Robert L. Pace is a legend among music educators for developing the pedagogy of group piano teaching and for being educational director of the International Piano Teaching Foundation for nearly 40 years.
His years of teaching music at the Juilliard School and at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, both in New York City, brought him recognition as well, as has his extensive list of piano-class teaching books.
But talk to Pace, who was named in November to the Music Educators Hall of Fame, and you learn there is much more to his story.
His is a life lived in music, Pace says, from piano and trombone lessons as a child, to student conducting for his high school band and orchestra. Hearing his mother play the piano drew him to that instrument. Listening to his grandparents’ recording of Sousa marches on the RCA Victrola made him want to learn to play the trombone.
However, more than anything he remembers the Kansas schools where music was an integral part of the curriculum.
“Having a school system oriented toward music was important when I was a young student, and it is even more important today. Music is a key element of the curriculum. It is not peripheral to the curriculum,” he says.
And the piano, he says, is the central teaching instrument in music because the fundamentals taught there, from chords to reading notation can help students learn to play any other instrument.
Pace offers another example of why music is so important to learning other subjects: the link between music learning and science skills. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy appointed him to a panel tasked with studying how the cognitive mental processing required by musicians could translate to the complex motor skills astronauts needed for scientific work.
His career as an educator has centered on teaching piano students to read patterns and hear harmonies. He theorizes that students learn piano better in a group setting than in a one-on-one setting.
Pace. 83. will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 61st MENC National Biennial Conference, April 9-13 in Milwaukee.
For a complete biography of Pace, visit www.menc.org/news in February. Information about the other two 2008 inductees, Thomas Jefferson Anderson and Mary Helen Richards, will be available there as well.
