Why don’t piano teachers teach the chord method of playing to young children and adults?

Question

I have been playing piano since I was 10 and now I am 43. I have never really been good at sight reading sheet music. I have recently been researching alternative methods of learning songs fast as sometimes learning one piece of sheet music took me months to learn.

I have found it a revelation to learn the chord and improvisation way of learning a song. I have literally played numerous songs tonight in minutes compared to reading sheet music over years. Why are these methods not taught by piano teachers?

I look up the chords to my song of choice and improvise too and played the whole of John Legend's song ‘All of Me’ within minutes. Why do teachers have to focus on sight reading and musical theory?

After 10 years of lessons I have learnt more using this way of learning. I have a musical background, but this way is much quicker to learn songs fast.

Answer 1

Just like there's pop, rock, folk, jazz, metal, etc. guitar, there are many different disciplines of piano playing, each with a different set of required skills:

• classical piano
• pop piano
• jazz piano

I consider these as separate subjects, and in music schools there's usually a separation between at least classical and pop/rock/jazz. Additionally, you might think of playing pop/rock/jazz keyboards like synthesizers etc. as a different discipline. I quite often see people buying "Casio" style plastic home keyboards and expecting to play piano pieces on them, even though the keyboards don't play like actual pianos at all.

In the classical tradition, pieces are written down note-for-note and reading notation is essential. In pop song accompaniment, it doesn't really matter what notes you play, as long as you support the melody and other people. People might even use "music sheets" with just lyrics and chord symbols on them, and no staff notation at all. Like this:

   Eb   Eb7/G      Ab                 Eb   Bb
 O holy night, the stars are brightly shin-ing

Your question could be paraphrased as: "Why don’t classical piano teachers teach the chord method of playing?" And the answer would be: because that method is not used in classical piano practice. It is used in pop piano. If you want to learn pop piano, don't select classical piano as your subject.

A part of the problem is, even today people may not be aware of the differences between the disciplines. Certainly 30-40 years ago, pop piano was not a commonly taught subject in music schools. Classical music was the norm, and the few pop/jazz schools were separate entities. From what I recall, practically all pop pianists or keyboard players were largely self-taught, when it comes to pop accompaniment. Many had studied classical piano, but the skills needed in pop music were a separate thing you had to learn somewhere else, unofficially, "under the counter", and in practice. Maybe there was something about pop accompaniment, but as an optional extra later on.

But today, things are different - pop piano playing is better acknowledged, and the classical approach isn't assumed by default. I've been following a young relative's pop/jazz piano studies, and it's about chords all the way. The music sheets are just melody and chord symbols, and they don't care about things like scale fingerings at all. Instead, among other things, they've looked at how analog synthesizers work! Think about having arrived to your piano lesson, and the teacher says: "On today's lesson, we'll be playing this Moog synthesizer."

Today, if you seek piano lessons, a good teacher or school should ask you, what kind of piano playing you're interested in. A teacher should explain the differences, and if needed, direct the prospective student to another teacher.

Answer 2

Piano teachers routinely teach chord-reading, just not the teachers you studied with, it seems. Teachers who focus on jazz and popular music are the most likely, since chord charts (sheet music) are most common in those genres.

Teachers who focus on classical music often have not themselves learned to read chord charts, though this is changing. But the classical tradition goes back hundreds of years, at a time when lessons were geared toward becoming a professional (classical) musician — meaning that sight-reading standard notation was an absolutely essential skill. Those ways of teaching are still highly prevalent.

Piano teaching has only just begun to seriously evolve away from those earlier traditions in the last ten to twenty years. At the time you began playing the piano, you would have been hard pressed to find a teacher who would (or could) teach from chords. However, you could probably find someone now with relative ease.

Answer 3

Devil's advocate: would most of us go along to a classical concert and enjoy a pianist playing a rough approximation of, say, Moonlight Sonata, a Bach fugue, et al?

Somewhat doubtful - the jazzers amongst us might love it, but the purists might walk out.

The answer is - what does one go to a piano teacher for?

It was always the case - say up to 50 years ago - that we went to learn to play properly - off the dots. That way, we could find sheet music and play it, if not immediately as great sight-readers, but eventually. And reproduce that music as it was intended - thus written out.

Now, though, merely playing the right chords in the right order (sorry, Eric!) is enough to get to play at a lot of venues - maybe not Carnegie Hall yet.

So, there's a vast difference between a pop song and seasoned classical music, and jazz has had a lot to do with the differences along its way. A cover version of a pop song seems acceptable when the chords are right, but their voicings aren't original. It will hardly work though, for Baroque, classical or Romantic pieces. Maybe because the pop type songs are more simplistic, maybe because we're kinder to their interpretations?

There's also the fact that a lot of 'serious' music for pianists isn't actually chord based, as opposed to most pop music, which is.

Answer 4

You could argue that any notation can only ever be an approximation of "what a piece should actually sound like", but reducing a whole arrangement to a sequence of chords is quite an extreme data reduction - you're looking at a very abstract form of what's actually being played.

Before the advent of recording (and the distribution of those recordings), a chord sheet on its own would give you little idea of how many piece were supposed to sound, especially if you had no prior knowledge of the style of the piece. One reason that music lessons tended to focus on rendering a score was that being able to play accurately from score was the only practical way of actually hearing the pieces you wanted to hear in a way that was somewhere close to how they were actually meant to sound.

I'd argue that using 'just the chords' as a way of conveying information about how to play a piece became much more useful when recordings were available - the two formats complement each other extremely well, as the chord sheet gives the non-expert player a shortcut to decoding the recording by ear, while the recording gives an exact rendering from which the person wishing to cover the song can extract whichever stylistic features they feel are important.

This way of working is now even easier with widespread internet availability and the enormous range of recordings that are accessible instantly at a low cost.

However, it's also worth pointing out that some pieces don't 'condense down' well to a simple chord sequence - there are cases in all genres of music where the motion of some of the individual voices is important to the way the harmony moves as a whole.

Answer 5

I'm afraid I'll have to play devil's advocate, too.

Arguably, you never actually learn how to play a piece from its lead sheet (melody + chords). You learn the melody, yes. You learn how to harmonize it, yes. But you never learn precisely how to play the accompaniment (was it straight 8ths block chords, or was I supposed to add syncopation?), so unless you play by ear, you're reading the full sheet music, or you have the accompaniment memorized, you can never figure out what the left hand is really supposed to sound like just from the lead sheet (at least if you want to mimic the most famous recording of the pop/jazz/rock/metal/etc. song).

As other answers here indicate, there are teachers out there who will help you learn from lead sheets, but my argument above is that you may never actually sufficiently learn a piece from its lead sheet.

Funnily enough, there are also pieces out there where just learning the melody in any key just might be sufficient, and you are expected to be able to improvise an accompaniment, including changing the chord progressions between renditions. Those pieces tend to be folk songs, children's songs, Christmas carols, and even national anthems. However, you go back to needing to learn the sheet music in full if you want to play specific versions of those pieces, such as the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Christmas Tree". Regardless, learning the chords for those pieces is not the best way to learn them.

Ironically, you need to learn a substantial amount of music theory just to learn how to read the chords of lead sheets fast enough. (Try reading Cm7♭5 - Fsus4 - DM7/F♯ - Gm9♭13!)

Answer 6

Here's another way to look at the issue. As you say, you were able to throw together your arrangement for "All of Me" in minutes. And it wasn't hard, was it?

Someone with no musical background and no piano instruction probably couldn't do this, but you could. I have a hunch that that background and that instruction were more useful to you than you're giving them credit for.

On the other hand, it shouldn't take months to learn a simple song from sheet music. It makes me wonder what kind of "theory" your teachers taught and what they considered "sight reading". I find that for a lot of the music I play, although lately I play almost exclusively from other people's arrangements in sheet music format--it helps a lot to think of the music as "bass + chords + melody". Most of the time I don't need to decipher the written chords note by note; I can recognize one as a chord I know (say, B-flat major) in an inversion and voicing I've seen many times before (though I couldn't name it at this point--too many decades since the theory classes), and that's what I play.

"Sight reading" for my teachers meant you take music you've never seen or heard before, set it in front of you, and just play. Maybe even in ensemble, so there's no stopping to figure anything out or going back to correct something--you just have to go and keep going.

One thing you can try is to search for music that you would enjoy playing that you could learn quickly. Another option is, if you're going to spend months learning something, make it something worth spending months learning. You can even do both at the same time.

Answer 7

Yes, as in other comments and answers, there is a distance between various genres and their performance styles.

One aspect that is "beyond chords", and relevant to both classical and jazz, is "voicing" of chords, that is, a choice of notes to express that chord, but/and fitting smoothly (as in "voice leading" and such) with nearby. In classical music, where the voicings are written out explicitly (without pretending to specify a chord), in fact there is often considerable ambiguity about what "the chord is". Similarly in (substantive) jazz.

And, then, in bop and other jazz, being able to play scales fluently, and switching between keys in doing such, is a very relevant skill. So, yeah, knowing fingering so as to be able to do it really matters! :)

Still, yes, very simple versions of many pop and traditional songs are recognizable and acceptable and fun without any of that. Still-again, the sound many people have in their ears for Xmas Carols, for example, does involve some modest-but-definite choices of voicings in a left-hand accompaniment... as I rediscover every year, reading from a simplistic score for such carols, and often guessing correctly at a somewhat subtler voicing/harmonization than the simplest-possible one.

Answer 8

I have found it a revelation to learn the chord and improvisation way of learning a song.

Improvisation is the critical word.

I think what you mean is learning how to improvise rhythmic patterns that fit chord progressions.

Why don't piano teachers teach that?

Because most of them are preparing students for piano recitals where you're judged by some notion of a "perfect" performance. Or at least that's the mentality. Your pretending to be on the path of concert pianist.

Often that is mistakenly thought of as "classical" style. But, historically that is wrong. Musicians improvised in past musical eras. Decorating simple melodic lines with embellishments, improvising preludes, filling in the right hand of figured bass, those were some of the ways they improvised. Improvising a melody over a given bass was a big part of it. That's analogous to today's lead sheets of melody labeled with chord symbols. You improvise by embellishing a rough musical structure.

People talk about it as a "lost art" in the classical world but there is a lot of recent research and interest in the topic so it is being revived. "Partimento" is one of the topics to look up. It probably won't help much with learning pop songs, but you may still find it interesting. It might even throw some light on music you learned in all those lessons.

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After re-reading the OP, I really think the confusion here is about accompaniment and musical textures in various musical genres.

look up the chords to my song of choice and improvise too and played the whole of John Legend's song ‘All of Me’ within minutes. Why do teachers have to focus on sight reading and musical theory?

What you improvised was your accompaniment to a melody.

You can do that with music that was written with that in mind. Homophonic texture is what we talking about: melody, with bass part or chord symbols, and chord based accompaniment as filler.

A jazz/pop lead sheet is such a thing.

A baroque trio sonata with figured bass is also such a thing.

Beethoven's Fur Elise is not such a thing.

Gershwin's Three Preludes is not such a thing.

Generally, solo piano music is not such a thing, because there isn't an accompanist. And to be clear, doing something like playing solo piano from a lead sheet is not playing a work written as piano solo music, it's essentially an on-the-fly piano arrangement of a song, a work for a vocalist and a band accompaniment.

Contrapuntal music (polyphonic texture) is pretty much categorically not the kind of music we are talking about. Bach fugues are not the type.

This isn't a classical versus pop music issue. It's a matter of accompaniment versus non-accompaniment genres of music.

If you took piano lessons and worked on figured bass realization or dance accompaniment, things like that, I'm sure you would have gotten lots of work improvising accompaniment.

Answer 9

Another view of this topic is that when you learn classical music or sheet pop music from a proper pianist, you want to see it as layers of meaning. I am not very good, but I have learned songs as a sequence of notes. Unless I let my hands just do what I had taught them, I messed up and had to switch my brain off again to work out the right way to play it. This is because I didn't see the music as layers of meaning in terms of key, chords, notes. I just thought of the notes. Understanding the chord structure of a song doesn't just mean that you want to play pop songs from guitar chord charts off the web. It also gives a much better understanding of a song read from sheet music. E.g. Für Elise first theme. Just go through and see what chords it is playing. E and Am, followed by the section of C G Am and E (I think). My daughter had been taught City of Stars by her piano teacher without a single mention of what are very obvious chords. Gm, Dm, C, F. It gives you insight into what it is saying musically and why it feels a certain way at certain points. You aren't just blindly hitting notes that a musician who did understand music structure made up.

Answer 10

As an addendum to other great answers: Playing "chords and melody" can be a lot of fun and discovering it can be a thrill, but it's not actually something that ever gets played by any sort of pianist in practice.

Classical pianists - don't play chords and melody. This one is obvious.

Pop/Rock pianists never (!) play chords and melody - that would clash with the vocalist and sound awkward. You can get transcribed pop piano classic of the likes of Billy Joel and Elton Jonh - you will not find the "melodies and chords" approach there.

Jazz players don't play melody while comping. And the chords they play is another area of expertise (far beyond just "knowing chords").

The closest to the "chords and melody" approach is what cocktail pianists do. Doing this well is very hard and quite niche.

Now think about it: why should piano teachers default to specializing their pupils to become cocktail piano players? There's nothing wrong with that, but still - why would you consider this such an essential point of piano education?...