DHAHRAN, 23 January 2004 — There is nothing like a beautiful melody to lift the spirits on a dreary day. Unfortunately in Saudi Arabia not every child gets the chance to learn how to play beautiful melodies. But a new interactive piano method created by Sarah Lyngra ([email protected]) hopes to bring the opportunity for everyone, both children and adults, to experience the joy of playing music.
“As a piano teacher for children as young as four and five years old, I became frustrated with the methods being promoted to teach new learners to read music,” said Lyngra. “Young children cannot read. However, this does not mean that they should not play a musical instrument. In fact, to develop perfect pitch, enhance the synaptic connections in the brain and stimulate the nerve endings in the fingers, children as young as three or four years old should be playing the piano. Unable to find a piano method ideal for use with young children, I set out to develop one myself.”
Lyngra began her quest to create the ideal piano teaching method in Copenhagen where she was teaching piano to four- and five-year-olds who spoke French. She hit on the idea to break down the complex process of reading music and combine the basic elements with colors to represent the individual notes and musical instructions.
“To read music in the standard way it is necessary to read notes represented by letters and to learn many words derived from Italian. This is difficult and boring for most young learners,” explained Lyngra. “Consequently, many piano teachers won’t take students younger than seven or eight years old and many students discontinue lessons quickly because they find the entire subject confusing. Even worse, parents cannot help in the learning process because they don’t understand what’s being taught. The method I have created overcomes all those obstacles.”
Lyngra’s interactive piano method uses an adventure story to teach all the fundamental concepts of reading music. Titled, “Sarah and Nikolai’s Incredible Discovery of Musicland,” the books take parent and child on a magical musical adventure into a fantasy land where the Purple Dragon, Red Giant and Brown Beethoven help new learners understand the core ideas in reading music.
Yellow Cat is the guide on the musical journey and from the beginning he gets the new learners off to a quick start, telling them that there are no more lefts and rights to remember. Instead they should think of the notes on the piano keyboard as moving up and down. As for the notes themselves, the white keys on the keyboard are assigned one of seven color-coded characters. These characters are permanent fixtures throughout the story.
“I teach piano to 55 students weekly, mostly in groups of three or four at a time,” Lyngra said. “The children are quickly able to associate the keys and the colors. In my books the music itself is written with the required color superimposed over the body of the note instead of the music being printed in standard black and white. In this way the children instantly recognize which note to play. Using standard methods, new learners usually have to decipher the music rather than play it.”
Lyngra added that her new interactive method works equally well with children, adults and even individuals with learning disabilities.
“By replacing the complex letter combinations and simplifying the music layout I have found that all new learners are able to immediately focus on the delight of making music, rather than the tedium of picking out the melody,” Lyngra remarked. “The students learn the music concepts in the storybook and then they exercise their new knowledge in the accompanying practice book. As they move through the story, the layers of knowledge build one upon the other until, by the conclusion of the tale, the students are able to read music written in the standard form.”
This was a very special project for Lyngra as she was not only able to involve her students in the development of the new learning method, but her mother, Beatrice Joan Wilson Powell, used her artistic talents to illustrate the story. The first two books in the series have just been printed and the next two books should be completed in Fall 2004.
“My goal is to bring the pleasure of music to everyone,” Lyngra said. “Parents don’t even need a music teacher to begin using my method with their children. With my books and a simple electric piano, every parent can introduce their children to the joy of playing a melody.”
