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…

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…

Piano Technique: Practicing Trills

It's amazing how one can fill a whole page rhapsodizing about trills. But for me they are more OPERATIC, as if a splendid soprano were singing a Mozart aria, producing the most artfully beautiful alternation of two notes. These would be undulating, and grouped in such a way, that their lilt would be apparent. In…

Adult piano instruction: the singing model in playing/practicing Chopin

There's no doubt in my mind that Chopin's music is allied to the opera and the New York Times featured an article on this very subject that resonates in my teaching and playing the composer's works. From Tommasini, Arts editor: "It’s a wonder that Chopin, born in 1810, never tried to write an opera, because…

Adult Piano Instruction: Rockin’ and Rollin’ in Rhythmic Rehab

Tonight's piano lesson on Facetime amounted to an impromptu jam session: A syllabic interchange coupled with clapping inspired a collaborating adult student to experience the "feel" of a beat, rising and falling with organic authenticity. The nearly "improvised" exchange between teacher and pupil sprang from a Five-finger Ab Major warm-up that progressed from Quarters, to…

Pretty piano rooms

Dr-Lubov Laura De Valois "My studio has 4 pianos: Two acoustic grand pianos: “Yamaha C” and “Hamburg Steinway and Son”, (built around 1880), and restored in New York by Steinway. I also have an electric Kawai, "Concert Performer" CP 175, that I use as the recording studio; and a Yamaha Clavinova CVP-109 for my students…

Facing the Music on FACETIME

  https://youtu.be/hFHhwQPP2Jw Burgmuller's "SORROW" received a BOOST on FACETIME where it was the PITS on SKYPE. The latter sometimes mimics jet landings with a whoosh sound, while an echo chamber effect causes unwanted tremolos. In this "FACE"-beamed environment, a formerly LIVE student who turned VIRTUAL, experienced a musical FACE-lift. With a new media spotlight, where…

NY Times: “Is Music the Key to Success?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& A good portion of this opinion piece focuses on how music study fueled high-profile careers, (by and large) outside the arts arena. The writer, Joanne Lipman, is author of Strings Attached..., non-fiction that reads like a novel and honors a task master H.S. music teacher who endured a life of hardship. No doubt the…