Joanna lessons

Joanna MacGregor has a hectic schedule as a concert pianist. So why has she has added the task of writing books for young children learning the piano?

Even a member of that mythical species, the completely tone deaf, could not fail to be stirred by a Joanna MacGregor performance. Simply to see her zipping around a keyboard grabbing fistfuls of notes at the behest of some unfeasible contemporary score is to watch a pianist pushing the human frame to its limits.

But even her dazzling virtuosity was not enough to wow one small boy at a recent concert she gave for kids. Like the rest of the audience, he had been cascaded with bits and bobs of pieces in every style from her vast repertoire of classical, jazz, ragtime, blues, techno, African etc. He'd coolly watched her dive under the lid of the concert grand to pluck the wires - normally a surefire knockout for kids. Then as she drew breath and invited questions, he piped up:

"Can you play Match of the Day?"

How many veterans of the Wigmore Hall platform would be floored by such a request? For Joanna MacGregor, though, it was simply a hoot. "In his eyes, until I played Match of the Day, I hadn't passed the test. I wasn't a proper pianist." Needless to say, she sailed through and doubtless logged the experience for her next children's recital.

MacGregor is rare among top-flight concert pianists, for the interest she takes in how small children learn the instrument. She has just published her own piano tutor for children: Joanna MacGregor's PianoWorld. And she has managed it despite a crippling work schedule. This week, for instance, she was giving a lecture in London as Gresham professor of music. Then she was straight off to Bath for the first of three concerts at its festival - a recital that included a fiendishly hard piano transcription of Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka.

There hardly seems to be a festival this summer which she is not gracing. Tomorrow, as artistic director of the Society for the Promotion of New Music, she is in the thick of an all-day collaboration between nine young composers and artists at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. She runs her own recording label: SoundCircus. And by her own admission she cannot meet an artist of any sort without being tempted to suggest a joint project. So, why on earth take on the extra burden of writing a book?

"Everyone asks me this. People are clearly surprised that I would concern myself with the very first lessons. It says a lot about the music profession that we tend to concentrate on the top end, on the BBC Young Musician competition, on this idea of the child as a nascent virtuoso.

"Most people's interest in music is much more ordinary and much more everyday. I find that much more interesting."

In producing the first three books of what she intends to be a continuing series, MacGregor is drawing on vivid experience. Between the age of 18 and 25, before she was getting concert engagements as a pianist, she taught a stream of beginners the piano. But most important in her make-up now as a musician who is unsurpassed in the breadth of her eclectic repertoire, was the endless procession of small boys and girls during the 1960s and 70s traipsing into her childhood home in Willesden, north London, where her mother taught the piano.

"Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to play every sort of music - bits of classical, jazz, pop, improvisation."

Until she was 18, she had lessons from her mother, too. "I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities."

Just as everyone should be able to learn how to swim, or to speak a smattering of French, so, in her view should everybody be able to make a stab at learning the piano. Some kids have a flair and make rapid progress. Such kids, she says, can take care of themselves. She is fascinated by the others: those who chug along at varying rates of progress, enjoying it for a while, but all too often giving up.

This falling off happens at any stage. Some kids find the beginning too frustrating. Others rebel at parental pressure driving them to "be like those children on the telly". A fair proportion bow out at Grade 5, the peak of the foothills, after which the going gets distinctly tougher.

"I worry that some people use music, like sport, as a way of making their children achieve things, rather than just saying: it's music, it's there to enjoy. I don't want to sound woolly, but the reason children fall by the wayside is because they feel they are not going to match up to their parents' high expectations."

The production of her own training manuals begs an obvious question. Does she have a poor opinion of the existing corpus of tutor books, or indeed of the general quality of piano teaching? "I'm very reluctant to criticise other people's teaching or others' tutor books," she says, shutting that avenue for discussion. What she does do is readily accept that her books, colourful and eye-catching though they are, are by no means the only books on the market designed to make the early years enjoyable.

Her wheeze for luring the fives, sixes and sevens through those bewildering early months is to weave a storyline into the books and their accompanying CDs, right from the that first fumbling for middle C. Ned, a crepe-soled rocker with an extravagant quiff, and Grumper, a cat in cool shades, live on top of an old upright piano. A note, signed Scherzo Sisters, arrives: "PianoWorld needs help today, Silent pianos get thrown away. To save the piano complete our tasks, That's all the Scherzo Sisters ask."

And so the odyssey begins. First task. Find the Cs - "they're always to the left of the two black keys". The challenge at this fragile stage is to make the work interesting.

"Kids want something that sounds exciting and good, even if they're playing just one note." And so, from lesson one, there are accompaniments in a variety of styles for teacher - or parent - to play beneath the child's line. For kids whose parents aren't pianists, the accompaniments are recorded on the CDs.

For five to seven year olds, learning the piano should be unadulterated fun, MacGregor insists. "You have to allow them to improvise and give them a reason to play at either end of the keyboard and on the black notes and use the pedals."

In Book 2, the characters fall inside the piano and open up opportunities for making a whole lot of weird noises. As progress is made, bigger obstacles loom. Children need to be coaxed quite hard to read the music rather than rely on ear. Having relied for so much of her own childhood on her very keen ear, MacGregor has considerable sympathy on this score.

But perhaps the biggest problem of all is practice. How can children be persuaded to play a passage even once again, let alone many times over. She admits not having practised rigorously until she went to the Royal Academy of Music, after graduating in music from Cambridge. As a teenager, she had simply played what she liked: hymns at school, keyboard with bands, and lots of Gershwin for dance classes.

At the Royal Academy and afterwards she began building up a contemporary repertoire whose formidable difficulties demanded practice. Now she loves practice. The eight hours a day that she gets through are the core of her musical life, she says, more important than performances.


The secret of any practice, whether for 20 minutes or five hours, is to work out beforehand exactly what it is you are aiming to do, she says. Other tips: treat yourself - play the whole piece through, however many wrong notes. And mix hard with easy.


But Birtwistle must wait for Book 4.

· PianoWorld Books 1-3, published by Faber Music, £4.95 each.

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