I used to hate piano. I started piano as a young child (as all asian kids do) taking classical piano lessons. Sure, I enjoy listening to classical piano music now, but as a child it just didn’t resonate with me. On top of that, it seemed like all I was doing was memorizing notes on a piece of paper. Robots could essentially do the same thing. It took hours (really weeks and months) to learn just one song and by the time I started my second song, I would have forgotten most of the first song I learned.
Imagine you want to be conversationally fluent in French, so you go to a French teacher and she gives you a poem to learn. Then every week, you learn one line of the poem until you are done. At the end of many weeks, you can recite the poem as well as any Parisian. However, you have no idea what the words mean and you still can’t hold a conversation in French, ask some one for directions, or even just comment on the weather. You’ve simply regurgitated one piece of literature. Multiply that by a few years of the same training and maybe you’ve learned 10x more poems (or songs). But you still don’t know what you were playing or how that music was created. That was the way I was taught and I quickly burned out. Have you ever felt that way trying to learn piano?
Think about how babies learn. Babies are born with no knowledge of spoken language and yet, all learn a language at some point in their lives. Could you imagine if we gave babies a piece of paper with words on it and expected to teach them word by word or letter by letter? Of course not. Why would we expect to learn piano the same way? The first words out of a baby’s mouth is imitation of his/her environment. Thus, the quickest way to get up and running playing songs is by imitation.
Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t learn to read music. The ability to read music opens up your musical world just as learning to read English does. But it is not the first step in learning to play piano.
As the great Clark Terry said, “Imitate, Assimilate, and Innovate.”