A surprise visit by a lost kitten…

http://youtu.be/aWrvCCECJ4I After "Feather" (by his name tag) had a feast of delights wandering from room to room, he was fetched by his owner who lived about a mile away. Apparently, this little one has been lost and found several times since his birth. I'm told his mother might be a neighbor of mine, who lives…

Pianists, back pain, and my personal rehab bundled into a BALL

Eight weeks ago, as I started my scale warm-up routine, I felt sudden, excruciating, spasmodic pain in my lower back, and I couldn't move in any direction without feeling a knife deeply embedded in my spine. It was an "e-m-e-r-g-e-n-c-y!"that I registered by text message. My Nokia cell was thankfully beside me on the piano…

A relevant sequence of pieces for an Intermediate piano student

One of my adult pupils is deeply embedded in J.C. Bach's Prelude in A minor which is a soulful outpouring of broken chords with patterns and symmetries built into its harmonic fabric. Yet through a sequence of secondary dominants that heightens the composition's beauty, a melodic line is interwoven, and it needs to be fleshed…

The Love you and leave you life of a piano teacher

Tonight marked the end of my decades-long era teaching children. It happened as a kiss-off in the front seat of a snazzy van. The parent of two over-scheduled kids dropped them off at swimming following piano, leaving me as the sole passenger about to be pink slipped. What else to expect? Soccer, tennis, swimming and…

Piano Technique: Big Leaps, Crossed Hands, and shifty eyeballs (with slow motion video replay)

Arioso7's Blog (Shirley Kirsten)

up tempo:

Be prepared to exercise your eyeballs minus head movements when tackling large leaps, especially those hand-over-hand acrobatics that are intrinsic to many of Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas.

In the first video I’ve isolated a few of these jumps from Sonata K. 113 in A Major, demonstrating what I’ve found to be the best approach.

While I’ve crashed and burned on more than one occasion, a new consciousness emerged through trial and error.

Recommendations

1) No bobbing head back and forth when playing crossed hands.

Use your shifty eyeballs, if necessary, to target the destination notes going back and forth over your right hand.

There are two places that stand out in this sonata. The first involves two octave, crossed-hand jumps. The Left travels back and forth over the right multiple times.

In the second instance, there are jumps of four octaves, and these can be suicide trips, unless mediated…

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Elena Cobb urges her classically trained colleagues to teach jazz, too

Elena's pearly words of wisdom "Some say that classically trained teachers cannot teach jazz. I disagree and I'm working tirelessly to promote the idea among my colleagues." Cobb was commissioned to write an article for the Music Teacher magazine UK that has an appetizing text plus a menu of tantalizing musical samples. (The whole spread…