What Music Schools Don’t Teach — How I Really Learned to Play Popular Music

I’ll never forget that moment, it was the talent show in 5th grade, and I volunteered to play the piano. I had played the piano since I was 5, and had gotten pretty good at that point. I had moved on from Minuet in G and had started to play Bach 2-part Inventions. That’s what I had most recently learned and so that’s what I played for the talent show.

I was very proud of that piece. I spent about a month or so learning and memorizing that piece. Come performance time, I nailed it. I held my head up high and I bowed and everyone applauded. This was a pretty cool feeling for me at the time.

However, it wasn’t that impressive compared to what other people played, and not just other talents, but other piano players. The movie Titanic had just come out, and naturally, this other girl played “My Heart Will Go On.” The entire audience was in awe, and so was I! I was amazed and had really wanted to learn it myself. This was a very popular song at the time, heck, it’s still a really popular song today. That being said, I didn’t learn it, nor did I know how to learn it, nor did I know how to go about getting the sheet music so I could learn it.

I would spend the next 10 years learning more classical music at the piano, that would get progressively more difficult, culminating in an epic recital where I performed Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, Listz’s Dante Sonata, Bach’s Italian Concerto, and Prokofiev’s 7th Piano Sonata. With my technique getting more and more virtuosic, I even started learning some of Kapustin’s Concert Etudes and performed his Suite in the Old Style. (He writes very difficult jazzy classical music, it’s pretty awesome, Google him!).

Yet despite all this progress, during that time I really wanted to learn popular songs, popular music, and to play stuff for my friends that they liked. I can play pop tunes now, but for many years I couldn’t. Many people are stuck in this situation, where they are performing all this beautiful music, very little of which is what people listen to on the radio today. What gives?

We are all part of the classical piano teaching system!

According to a recent Nielsen Report, Classical Music made up less than 2% of music sales in 2015. Only 2%! Yet ask anyone who has ever started learning the piano from a local teacher, and odds are they learned Minuet in G. Great piece, but why not Bieber’s “Love Yourself”?

Culture. In my opinion, it all comes down to culture. Most piano teachers go through music school, where they learn more classical music, and then go on to teach what they learn, more classical music, again, only 2% of sales. This perpetuates, and you’re left with people learning classical music, when more often than not, they’d rather learn other genres, unless of course they’re in the 2%.

In order to learn what we really want, we have to escape from the system that we are in, we can’t keep learning from the professors, and the piano teachers that come out of all the music schools that we see. Their focus is again on teaching more classical music. Instead you have to find performing musicians, gigging musicians, and ask to learn from them, and I don’t mean those giving classical recitals.

Jazz musicians are a great start, but jazz is a little too pure. Jazz as an art form is all about improvisation. The solo during any jazz piece will be quite different every time it’s performed, but the solo of a pop song is set in stone. The solo of Sweet Child O’ Mine or Free Bird isn’t something that should be wildly different every time it’s heard.

When playing pop songs, I learned that it’s not about notes, it’s about chords. As a pianist playing a song on the radio, you are on 1-man band. So essentially you are the rhythm section, laying down the chords and the beat, with the bass lines being crucial to communicating the feel in such a way people can dance to it. I only learned this from people in bands.

I say we devise a new system for people to learn to play the genres of music more than half of america spends its money on, pop, rock, and R&B. I don’t consider myself a sell out. I just want to have fun, playing the music people have fun listening and dancing tune. If every teacher just had more of that mindset, I think we’d all grow up knowing many more musicians, and a lot less classical music quitters.

Daniel Bachelis muses on lots of topics, and is currently at work creating a new course called Play Any Pop Song. You can check it out here.