Private Students

Private Student

Here is an excerpt from the first five minutes of an eight year old pupil’s piano lesson. It shows the student engaging in inference learning.

– First at a generalization-verbal level – student chants rhythm patterns back to teacher using rhythm syllables when teacher used neutral syllables. (This was the first time he had done this using division and elongation duple meter rhythm patterns).

– Second at a generalization-symbolic level of inference learning – student writing tonal patterns that teacher sang to him, and then playing them on the piano.

– Finally at a creativity/improvisation level of inference learning – student creating a four macrobeat rhythm pattern in duple meter and improvising with it using tonic and dominant functions in F major.

Here Emma is performing with students Lianne Weeks, 15 yrs & Megan Knowles, 7 yrs in 2006 at a concert for local music teachers and their pupils. Megan had been learning with Emma for about eighteen months and made up the arrangement to Land of the Silver Birch based on its harmonic structure which she analysed in a previous lesson. Lianne had received fortnightly singing lessons for a year.