RE: The Holy Grail of Music Theory: The Circle of Fifths (FAST MUSIC THEORY)
With me, guitar students always begin with the e minor pentatonic scale because it's easy. Children, especially, are more likely to benefit from scale knowledge once they are first presented with the fact that scales can be used for fun. Improvisation in my classroom happens as soon as it can.
Children piano students don't seem to have a hard time grasping CDEFGAB, especially when it's linked to something as simple as "just the white keys." Once someone grasps all of the major scales, I explain that they already know all of the minor scales also and we learn about relative minors. It takes less than 30 minutes for most kids to get this.
I agree with you that students should begin with interval based training. I always start people on note recognition, half steps and whole steps, and then intervals up to the Major 3rd (so they can learn chords easily). Scales and keys come after we've already learned a few songs in the key of C. Sound physics is fun, but doesn't ever make anybody play differently. It's an inspiring talk I give when a student's interest begins to slip, or they've played for enough years that they can think about it creatively.
Ultimately, this post is for anyone interested in understanding music. It's definitely not the first thing I'd start with, so absolute beginners would benefit from reading my theory posts from the beginning :)
I do private instruction, only- just last week, for the first time a local school music director and talked to me for an extended period of time, so that might change. The ratio of guitar to keyboard students is about 8:1, so there's no good reason to focus most students' attention on standard notation early (from which structure nearly all theory pedagogy derives, historically, let's face it).
Agreed. I don't make any beginners read music for many months--It increases my failure rate way too much because it's not initially fun.
I remember when I was 7 starting on piano- there wasn't the slightest hint of improvisation in what I was taught, it was all rote, and I can't think of an instance (admittedly, nearly 60 years later I won't remember much clearly) I EVER heard words like "mess around", "have some fun with it", "explore everything about the instrument"...I utterly refuse to avoid this with my students, so I'll challenge them to come up with any random melodic fragment, or a chord, or a rhythm, and spend at least a minute or two exploring it.
That is excellent!