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In an interview with SIC Notícias, he says that the desire “came naturally”, because when teaching younger people, he realized that their parents often had the objective of learning too. That’s why he created “Discover the Pianist in You”. A project that encourages adults to learn to play the piano through assimilation.
Diana Ribeiro da Silva, pianist and piano teacher for over 15 years, turns dreams into reality. In 2011, the and since then, he has taught hundreds of adults to learn to play the piano from scratch. Some had never played on screen, others rediscovered music after many years.
To SIC Notícias, he says that the desire “arose naturally”, why When teaching younger children, he realized that parents often had the goal of learning too. “With adults I could explain music in a deeper way, I could teach from music history to technical details that sometimes you can’t explain to children.”
“I felt that the interpretations that adults made of the songs ended up being much deeper because the musical background was much superior. (…) And so it ended up being interesting to start taking these students to take, not only the exams that I had taken in high school, but to take them to take much more basic levels in a more gradual way. So that motivated me to create this project.”
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“In each class, we learn a part of the theory by putting it into practice”
The course has the duration of five months and it works intensive and for assimilation. In each class, the student learns the theory and puts it into practice. Diana’s goal is to make the difficult, easy. In this project, they have access not only to more than 140 recorded classes, but also to individual classes and various syllabus documents.
“Learning this musical instrument is normally associated with something very laborious and difficult. I think most of the time this happens because there is no connection between theory and practice (…) and when we manage to merge these learnings, the process becomes very intuitive. Here, I created a method that works by assimilation. In each class, we learn a part of the theory by putting it into practice, that is, the body immediately sees the immediate result of what it is doing.“
And this interconnection, explains Diana, makes the process work without the need to memorize material. “The body naturally knows what it should do without knowing how it got there. (…) AI think that learning the musical alphabet happens much faster in an adult, because they understand the code and are then able to convert the code into the execution of the staff itself.”
“When I learned, there was no YouTube. They gave me a staff and I didn’t know how that staff was supposed to sound. Many times, I read the staff with mistakes, activated a wrong motor reflex and learned something wrong that ended up being much more difficult to correct. I think that with this recorded methodology – in which the student has the staff, sees the staff and is watching the video of how to do it – it makes them do it right from the beginning and, in doing so, they don’t memorize wrong movements, thus learning It’s much faster and much simpler.”
“In Portugal I tried to take students to exams at the National Conservatory and it was not allowed, that is, normally you can only do grade five and grade eight exams, and not annually, and when I discovered that the Royal School of Music had a methodology called association board of Royal School of Music (ABRSM), which allowed students to take exams annually – and they could do it at any age – opened up a range of [de opções] in my mind.“
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What to do to get started?
Anyone who wants to participate in the project just sign up for the trial week – a – and follow from home. There is no need to invest in a piano right away. Diana explains that there are those who, in the first few weeks, follow classes with a keyboard on their cell phone or even a sheet of paper to see where the notes are. And, after completing the course, then, yes, start thinking about buying or renting a keyboard.
“It is essential that the student has the desire to try to get a piano. I usually say that there is always someone who has a keyboard in the garage, even if it is one of those batteries that no one uses (…) but there is also the possibility of renting or, eventually, taking the leap to buy a digital or acoustic piano.”
“The first month and a half could ideally be with a borrowed piano so that the person can also gain this solidity and certainty of which piano they want to buy and then, calmly, they can make a more conscious investment.”
