The Situation and the Importance of Three-Hand Pieces in Piano Education

Piano education is important for teaching polyphony, improving sight-reading, consolidating the knowledge of harmony and gaining much more musical abilities. These attitudes in piano education can be gained to the students either playing alone or together. Four-hand piano pieces are practiced at many music departments in Turkey to gain the attitudes of duet playing. However, it's considered to be some deficients about teaching three-hand piano pieces, which are the preliminary of four-hand ones. The aim of this study is to determine the difficulties about playing four-hand pieces overcoming by three-hand pieces. This research is an empirical study, which was done with the control group. 10 first-year music department students were chosen for this research. The experiment and control groups were built up with 5 students in each. Following the pre-test implemented on the experiment and control groups, only the students in experiment group were practiced the three-hand pieces for four weeks. At the end of this period, the measurements applied in the pre-test were re-implemented for the post test. The extracted data in the pre-post tests were statistically analyzed by Mann Whitney U and Wilcoxon tests. As a result of the analysis; it was found out that there were no significant differences between the experiment and control groups in the level of pre-tests. Moreover, it was pointed out that in the post-test there was a significant difference in favor of the experiment group. As a result of this case, it was concluded that the experiment group who practiced the three-hand piano pieces could play the four-hand pieces easily and acquire positive development. According to these results, a variety of suggestions were included in this study.