a fast-track to reading music fluently.
Sightreading
When sightreading, musicians tend to read horizontally rather than vertically. This means looking more broadly at the music for patterns and context rather than just note-by-note along the line.
True pattern pieces help students start to think about music in this way.
Pattern Recognition
In some cases, your child’s teacher might introduce the printed music either during or after learning rote music. This can help your child connect the patterns they’ve just played to the patterns they can now see.
Note: While the written music might be referred to, students aren’t usually expected to read the full piece like they do traditional pieces. With rote pieces, it’s more common to have students simply recognise repeating patterns or common rhythms in the written music.
Memorisation
Many students struggle to memorise their music – even experienced musicians. This struggle can be even worse when the musician relies on reading too much without recognising the patterns and overall structure of the music.
Pattern pieces, by their nature, are memorised aurally, visually and finally through reading several times over.
Rote learning sets your child up for memorisation success down the road, helping them see the structure of music from the very beginning and experience pieces as a series of patterns and variations.
Creative Skills
Once a rote piece is learnt, it’s a great opportunity for your child to play around with the patterns in that piece. Some teachers like to encourage their students to come up with their own patterns to give the piece their own personal twist.
Even if this isn’t the case in your child’s music studio, you can still encourage them to branch out at home!
If your child is exposed to opportunities like this, they can become more confident musicians who understand how music can be transformed.
Supporting Your Child
It’s understandable to be intimidated by the idea of helping your child practise their rote pieces at home, especially if you don’t have a musical background.
But you have one important thing your child lacks: a grown-up brain. That’s the most important thing when helping anybody practise a pattern piece.
Here are some ideas you can try:
- Have your child play any new pattern piece right away when they get home from a lesson. The 3 minutes this takes will make the learning much stickier.
- Lean heavily on any available listening tracks, even if they’re not specifically part of your child’s assignment. If they are listed in the assignment, don’t skip that part.
- See if there’s a reminder video online that might help jog your child’s memory.
- Ask your child prompting questions: Do you remember how it starts, or what the end is like? Can you hum part of it, so we can try to figure that out on the keys? Did you sing any words while you were learning to play it?
- If the piece is included in your child’s book, see if it gives a picture showing the starting place for their hands.
- Sit in or nearby your child’s lesson so you can eavesdrop on the learning process.
If all else fails, have your child practise whatever parts of the piece they can remember. That’s better than skipping it altogether.
The made-for-parents video above specifically discusses rote pieces from the ‘Piano Safari’ series of books. But even if your child’s piece comes from a different source, you can apply many of the same principles to your child’s home practice of any pattern piece.
Does your child struggle when practising rote pieces?
Not sure how to support them? Let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking, and will do our best to help.
For more like this, check out other articles from our “music parent” series:
- How involved should you be in your child’s music practice?
- Why NOT to Teach Your Child Music Staff Mnemonics
- Help Your Child Develop a Solid Music Practice Habit
- Is your child’s piano practice “right”?
- Why is my child’s piano teacher playing games in lessons?
- Why does my child have piano listening assignments?
- Is your child ready for a piano exam?
- Music Appreciation for the Family
- What Your Child Will Learn in ‘Mini Musicians’
- What Your Child Will Learn in ‘Piano Launchpad’