A Multi-Sensory Piano Party

Kathryn Page explains how the feel of a velvet scarf and the smell of a candle can do wonders for your students’ playing

How many of us use multisensory stimuli in our teaching? Though a multisensory approach has helped many SPLD students in academic subjects for some time now, it can be equally supportive, indeed inspirational, when used in piano lessons in a more general sense. Pupils of every age and level can be inspired by touching, seeing, smelling, and playing with objects, images, food, aromas, and extra-piano sounds.

The next time you have a class concert or party for your students, why not consider laying out a ‘platter of plenty’ which could include contrasted delicious items for consideration as well as consumption. You could light scented candles. Find appropriate paintings for display. Above all play musical games: Ask pupils to suggest a pianistic sound or a piece that would complement a particular object, taste, smell, image, or nonpianistic sound that you allow everyone in the room to experience.

When your pupils arrive at the party, dish out food, and show how everything you eat has the potential to be ‘musical’!

Can you relate lemon soufflé to the delicate right-hand runs in Chopin’s B flat minor Nocturne Op 9 No 1? Get your students to climb to the top of the house ladder. Allow them to drop a feather down from the top rung, observing its slow descent.

Encourage more and more associations with music and style. Does the gentle descent of the feather equate to Liszt’s Feux Follets or the filigree variations towards the end of Chopin’s Berceuse? Dare your pupils to drink a spoonful of pure lemon juice. The sharp tangy bitterness comes as a shock to the palette – rather like a Beethovenian outburst of dry roughness after smoother sounds. Think of the opening of the slow movement of the Sonata in G Op 14 No 2, or the brittle percussiveness of Bartók or Ligeti. Bartók’s From the diary of a Fly shows that lemon association need not be the exclusive preserve of loud dynamics.

Light a lavender candle and play Bach’s pastoral E major Prelude from Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Discuss how both Bach’s simple line and the candle’s distinctive smell evoke a sense of innocence, of a fresh summer country walk.

Chocolate cake and fluffy carpets

Find pictures of landscapes, still life and portraits. Find abstract drawings. When we gaze at a painting we are not concerned with the brush strokes- we are moving into the picture’s world. Relate sounds and actual compositions to images on display.

Serve up chocolate. The heaviest black forest gateau reminds us of the rich resonance and thickly enriching textures and melodic lines in Brahms. Putting a small segment of dark chocolate on our tongue and refusing to chew it equates to a seamless romantic melodic line full of sweetness.

Let them drink sparkling water whilst you play some jeu perlé runs from Mozart. Ask pupils to slowly pour out milk into a bowl from a safe height. The gorgeous sound of the milk as it makes contact with the bowl could inspire more evenness and care in the arpeggios of

Liszt’s Un sospiro and Chopin’s ‘Aeolian harp’ Etude Op 25 No 1.

Ask everyone to take their shoes and socks off and feel as well as appreciate in their bare feet the contrasting textures of a thick carpet, parquet flooring and finally vinyl in turn. Take out both a silk and a velvet scarf and celebrate the different sensations as you wear first one then the other. Press into a velvet jacket and note how your fingers temporarily leave an imprint/indentation. This can help so much when playing passages in the Romantic repertoire where sensitivity and awareness of how our fingers can stroke the keys counts for so much.

All of these examples and ideas are there to inspire. We want to raise the creative awareness of all our pupils, taking them into a world of sensory pleasure. We want to guide them in a creative direction via association through their piano studies. We want to let music lift them away from the mundane towards flow and peak experience. ■

Kathryn Page has appeared in concert and on television as a soloist and in chamber music. She is a teacher, adjudicator and administrator for Chetham’s International Summer School and Festival for Pianists. Her interest in contemporary music has led to many world premieres including works by Gary Carpenter, Alisdair Nicholson and Django Bates. She lives in Cheshire and has five children.