Playing by ear

Oldest Daughter has been doing a decent job learning the piano.

I started pushing her about two weeks ago to start playing the piano for at least half an hour each day, usually at the start of the day. Music is an essential part of being human, and studies have shown that our brains pick up a fundamental connection between music and mathematics, and even between music and speech, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits. (Some anthropologists have speculated that humans sang before we developed speech.)

Besides, she's been puttering about with our keyboard off and on for years. It was time she got serious.

She's been doing a fantastic job  The only guidance she has received has been to start each song at C-natural, and then figure out from her knowledge of the song which note to play next. It's a method that takes time and patience, and will never get her to Carnegie Hall, but it's got fairly rapid gratification in that a player can usually work out a song fairly quickly.

With no help but her own ear and lots of practice, Oldest Daughter has figured out how to play four or five songs the entire way through a verse, with nary an error aside from the difficulty of maintaining a steady tempo. Today I had her play for me the songs she's worked out, and she played "Holy, Holy, Holy," "My Bonny Lies over the Ocean," "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World." She's also been working on "Peter's Denial" from "Jesus Christ Superstar" and a host of other songs, but she's got the idea.

So today, following her successful performance, I gave her lesson two: Figure out how to play those songs starting at a key other than C-natural, and no, playing it an octave up or down doesn't count. It's got to be a completely different note.

The idea here, of course, is that she is teaching her ear to judge the correct relationships among the keys, and training her fingers to move to the right spots at the same time. While she's doing this, I also am working on getting her to hold her hands correctly, and to use just her right hand for the melody line. We'll start using the left hand for harmony, and then for chords, soon enough.

Meantime, Middle Daughter has received a flute, and is very excited by it. Now we just need to figure out how she can play it, since neither of us knows how, I suspect this means that she will be getting lessons, since I've no idea how to play a flute and would have no clue on where to start.