Person first and together: a different kind of teaching.

   (start slow, soft, to self ...

   "Private lessons."
   Think, "Individual."
   He says, "Semi-Private," (to full voice ...
   She says, "Diads."
   Someone says, "Class,"
   Others say "No."
   You call out,
   "There ARE Groups!"

   (agitato ...
   Private lessons,
   Class lessons,
   Diads,
   Groups,
   Semi-Private,
   Individual!

   (now rhythmically and broader ...
   "Tomato, Tomahto?"
   "Potato, Potahto?" (to abandon ...

   "I like potato chips," and

   (singing ... "I--like New York in June

   "How about--" WAIT!

   This is exhausting and ridiculous, Fred.

   "Let's call the whole thing off,"
   as Cole Porter once said.

I know you have heard this buzz down the hall or around the water cooler. I will not try to sort the pros and cons of this noise. Instead, I will pinpoint the ISSUES that penetrate the clutter and clatter: The priorities for a Person First piano education.

Additionally, to observe the vision embodied in the mandate of Chairperson Brenda Dillon to the three major clinicians of thirteen for her unprecedented, three-day series on the National Piano Foundation's Group Teaching Track for MTNA, and contrary to the absence of compliance to it in the two previous presentations, I will also follow her mandate TO PROFILE MY BACKGROUND WITH GROUPS.

To accomplish both of these objectives I ask for your indulgence as I explore and highlight some pivotal events in my musical life from high school, year 1939, forward.

My initial reasons for embracing group teaching originated from experiences as piano student and teacher. The choice was easy and never close to a dilemma for me while the time and work to study and understand it continues at all levels of instruction.

With Raymond Burrows as my teaching model, in whose demonstration group I studied at Columbia University, I could not have considered a private lesson as a viable, artistic musical choice for a teaching environment and be true to my experience with him. With that background, I was even emboldened enough at that time to disabuse my fellow students of the notion a private lesson could ever match a group in musical and pianistic growth. I felt I could never maintain the stimulating environment for an individual in a private lesson that the group experience had provided me under Dr. Burrows. I wanted to give my future students as equal an opportunity to learn as I had been given so generously by my mentor.

My teaching has been animated by this experience while the profession has managed to maintain, to some degree, a bias toward group work. When considered at all, it is confined generally to how can groups be worked into private settings without disturbing, too much, a teacher's neat and tidy, fool-proof teaching world?" Still ill-informed, after more than a half-century, teachers sadly hold to: 1) A group lesson is somehow a version of a private lesson, WRONG; 2) it limits the pursuit of technical development, STILL WRONG; 3) it obstructs musical understanding because the responses it fosters and trusts are perceived as immature, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Confronted with their aforementioned biases, my colleagues possibly can sympathize with mine ... gleaned from my first encounter with teaching. From my sophomore through senior years in high school, I taught an average of thirteen private lessons each week with a bare-boned curriculum of lines/spaces (e.g. "General Beauregard Died Friday Afternoon"--lines of bass clef) not steps/skips; note values not short/longs; notes/fingers not phrases; counting not metrical tension/releases; right/wrongs not problem solving/ambiguity.

I compared that teaching experience to the group learning experience with Professor Burrows. My comparison showed me I felt supported, creative, artistic and able. I'm not sure my students did. I discovered I could cultivate and sustain competitive ideas while on the path of conceptualizing solutions for problems. I found value and fun in just the learning process itself and soon became an ardent student of it. I realized then I had not provided in my teaching the kind of material, process, or environment in which students could feel as immersed and enveloped in their learning as I had. On reflection I realized ... that was not teaching.

I was able to see my early teaching as one in which I had viewed each student separately as a tabula rasa of ignorance upon whom I had imposed facts. Each had to accept then memorize them by rote under the threat a lesson may not occur the next week. This sterile environment, albeit at another level, was not Raymond Burrows' "Repeat that again? Never!"

My future was clear. I had a great challenge before me if I were to pursue a teaching career. I changed the environment for my students using the group concept as the predicate for reevaluating materials and the processes for their presentation and development. The group structure remained constant from the very beginning to the most advanced levels of instruction.

I remember two of those students. Remarkably I find they are still playing today. Sixty-six years later, in their mid 70s, one on her large Gulbranson upright, the other on her Wurlitzer spinet, Leola performed for me in 4-part harmony "Onward Christian Soldiers" and Audry performed her arrangement of "I'm in the Mood for Love." I'm sure I taught neither. Perhaps I had not been a complete failure, but an excuse for not changing? I think not!

In between high school and Raymond Burrows there was a war, World War II. Attached to General Patton's Third Army my engineering outfit of one hundred and twenty troops, the Ten-Ten Ponton Treadway Bridge Company, was the first to bridge the Rhine River during the battle of the Rhineland. In the following period of German Occupation, I performed concerts in Belgium, Germany and France, sponsored by the International Red Cross. Soon after my discharge from the United States Army I was invited by the American Impresario Arthur Judson to be artist on the piano roster of Columbia Artists Management, New York City, NY to tour throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico on its newly formed International Community Concert Series.

After two tours and my marriage to the very talented and beautiful Maria Farra, I resumed my education at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, The University of California, Los Angeles, the Juilliard School and Columbia University, New York. From the bright lights of New York City, I was displaced to a moonlit village for my first teaching position at Union Elementary-High Schools in Tranquillity, California, population 198 (1953). School buses left at 5:00 a.m. to gather its student body from a forty-two mile radius in the farmland of San Joaquin Valley to begin classes at 9:00 a.m. I created piano classes with ten various-sized upright pianos collected from homes in the valley, directed Band and Chorus, taught senior English, third year Spanish and Music Appreciation. I wrote "More than the Three R's" for the MUSIC EDUCATORS JOURNAL,: "Music Literacy" for THE SCHOOL MUSICIAN, and "The New Studio" for the last edition of "ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE": then moved to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (1955).

The Movie Begins (1)

We hopscotch forward to the University of Colorado, Boulder (1970) to 3 students who inspired me to create a work consisting of lecture, art, and music for presentation at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF MUSIC EDUCATORS London, Ontario, Canada (1978). These students are Jeff performing Beethoven Sonata Op. 110, Mary, performing "Los Requiebros" from Granados, "GOYESCAS," both Bachelor of Music piano majors; and Chris, a Master of Music piano major performing Liszt's Paganini Etudes. These students finished their respective degrees that semester.

Back to Minnesota, here are at least 200 children at the renowned Walker Art Center in one of three, one-hour performances I conducted on Sundays once a month; piano monster concerts with Minnesota State Piano Competition Winners; piano classes at the University for non-piano music majors accompanying one of their own classmates, a flautist; The Childrens' Group Piano Laboratory Program with Hiram Titus, winner of MTNA's national high school piano competition, Dallas, TX (1964); Peter, Christine, Scott, and Susan, first seen at seven years of age in their first year of instruction, then still in their same group, now at 10, in their fourth year when MTNA invited us to Philadelphia to perform at its national convention (1961). An outgrowth of the Children's Group Piano Laboratory Program, was the National Education Television Award (1958) given to the University of Minnesota Department of Radio and Television for its thirteen-segment television series entitled, "A NEW DIMENSION IN PIANO INSTRUCTION."

On to Community Outreach Classes for studio teachers from Minnesota and Wisconsin; moving forward to Northwestern University (1962) and my first of more than a dozen national conferences on PIANO PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN GROUP SETTINGS.

Returning to the University of Colorado, Boulder, in my studio with Jeff, Mary and Chris; a piano lesson; a confluence of hands, more hands--pianists hands--as the third movement of Samuel Barber's Piano Sonata nears its end.

We have gone back in time, 22 years, with an edited version of the original Person First And Together: A Different Kind Of Teaching, originally produced in 1984 by The Denver Center for the Performing Arts. With the fourth movement, Allegro con spirito (Fuga), of the Barber Piano Sonata we now continue with Background, Viewpoint, and a Piano Lesson which includes four lectures on The Historical and Contemporary Foundations for Piano Performance Studies in Group Settings. A colloquy follows each of these lectures with Christopher Fisher of Ohio University and Wendy Bramhall of Oakwood College.

After the Movie sans credits

When I created this edited version of Person First for our session this morning I was surprised to find Cubism was predominant in the art collection. Upon review, I discovered my original attraction to it was prescient in that Cubism and my pedagogy have had similar collisions in their respective communities. Cubism challenged ideas about time and perception by complicating the pace of looking at art; my pedagogy moderates teacher talk by simplifying the organization of materials. With cubism, the day of pure optical pleasure was over; with my pedagogy, the day of pure teacher authority is challenged; both need to be approached with caution and figured out.

Once perceived as iconoclastic by the world of art in the nineteenth century, the movement of Cubism mirrors my own experience from the mid-twentieth century forward into the twenty-first in the world of piano pedagogy. My pedagogy does not feel the same, act the same, look the same, in much the same way Cubism did not resemble prevalent art processes of its day. Not ambrosial, my teaching does not ease one's path; it often trips one up through its simplicity. Sensibilities can be disturbed. Can teaching be actually so accessible and natural?

While Cubism stripped figures to geometric essentials, I have simplified the genesis of understanding piano pedagogy by eluding formula. In its way, Cubism refreshed the viewing of art as my pedagogy refreshes the similarities between learning, teaching and performing. Reconciling the perceived differences between these three acts grooms a curricular Gestalt for a lasting artistic piano pedagogy.

Perhaps this session will be remembered when Guy Duckworth fractured the delicate world of piano teachers; or perhaps his audacity will be easily forgotten. Perhaps, though, by prying open the artificial closed-off realm of piano teaching, his pedagogy may enter into the protective custody of contemporary practice.

To calm any fears that may have accumulated this morning, I will end by paraphrasing a verse from our childhood. The tragic demise written for the nineteenth century nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, ironically can be rewritten in the twenty-first century as a metaphor of hope for the topsy-turvy lives we lead in our musical Humpty Dumpty world. The rewrite is simple: "ALL THE KING'S HORSES AND ALL THE KING'S MEN CAN PUT HUMPTY DUMPTY" (for us, read piano pedagogy) BACK TOGETHER AGAIN.

Let the credits roll.

Author's Note: "On Tuesday morning March 28 at this spring's 2006 MTNA Conference, Austin, Texas, a powerful thunderstorm flooded the city, which resulted in a bolt of lightning striking the soundboard in the endlessly cavernous room in which I was performing. In total darkness with two flashlights, five men in 10 to 15 minutes of improvisation ingeniously patched my DVD, The Person First And Together, through--mind you--a digital piano(?); however, my microphone remained silent. Initially confronted with aquiring the vocal energy to be heard and nuanced I found myself competing throughout the 60-minute presentation between the emotionally tumultuous music of Samuel Barber's 1948 Piano Sonata coming from my DVD and a conversation of a script interruptus between me and the back rows of the audience "Can you hear me? ", "Yes, Yes, Yes!' Not exactly what I had planned!

For all to see unfettered is the text now in its entirety from my chaotic morning in Texas. Thank you AMT editors."--Guy Duckworth

NOTE

(1.) The actual persons and events described in the following prose appear on screen with the third movement Adagio mesto, of Samuel Barber's Sonata for Piano, Op. 26.

Guy Duckworth, throughout his teaching career, has stressed improvising (Keyboard Series 1963) and mirror playing (Symmetrical Keyboard 1987) to inform pianists of the musical, keyboard and technical deep structures inherent to artistic performance.