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Terror of Black. To turn students into something more than what Pace calls "finger wigglers," group teachers plunge their students quickly into harmony, ear training, sight reading and improvisation instead of emphasizing recital pieces and finger drills. "It's like teaching a child to swim before he gets afraid of the water," says Pace. "Most children get middle C-itis by playing only a sea of white keys for so long. They're terrified of black keys. They think that any composer who uses sharps and flats is just being mean."
For fees ranging from $100 to $200 a year, group teachers generally offer two lessons a week, one with two or three students, the other with ten or twelve. Most groups use two or more pianos, interlace individual student workouts on the keys with duets or quartets to sharpen sight reading and harmony skills. "Group teaching is not 60 minutes sliced into ten-minute sections, one for each of six students," says Betty Belkin. "It takes planning, and you've got to know what you're going to do long before the group comes to the studio." Emulating Pace, most group teachers use flash cards to drill students in key signatures, and divide their kids into "teams" to keep competitive spirit high. "You have to know the work cold," says Pace. "We don't dawdle. A good class bounces."
At his Mount Kisco, N.Y., studio, Pace and an assistant handle 40 students—including Pace's own four children, aged six to twelve—who get no chance to dawdle. At one recital, a seven-year-old girl rippled off a lullaby in the key of F, played it again, at Pace's request, in E and in Aflat. When one of his students was asked to play The Star-Spangled Banner at elementary school, she flustered her teacher by asking "In what key?"