Piano Technique: Folding in Thumbs for smooth keyboard transit

Most piano students experience the nemesis of hard-falling, accident-prone thumbs during their scale and arpeggio romps. If unchecked, these power-grabbing fingers of each hand have a tendency to interrupt smooth-playing keyboard journeys. As a start, a player should imagine a scale or arpeggio as a seamless outflow without "bumps" or undesirable "accents." Even in a…

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 Study: Process not Mastery

One of my students recommended a book by George Leonard that globalizes the idea of gaining Mastery in any field of endeavor through a love of "plateaus." (These are pauses in forward-moving progress that can either frustrate a learner, or motivate him to forge onward with an all-embracing love of the "journey.") The author begins…

Salvaging the remains of a Ravaged piano lesson

As I stepped out my front door to investigate what sounded like three lawn mower engines powered up at FULL BLAST, eviscerating an Online piano lesson to Arizona, I spotted a tree removal squad slashing a young Oak to smithereens just a few yards from the piano room. The tree, about 10 feet tall, not…

Playing Mozart: Phrasing and Nuance

Expressing Mozart's piano music beautifully is a composite of many ingredients that include vocal modeling; an understanding of form/structure and harmonic elements; sound imaging, and in the cosmos of the imagination, exploring how to produce what we want to hear. In our ongoing phase of "experimentation," we delve through a terrain of unclarity, seeking ways…