Regular readers know that I have a music student. I’ve been teaching him to play the triple row diatonic button accordion, and he’s coming along well. The button accordion is a folk instrument and in many cultures the normal way of teaching and learning it is by ear. However, I’m teaching my student to read music because it seems to me it is a simple and easy to learn skill that makes it easy to share music. I can play a tune for my student and show him how it should sound, then send him off with the written music which he can use as a reference. We share that reference and we can agree that “this is how it is written”.  We can also agree on the language. For instance, “play an alternating bass with an F chord over these two bars and then switch to a C chord as you begin to pull air back through the bellows.” The notes all have names and when we use them, we know what we’re talking about. Of course, that’s only part of the learning. The other part is about making the music come alive, adding feeling through the bellows work, adding embellishments, triplets, grace notes, slurs, chords and so on.

I was contacted by a fellow yesterday who wants to learn the instrument, but he wants to learn it the “normal” way, by ear. He plays the single row diatonic button accordion and he has a triple row box, but he doesn’t know how to go about playing across the three rows to take full advantage of the possibilities of the instrument. There are two problems. One is that I haven’t really considered how to go about teaching someone without using the language of reading music. The other problem is that his triple row accordion is in ADG and mine are in GCF. The accordions are in different keys but the relationships between the notes are relatively the same. In other words, you have to learn the same fingerings, but the music will sound different as it is played in different keys on the different boxes.

I’m not one to back away from a challenge, so I’ve agreed to spend an hour or two with this fellow to explore the possibility of my teaching him. This gives me a week to figure out how to go about it. I think he will have to play one of my accordions when he comes over so we can play together. As well, I’m going to have to figure out a language that doesn’t depend on reading music. Maybe it will be something like position 1, position 2 or something like that. I have no idea if I will be successful in teaching him that way or not. He’s worked out tunes on the single row instrument. Maybe he just needs to garner an understanding of approach to the triple row instrument and then he can simply let his ears guide him.  In any case, it can’t hurt to spend some time trying to find out. Certainly I would like to have one more student. I’ve been enjoying the activity of teaching and it’s very gratifying when my student makes progress.