Reconceptualisation of the electronic keyboard and its teaching (I)

Author: Anonymous

Created: 2006 (approx.)

With the global economy picking up, people are starting to have free money in their pockets. As a result, parents who are looking forward to their children's education are beginning to invest more in their children's education, and electronic keyboards have once again become one of the hotspots for investment in art education. According to industry estimates: this year and next year, electronic keyboard consumption will return to the highest level in history. But the recovery is never the same as a simple repeat, in the face of many good news at the same time, we need to re-examine the electronic keyboard and its teaching. After all, the electronic keyboard is not a simple commodity, not as long as you have sound limbs and senses can use the tool, it is a must undergo a certain amount of training in order to master the instrument. The electronic keyboard has been an integral part of the musical instrument industry for more than twenty years in China. The electronic keyboard market has made remarkable achievements from scratch, from disorder to order. At the same time, electronic keyboard education, as a derivative of musical instruments, has also become an integral part of music education as a whole, and has made great contributions to the creation of a musical population. However, when we look at electronic keyboard education in a rational manner, we deeply feel the defects and hidden dangers, which have made the electronic keyboard as a musical instrument fail to achieve its due status. The existence of such flaws and pitfalls has at least slowed down the development of electronic musical instruments in China. To a certain extent, it has become a second-best and unavoidable choice for parents, and to a certain extent has become synonymous with cheap art education. In Europe, America, Japan and other popular music developed countries, electronic keyboard, electronic synthesizer is as an independent musical instrument type - keyboard (KEYBOARD) and the existence of its own unique teaching philosophy and teaching methods. According to an American survey: thanks to the world's most developed electronic musical instrument manufacturing industry, Japanese children have become the children with the highest average level of musical literacy in the world. However, electronic keyboard education in China has gone astray right out of the gate. The vast majority of current electronic keyboard teachers in China were originally engaged in piano performance and education, and most of them have a strong sense of dedication and responsibility as teachers.

With the whole society knowing nothing about the electronic keyboard, a new type of music, they have gradually established a set of electronic keyboard teaching mode with Chinese characteristics. However, the deviations and defects in their own knowledge structure prevented them from truly appreciating the connotations that the electronic keyboard has when they became professional electronic keyboard teachers. Because these teachers themselves have not been educated in all aspects of the electronic keyboard as an independent musical instrument, and have only undergone some short-term training to make them become professional teachers of the electronic keyboard, they take for granted a set of well-established methods of piano teaching and transplant them to the teaching of the electronic keyboard, thus making the electronic keyboard in China a substitute for the piano rather than an independent musical instrument type. This kind of pedagogical thinking contributes to people's (especially parents') existing misconceptions about the electronic keyboard. Due to the large price difference between the cheapest electronic keyboard and the cheapest piano, and due to the apparent efficiency of the existing electronic keyboard teaching, many parents, when choosing an instrument for their children, think more in terms of cheapness and quick success than in terms of the characteristics of the instrument itself. As a result of this pedagogical philosophy, teaching is heavily tilted towards skills training, with little regard for the development of students' musical understanding and expressiveness. Teachers, when choosing instruments for teaching and recommending instruments, often favour models with simple functions. Indeed, from the point of view of finger function training, there is no essential difference between complex and simple models. On the contrary, choosing a simple model can save teachers the trouble of mastering the instrument.

For a period of time, YAMAHA's KB-200 electronic keyboard (a third-rate product of a first-class company) was speculated to a high price of 3,600 yuan. The phenomenon that this price is grossly disproportionate to its value is the most relentless reflection of this philosophy of teaching in the marketplace, which has led to the manufacturers and their owners earning huge sums of money that are beyond their expectations. We must see that manufacturers take great pains to develop new functions, certainly for the needs of the enterprise's own development, but at the same time, it also enriches the expressive power of the electronic keyboard, which is seriously neglected in our teaching, and there is a danger that this kind of teaching will degenerate into finger gymnastics, which makes YAMAHA continuously design and manufacture its mediocre KB series products for the Chinese market. We should now realise that YAMAHA's best electronic keyboards are the PSR series, whose excellent quality is unquestionable, but whose complex operating functions dazzle our teachers and make them tired of dealing with them. The author once witnessed how a waiter employed by YAMAHA at the Frankfurt Music Fair made a PSR series electronic keyboard show amazing expressiveness, which is unimaginable at home, and which to a certain extent reflects the problem of teaching tendency.　　We can divide the playing technique of the electronic keyboard into two major parts: the finger-playing technique and the function-operating technique, the latter of which has already been elaborated to some extent earlier. As far as the requirements for introduction and general performance are concerned, the difficulty of the finger-playing technique required by the electronic keyboard cannot be compared with that of the piano, that is to say, its threshold is indeed much lower than that of the piano. It is true that our teachers are unique in teaching this part of the piano, and they have achieved remarkable results. However, is it because the threshold of the electronic keyboard is lower that it has lowered its value? The answer is no, and the real answer to the question depends on how well we know it.

　　The real charm of the electronic keyboard lies in the richness of the musical elements it contains, which is incomparable to any traditional musical instrument. What are these rich musical elements? Anyone who knows a little about electronic keyboards knows that even the lowest-grade electronic keyboard has a rich and varied range of voices, each of which is a musical instrument. Not only that, but any electronic keyboard has a system of automatic accompaniment styles unimaginable in any traditional instrument, which is made up of a series of automatic chord rhythms in different styles. Each of these rhythms is a musical style in its own right. It is obvious that the electronic keyboard can provide us with a huge amount of musical information. Since the electronic keyboard has such a huge amount of musical information, what kind of musical knowledge can it teach us apart from finger playing skills? Take the voices as an example, the piano is the most familiar voice to our electronic keyboard teachers, and of course they can teach their students to play like a real piano, so have our teachers taught their students to play like a real guitar, not just a piano with a different guitar voices. In fact, this mastery of playing skills that simulate various instruments is an important part of the teaching of the electronic keyboard as a KEYBOAD, and after the student has mastered this method of playing, he or she will naturally become a qualified keyboard player. A big reason for the serious shortage of keyboard players in the entire popular music industry nowadays is that our teaching of the electronic keyboard has not played its proper role. Another point to note is that our teachers tend to emphasise too much the realism of traditional instruments such as piano, trumpet, blackwinds, etc., while ignoring the existence of other voices. This is due to these teachers' ignorance of the knowledge of popular music that underlies the intrinsic dynamics of the electronic keyboard, and because of this ignorance, manufacturers and and students are seriously misled. In fact, the practice of artificially distinguishing between voices is unnecessary. It is not conceivable that a piano with outstanding voices and other poorly voiced electronic keyboards would make an excellent product. It is the overall voices that are important in evaluating an electronic keyboard. As far as the technology itself is concerned, although the fidelity of traditional voices is rapidly improving with the rapid advancement of sound source technology, the differences with real instruments will always be there and insurmountable. But electronics can create sounds that simply do not exist in nature, and it is precisely these electronically synthesised voices that best reflect human creativity and stimulate the imagination of the performer. Styles, on the other hand, is a perfect combination of human electronics and art. The effect of the orchestra it shows is beyond the reach of any traditional instrument.

Once the student begins to learn the use of automatic accompaniment styles, he instantly enters the realm of polyphonic music. What a wonderful idea this is! However, there is more to it than that. As we have already mentioned: the system of automatic accompaniment styles consists of a series of different styles of automatic chord rhythms. Each of these automatic rhythms is, in turn, a musical style type in its own right. For example, when choosing JAZZ style rhythms to accompany a piece of music, it is possible to give the students some knowledge of JAZZ music, which in turn will at least enable them to grasp how to vary a ready-made piece of music to make it a real JAZZ piece, rather than just mechanically applying a JAZZ music accompaniment and calling it a day. Similarly, the same piece of music can be given a Latinised variation and a dance variation. What an interesting kind of work this is! The question is whether our teachers themselves are equipped for it. Let us come back to the art that can be achieved with the electronic keyboard! There is a class of people in the world known as electronic keyboard players, and what qualities should they possess? They should have both the skills of a pianist, the talent of a composer, and the sensitivity of an engineer. However, such a requirement seems to be a bit out of reach for an ordinary student. However, the knowledge of harmony, counterpoint, composition, and orchestration as part of the teaching process is a fundamental way to continue the student's playing life. Because electronic keyboard students are not as lucky as piano students, even if you only play by the book for the rest of your life, there is no worry about finding sheet music, because the masters have prepared ready-made works for all levels of pianists that can be played for several lifetimes, as long as you have the appropriate skills and enough energy. So creativity is not a fundamental requirement for the average piano student. However, the electronic keyboard is a kind of musical instrument that is impossible to completely solidify its content (this content includes many aspects such as musical elements and functional settings), and it is updated in accordance with the development of electronic technology and musical styles, so it is inherently impossible to produce a musical score that is universally applicable to any variety of electronic keyboards, and so imagination and creativity become the life of the electronic keyboard performance. Therefore, cultivating students' imagination and creativity in music is a fundamental aim in the teaching of the electronic keyboard. In this way, many students will not end their playing career after finishing Grade 10 and leaving their teachers. It should be mentioned that there is a strong demand in China for Chinese folk music to be included in the electronic keyboard. This demand is not wrong in itself, because Chinese folk music itself is a huge treasure, which will undoubtedly help to enrich the content of the electronic keyboard. However, we should be aware of the fact that the electronic keyboard is in fact an industrialised product of popular music, and it is suitable for the expression of highly rhythmic, structured and repetitive musical vocabulary, which is precisely the strong point of popular music. Therefore, as far as the characteristics of Chinese folk music are concerned, the Chinese folk music that can be expressed by electronic keyboards must be a kind of folk music that has been pop-musicised, that is to say, it can only be a kind of pseudo-folk music. We can say without hesitation: pop music is the main musical language of the electronic keyboard, and we should not artificially impose the mission of promoting national culture on the electronic keyboard. Any attempt to folk musicise, at least for the time being, is only part of the marketing strategy of individual manufacturers, and folk musicisation can never be mainstreamed, in any country, in any region, and not only in China. Perhaps this is its flaw, but the electronic keyboard is not destined to be a one-size-fits-all instrument from the day it was born, and like any other musical instrument, it inevitably has its own strengths and weaknesses at the same time.

The electronic keyboard should allow us to hear the international musical vocabulary and feel the pulse of popular culture. As long as we don't have narrow-minded concepts and stubborn prejudices, we will be able to acquire a wealth of knowledge and endless fun. We do not wish to offend the teachers who have contributed so much to the development of the electronic keyboard, but we are always looking forward to a more perfect situation: the electronic keyboard should play a greater role in our music education. We cannot talk about the current state of the electronic keyboard without mentioning some of its technical aspects as a hardware device in its own right, and inevitably some of the technical characteristics of the various brands and some of the differences between them will be touched upon. We will make some skimming type scanning. At present, there is a wide variety of electronic keyboards on the market, and it is indeed quite difficult to choose a suitable model among them. From a technical point of view, a certain degree of understanding of these varieties may help us choose. There is no doubt that YAMAHA is the number one brand in the domestic electronic keyboard market today, and in the international arena, if it is not always ranked number one, it is at least always in a leading position. Among other foreign brands, only CASIO is still holding its own in the Chinese market, but in the competition with YAMAHA, it is always at a disadvantage. Like TECHNICS, KAWAI, JVC, ROLAND and other brands, either always in the supporting role of the position, or simply disappear. Need to know: ROLAND as the supreme brand of electronic musical instruments, in the field of electronic keyboards in China, but has never been in the market to obtain the appropriate recognition, while in the international arena, it is in this field, but has a non-negligible position. These phenomena, of course, have the factors of manufacturers' market strategy, but also technical reasons. It is worth noting: a well-known European brand GENERAL MUSIC also quietly landed in China, although it is difficult to predict its market prospects, but it is very different from the Asian brand, European music taste, will show us another charm. So far, YAMAHA and CASIO, the two brands to compare, has become a topic we can not escape.