fwiw I think piano pedagogy is exactly the kind of thing where an entrenched regime has propogated a suboptimal approach relative to most people’s goals on the instrument (and that there’s maybe only some single digit number of people in the country teaching outside of the small handful of dominant, not-especially-useful-to-most-people paradigms).
E.g., if what you want to do is play pop songs, a combination of ear training and a ‘simon says’ style app that reads midi off your keyboard and instructs you to play a ~random triad will basically get you there in ~100 hours of practice (assuming daily practice not to exceed ~3 hours/day). There are similarly straightforward training setups that I expect to be effective for other goals one may have on the instrument. I built ~all of my physical facility on the instrument in about three months of focused practice, and have similarly ‘cheated’ my way into my other capacities (I’m definitely missing things that other people 5 years into the instrument would have, but I also have a lot of things those folks don’t, and I prefer and deliberately pursued my skill profile over theirs).
I agree that few people who start playing piano as adults will ever play Rachmaninoff at competition level (but think very few people who enter into the pedagogical system designed to meet that end actually have that goal in practice).
I also (I think, although you don’t say so outright) agree that some tasks require developing wholly other senses — new channels for phenomenal sensation or new ways of comparing phenomenal sensation in an existing channel (e.g. audiation and relative pitch) — and that those aren’t well-captured in Oli’s ontology.
fwiw I think piano pedagogy is exactly the kind of thing where an entrenched regime has propogated a suboptimal approach relative to most people’s goals on the instrument (and that there’s maybe only some single digit number of people in the country teaching outside of the small handful of dominant, not-especially-useful-to-most-people paradigms).
E.g., if what you want to do is play pop songs, a combination of ear training and a ‘simon says’ style app that reads midi off your keyboard and instructs you to play a ~random triad will basically get you there in ~100 hours of practice (assuming daily practice not to exceed ~3 hours/day). There are similarly straightforward training setups that I expect to be effective for other goals one may have on the instrument. I built ~all of my physical facility on the instrument in about three months of focused practice, and have similarly ‘cheated’ my way into my other capacities (I’m definitely missing things that other people 5 years into the instrument would have, but I also have a lot of things those folks don’t, and I prefer and deliberately pursued my skill profile over theirs).
I agree that few people who start playing piano as adults will ever play Rachmaninoff at competition level (but think very few people who enter into the pedagogical system designed to meet that end actually have that goal in practice).
I also (I think, although you don’t say so outright) agree that some tasks require developing wholly other senses — new channels for phenomenal sensation or new ways of comparing phenomenal sensation in an existing channel (e.g. audiation and relative pitch) — and that those aren’t well-captured in Oli’s ontology.