The Theory Behind the Lack of Theory

(Saved from the original Piano Wizard website)

What Piano Wizard is.

Piano Wizard can be thought of as “training wheels for the piano”. Like training wheels for a bike, they don’t do the work of riding, pedaling or steering a bike, they just make those things easier, and give your child a chance to build up their skills without a lot of pain and humiliation, and let them have fun and success right away. You wouldn’t put a 3 year-old on top of a ten speed bike at the top of a hill and give them a shove and expect them to learn to love biking, but we do that to children with traditional musical education all the time. Training wheels give kids confidence, freedom, they even let them ride bikes with their older friends, and accompany them. Gradually, the child acquires their bearings, their balance, and the wheels can be gradually raised, until the child is riding the bike virtually independent of the training wheels, which can even be removed at this point. Like the bike, music, once mastered, can take the child anywhere they want to go. The child learned by DOING, not with diagrams and physics theories of maintaining forward equilibrium on a vehicle with one stationary and one movable wheel. You just stopped them from crashing and burning, and let them have fun, and nature took it’s course.

Piano Wizard also teaches by DOING, by PLAYING. All the underlying logic of music is there, and is subconsciously, and then consciously exposed to the child, but that comprehension is not necessary for them to play, learn and enjoy music. In fact, Piano Wizard transcends years of musical theory, history, and an archaic confusing musical notation tradition, and reveals in living color the underlying MATHMATICAL and SPATIAL logic of music, namely there are 2 basic dimensions, pitch (Which note, color coded for easy identification in the game) and rhythm, or time, (revealed by showing the original logic of space between notes to show the correct time to play them). Because the child can ANTICIPATE when to play the note, their innate hand-eye coordination is all they need to play the music of the masters, in seconds. There ARE other dimensions of music, that the game does NOT teach, like timbre, attack, dynamics, and the rich musical conventions we inherited that constitute harmonic theory, but these are the muscles, the flesh, the organs of music. Pitch and Time are the skeleton, upon which all the rest hangs. Get that right, and you have a basic form, from which you can BEGIN to create great music.
This game can teach pitch and time like no other. Through the color and movement of the game, the underlying musical logic embedded in the melodic lines, the rhythmic pulses, the harmonic combinations of pitch and time of Bach or any other composer is revealed transparently and intuitively to the child in all of us, and absorbed into their thinking, into their hands, and their hearts, as unconsciously and as completely as they absorb the logic and vocabulary of their native languages. Bach famously said 300 years ago, (modestly), that all he did was hit the right note at the right time. He did more than that of course, but that is still the best place to start when learning a piece. We can give that start to anybody, painlessly, joyfully, and continuously. Because the game uses MIDI technology (more on that later), there is no limit to the music that can be plugged into the game, it is a training tool for life.
But pitch and time, just hitting the right note at the right time, is not MUSIC, anymore than the frame of a house is a home. Music is art, it is the phrasing, dynamics, the touch, technique, the posture, the interpretation, the emotion, the passion, it is “between the notes” as Jimi Hendrix famously said. Thus, this game does not, can not, will not replace teachers. Human teachers, artists who have given decades of their lives usually, studying every dimension of music, and usually for the best reason of all, LOVE, and who have been dying to share the ART of music with their students, instead of the MECHANICS of which note to hit when.
We have the equivalent of Shakespeare scholars teaching typing. Let the game teach the typing, the framework, let the teachers do what they do best. Our nightmare would be for kids to think that this game is all you need to learn to play the piano. They will hit bottlenecks soon enough, in their fingering, their technique, which will inhibit their top speeds and scores unless they get a “Piano Wizard Coach” (shhh, we mean piano teachers). They will have questions, curiosity about musical notation, sharps, flats, musical theory, history, and they will be ultimately seduced into continuing this musical journey not by a silly video game, but by music itself, one of the most beautiful sacred means of self-expression, by a window into the minds of Bach, Chopin, Beethoven and Van Halen.
Yes, Van Halen. Because, wherever it takes them, that is their journey. We can guide them, teach them to ride their bikes, in this case, to read music, but like a bike, we can only give them the vehicle, where they go, and how far, and how fast, is up to them. But that is their joy of discovery, and before they know it, we can have the classics in their bones, for them to enjoy for a lifetime.