Marilyn Lowe’s “Music moves for piano”: the author, her method, and its influences

Being able to read traditional music notation is, of course, an essential skill that every pianist needs to master. It takes time to achieve such mastery, as pianists need to absorb an enormous amount of information in a very short period of time. However, learning to read music notation and learning to understand the fundamental theoretical concepts which form its structure, are related, yet at the same time completely different activities. We can compare it to reading a piece of prose: one reads literature both to see and understand how the words sound together (as in reading notation), but also to grasp connections and meanings behind them (as in learning to understand how the music functions).

In the context of a piano method book, learning to read and reproduce the notes on a page is not enough. Understanding the meaning of a note in the context of tonality, tempo, meter and other attributes is an important skill to have in the beginning stages of learning to play piano. Focusing on these audiation-based things via Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory’s learning sequence is the key intervention that Marilyn Lowe’s Music Moves for Piano (MMP) contributed to piano method literature. This text, and its underlying theory of audiation from Edwin Gordon is the focus of this paper.