In reviewing this piano method book – described as ‘An introduction book for early beginners of piano and children in special education’ on the front cover – my first response was to question if these two groups could be served successfully using the same material. In the UK, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) embraces a wide range of issues affecting the ability to learn, across a wide age-range, and the early beginners targeted here are three- to five-years-olds (or even younger), which is very early to be playing the piano. Do the needs of these two groups overlap in the way this volume implies?
The book's Foreword, written by a child psychiatrist, describes (in academic language) how our brains process music and how autistic children learn music, implying perhaps that autism and special educational needs can be conflated, which clearly isn't the case. The prose that follows is hard to grasp and, in any event, not particularly helpful in a practical method book. Readers don't expect this level of justification. Moreover, the Foreword openly admits that the way in which music helps autistic children is a matter of speculation, as there is still no hard evidence.
The book's content is devised by Erman Türkili, a concert violinist, the founder of a music school in Istanbul, and Dean at the Bahçeşehir University Conservatory. Türkili explains how the book presents a simple, intuitive approach developed from his own teaching practice. Using coloured shapes – circles for right hand, triangles for left, and a different colour for each key – the book seems to provide an effective alternative method for learning to play, avoiding traditional stave notation, which, we know, is a challenge for many youngsters. Stickers supplied with the book are placed on the learner's keyboard, from which point interpreting the ‘notation’ is straightforward. It aims to inject some essential fun into the process of early-stage learning, and is illustrated by very appealing pictures of animals playing instruments. The teacher is expected to give a lot of support, and there is guidance and explanation at each stage. However, there is no discussion of technical issues or the size of keys – a topical debate in recent years.
Working through the book, I found good advice, such as to repeat each exercise until the student is comfortable. Doubts were raised, however, concerning techniques that might be manageable by a teenager but are very challenging for a young child. There are also issues with the pacing and how material is graduated. For instance, the left hand is not introduced until halfway through the book, whereas in most methods it starts at the beginning, separately from the right hand, receiving equal attention. When the left hand does appear, it plays an octave below middle C, with 5th and 4th fingers. Musically this makes sense, when accompanying the right hand at this point, but most teachers know better than to start with the weaker fingers.
Although fingering may be ‘free’ at first, according to the book, ‘correct’ fingering is soon introduced, helped by colouring the fingers to match the notes on the keyboard. So, fingers 1–5 are used for notes C–G, but A and B are then played with ‘joker’ fingers, meaning that the child can choose which finger to use. Unfortunately, this entails jumping to play these notes and then jumping back again, which can be a challenge.
Screenshot from a YouTube video explaining how to mark up a student’s hands
‘Double-notes’ – which could be interpreted as double-length notes but actually denotes two-note chords – are introduced very early on, as are triads, which would be problematic for most pre-five-year-olds. When the hands start playing together, an exercise in 3-time is presented with no explanation of this change of metre, although the arrangement of the shapes makes coordinating the hands clear enough.
While the creativity is welcome – pupils are invited to colour in the pictures and to compose their own pieces by colouring in a series of symbols – it surely should come from exploring the sound rather than colour? The suggestion that consonant sounds are ‘better’ seems rather old-fashioned, and I would think that young and autistic children are more open-minded than this.
In conclusion, although the concept and much of the content are appealing, I have reservations about this book. The opportunity to learn and express oneself through music should be available to all children, but challenges vary enormously, and I am not convinced that material seemingly developed for older children is appropriate for the very young. I think First Steps of a Little Artist might be better suited to five- to eight-year-olds, and that one shouldn't ignore the question of whether both they and children with special needs wouldn't be better served by playing by ear during the initial stages. On such terms, readers may find this method unsuitable.
