Music as a language: Rethinking piano lessons

Singapore is full of children with piano certificates, yet it’s also full of adults who spent years at the instrument and now rarely touch it. According to NIKHIL HOGAN, founder of Hogan Music Academy which offers private piano lessons at home, this disconnect is often mistaken for a loss of interest, when it actually points to something more fundamental.

“Many children are praised for ‘playing well’ but what they are often doing is reproducing a small number of pieces through memorisation,” he says. “It’s like a non-English speaker memorising a passage from Hamlet. The performance may sound impressive, but they haven’t learned the language. They can’t read new text, hold a conversation, or express their own ideas.”

“In music, the same thing happens,” adds Nikhil. “A student may appear to perform convincingly, but they never actually learn the language. After years of lessons, families may realise that a great deal of time and money has not resulted in lasting musical fluency, and the instrument is often abandoned.”

This distinction sits at the heart of the Hogan System, a fluency-based approach that offers an alternative to conventional piano teaching.

Rethinking piano lessons, one note at a time

The Hogan System

Created by Nikhil in 2019, the Hogan System places reading, improvisation and composition back at the centre of musical training. Instead of focusing mainly on memorising pieces for performance, students are taught how music works. That way, they can read, think and create independently.

Classical music is used as the starting point because it clearly shows how music is structured. Its patterns and harmonies make it easier for students to build strong reading and listening skills that can later be applied to other styles.

Today, the Hogan System is taught through Hogan Music Academy in Singapore, with personalised, one-to-one instruction delivered in students’ homes.

Piano lessons focused on sight-reading, not rote memorisation

One of the clearest differences lies in how students learn to read music. In the Hogan System, sight-reading is developed systematically and treated as a core skill, not an occasional test.

In many exam-centred programmes, students rely heavily on memory. They read infrequently and often struggle with unfamiliar material, making new pieces slow and stressful to learn.

Over time, students taking Hogan System piano lessons sight-read through hundreds of classical works of increasing difficulty. This allows reading to become fluent and consistent.

Theory learned through doing

Another difference is how theory is approached. In many programmes, it is taught as a written subject, memorised for exams and quickly forgotten. In the Hogan System, theory is learned through practice.

“Students prelude before pieces using correct harmony, reduce music to its essential chords, and improvise new melodies over existing bass lines,” says Nikhil.

A word from leading music scholars

“A new way to teach children music turns out to have been a very old way… the way that Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart learned music.” – Robert O. Gjerdingen, author of Music in the Galant Style

“He strongly believes in a global recasting of music teaching based on a holistic approach modelled after 18th-century pedagogy.” – Giorgio Sanguinetti, author of The Art of Partimento

WhatsApp 8977 2512 | hoganmusicacademy.com 

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