This text is part of the special Acfas awards
Learning to play the piano, or any other instrument, is not just a matter of talent. Between the success of one student and the early abandonment of another, the pedagogy changes everything. At the University of Ottawa’s Piano Pedagogy Research Laboratory, this discipline is studied using science and empirical data. Gilles Comeau, director of the laboratory, is the winner of the Jacques-Rousseau 2021 prize from Acfas, which rewards multidisciplinarity.
Himself a graduate in music and piano, philosophy and psychoeducation as well as a doctorate in fundamentals of musical education from the University of Montreal, he has worked for more than 20 years to establish the pedagogy of the piano as a real field of scientific research.
In 2004, he opened this innovative research laboratory, also called the PianoLab. To do this, he first carefully observed the work of other multidisciplinary research laboratories, as there was no such scientific laboratory in music. Since the founding of the laboratory, researchers from a multitude of disciplines have contributed to the research.
“To put music under the magnifying glass of science, I worked with researchers in computer engineering, mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, rehabilitation, audiology, kinesiology, psychology, neuroscience,” explains Gilles Comeau. Instrumental teaching is now seen as a disciplinary and multidisciplinary field of research, which has repercussions on the training of new researchers in piano pedagogy, in music pedagogy in general, and on the training of new music teachers, who can now rely on evidence. “
Beyond preconceived ideas
The fact that music learning has always been an extracurricular activity, not a compulsory one, has made music teachers rely heavily on the question of talent. If a student was having difficulty, they would tell themselves that they had no talent or that they were not practicing enough.
“We did not question ourselves much to find solutions, as we did in education, illustrates Gilles Comeau. Back in the days of our grandparents, those who had difficulty reading simply left school. For our parents’ generation, we managed to educate them until the end of primary school. Today, people with dyslexia are graduating from college. “
According to the professor, if we did not have the choice to scientifically study how learning to read is done and to develop approaches to help those who have difficulties, in music, we have always been happy. to work with the best and we have developed a model where those who do not succeed easily end up being eliminated or giving up.
“In the laboratory, we were interested in musical dyslexia, to find out that there are children who have difficulty reading sheet music in the early years, and it is likely that this has nothing to do with it. talent, practice and liking or disliking the instrument, he says. They just can’t read the notes. Our laboratory therefore wanted to understand all of the learning and its difficulties. “
A more comprehensive approach
Some of the questions the researchers looked at included motivation and its factors, motor coordination, perception, pain and injury, and performance anxiety, a problem that increasingly affects students in the classroom. music.
“Traditionally, the teaching of the piano was based almost entirely on the experience of teachers, the great masters, but there were very few scientific texts on the subject,” notes Gilles Comeau. In the laboratory, we were able to demonstrate that learning to play the piano can be studied on a scientific basis, using measuring tools that had not been seen before in the field. We were the first, for example, to use infrared thermography to observe pain, inflammation or a lack of circulation in musicians. We have paved the way in several fields to train researchers in order to intervene in a scientific way in an essentially artistic discipline. “
Gilles Comeau has no doubt that the work of PianoLab will help piano teachers to adopt a more global approach.
“Having taught the piano myself for years, I’ve noticed that with some students things easily fall into place, but it’s a minority,” he says. These are the others who have interested me, in my career, to find how to give access to the musical phenomenon and the pleasure of making music to a greater number of people. “