I remember years ago trying to teach
some Stockhausen, and trying to
explain why he felt compelled to
range widely all over the keyboard.
Students and everybody else are saying,
"Well, anybody can do that, it's just
random notes." So I said, "Well, what
is this?" And then I played [plays notes on the piano].
Eventually, one student put up their hand, and
I said, "Yes?", and she said, "That sort of
sounds like Happy Birthday." I said, "You're
right, it was simply spread out over the
keyboard.
 So it was an attempt to show
how composers can use register
sometimes taken to an extreme. Schoenberg, his Opus 11,
is a piece to introduce the idea of atonality.
[plays music]
And of course, the first initial reaction
from the students was, "Well, that just
sounds like chaotic music," and so I took
it and I made a few little adjustments,
very slight adjustments, as follows.
[plays music]
And all I was doing was just taking a chord, changing by one little note, changing this
to this, so suddenly you have that anchoring
G-major triad. The point was to show that
Schoenberg had taken familiar triads and just
bent them a little bit. It, again, was a
kind of way to help students get over
the hurdle of this unfamiliar distant,
sort of intimidating music, and allow
them to get into the mindset of
Schoenberg, and try to go to the next step
which was to ask the question and try to
answer it, you know, "Why would a composer
in 1909 do this? Why would a composer
decide that we don't need triads anymore, we're going to explore
something a little different?"
The pianist André Watts was once teaching
one of his students a Chopin piece,
and she was having difficulty, and asking,
"How can I learn this?", and Watts said, "It's
very simple. You use any and all means
necessary."
And so it is with teaching this
music.
You try certain things to get through to
the students, and if one thing doesn't
work, you try something else.
There usually is a way to make the music
come alive and open their minds and ears
a little bit so that they have a kind of
curiosity about it. Once they have that
curiosity then that leads to great
teaching moments.
