Online Music Lessons

In order to more fully understand the music being played, the student must learn about the underlying music theory. Along with reading musical notation, students learn rhythmic techniques like controlling tempo and recognizing time signatures, as well as the theory of harmony, including chords and key signatures. In addition to basic theory, a good teacher will stress musicality, or how to make the music sound good. This includes tone, phrasing, and proper use of dynamics.

Most music lessons include some instruction in the history of the type of music that the student is learning. When a student is taking western classical music lessons, music teachers often spend some time explaining the different eras of western classical music, such as the Baroque era, the Classical era, the Romantic era, and the Modern era, because each era is associated with different styles of music and different performance practice techniques. Instrumental music from the Baroque era is often played in the 2000s as teaching pieces for piano students, string instrument players, and wind instrument players. If students just try to play these Baroque pieces by reading the notes from the score, they might not get the right type of interpretation. However, once a student learns that most Baroque instrumental music was associated with dances, such as the gavotte and the sarabande, and keyboard music from the Baroque era was played on the harpsichord or the pipe organ, a modern-day student is better able to understand how the piece should be played. If, for example, a cello player is assigned a gavotte that was originally written for harpsichord, this gives the student insight in how to play the piece. Since it is a dance, it should have a regular, clear pulse, rather than a Romantic era-style shifting tempo rubato. As well, since it was originally written for the harpsichord, a light-sounding keyboard instrument in which the strings are plucked with quills, this suggests that the notes should be played relatively lightly, and with spaces between each note, rather than in a full-bodied, sustained legato.

Although not universally accepted, many teachers drill students with the repetitive playing of certain patterns, such as scales, arpeggios, and rhythms. Scales are often taught because they are the building blocks of melody in most Western art music. In addition, there are flexibility studies, which make it physically easier to play the instrument. There are sets of exercises for piano designed to stretch the connection between fourth and fifth fingers, making them more independent. Brass players practice lip slurs, which are unarticulated changes in embouchure between partials. Woodwind players (Saxophone, Clarinet, and Flute) have a multitude of exercises to help with tonguing techniques, finger dexterity, and tone development. Entire books of etudes have been written to this purpose.

From the title we know this is a music "lesson" (line 1). The first line immediately alerts the reader to a shift in the action when the narrator says "Sometimes, in the middle ..." (line 1) "we exchanged places" (line 2). The reader can guess that the student and the teacher are the "we." And perhaps this is a private lesson. Oliver further evokes a shift in the reader's experience by starting the poem as if it were the middle of a larger piece. At this point, the teacher takes her place at the keyboard, and the reader can safely conclude that the poem's narrator is the student when the teacher prepares herself before playing as "She would gaze a moment at her hands / spread over the keys" (line 2).