“Stay in Place” Online lessons, tutorials, and performances

We continue to lift our spirits in cyber, keeping our music exchanges alive and well under the veil of SIP. Ironically, in keeping with the times, many students have asked to study more somber works. Schumann's "First Sorrow, from the composer's Album for the Young, is a popular pick. Next is Chopin's mournful B minor…

Online Piano Lessons: Patience and Planning Amidst the Unexpected

Bundled into the universe of teaching piano Online, is the necessity to prepare for the unexpected. This means knowing what resources to dip into when there's a substantial video or audio freeze. Face Time and Skype, for example, might occasionally not deliver, and when it becomes apparent that lesson continuity is at a virtual standstill,…

Online lessons are coming into their own in the age of Corona virus

For years I felt like a duck out of water, barely floating outside the mainstream as an Online piano teacher. My isolation was intensified by boomer generation colleagues who insisted on face-to-face mentoring as the gold pedagogical standard. I could empathize before 2010, when I'd journeyed for years through traditional teaching circles without a second…

Technology in the Piano Studio

Since being launched into the cosmos of Online Teaching by an Australian inquiring about lessons, (2010), I have gone well beyond rudimentary Face Time and Skype transmissions. What has evolved from this student's bestowal of a gratis Logitech webcam, is a wider application of technology within the piano learning environment. Pupils (whether Online or in…

Piano Technique: Building scales to speed and fluency

I find myself reconnecting with my late teacher, Lillian Freundlich, when I borrow her approach to scale development. In this undertaking, she would always check my wrists and elbows through note groupings that were ignited by a basic roll-in energy. A scale could not start with a bang, but instead, it had a smooth, slope-like…

Computer crashes and recovery!

There's nothing like a Big Mac blitz of pulsating pixels in checkered, multi-colored patterns, building to an eye-catching display of blinking lights that forewarns of a computer shutdown. A lyrical Schumann tableau, Face time streamed from Australia, becomes muted by a choir of cackling parakeets whose primal sense of impending doom is on full screen…

Practicing Challenging Pieces: If we’re over a barrel, we can still learn something valuable

I'm the first to admit that not every learning journey through a particular composition will produce results we might have hoped for. After weeks or even months of methodical practicing in baby steps, we can find ourselves literally over a barrel, wading through ornaments, for example, that are crystal clear in slow tempo, but suffer…

Sound imagination and tactile, tonal expression at the piano for diverse compositional eras

Often a posted comment about a You Tube video inspires a blog topic that is of interest to pianists and teachers. One such public addition to my Channel quickly streamed into a comparison between two well-known compositions in the piano repertoire. The commenter was asking about the grade "level" of Debussy's The Girl with the…

Two-timing scale practice

I appreciate two-timing piano students who practice their scales with acutely sensitive ears. They are made keenly aware of what it takes to repeat a faulty step-wise sequence that's been thrown out of rhythmic alignment along a 4-octave route. (Auditory memory is a vital ingredient through repetitions that require retrieval of a consistent underlying pulse.)…

The Importance of Analytical Practicing

Needless repetitions that are unfocused, without attaching an analysis of what requires improvement will impede a piano student in the advancement of a composition. And while a tricky, isolated passage or complete section of a piece may have been carefully learned by layers in slow tempo, the very same area of the piece can develop…