The Night Before Christmas
This year my piano students have been absolutely mad keen on learning Christmas carols. Not so much keen to work
Music Education
What Does a Piano Lesson Cost?
Signing up for piano lessons means committing to practice, attending lessons and paying the fees on a regular basis. What should
Six Rules About Repertoire
These six rules are: for piano teachers, about students and their repertoire, covering motivation, sequencing, development and quantity. I’ve discussed
A Piano Teacher’s Manifesto
Originally published some years ago as What Are Piano Lessons For? this is my manifesto on the purpose of piano lessons. This is a manifesto that emerges from my experience, that reflects my values, and that frames everything about my piano teaching, about my writing for piano teachers, and about my composing for piano students. 1. Piano lessons are for learning how to do cool stuff on the piano. Cool stuff starts with things like playing familiar melodies, creating glissandi, using the sustain pedal, and moves on to more sophisticated cool stuff like creating a balance between the melody and accompaniment, voicing two parts within one hand, being able to control tonal variation, learning to recognise and perform any number of patterns (both by sight and by ear), knowing how to make different chords and chord sequences, being able to play a chromatic scale – fast, being able to play scales in contrary motion, or thirds apart, or sixths apart, creating different effects
Thirteen Mistakes Pianists Make
No one likes getting things wrong. It can be embarrassing, messy, expensive, damaging. But sometimes we fixate so much on
What To Do When You Make A Mistake
Mistakes are a big fixation in the life of a piano teacher. Students come to piano lessons and play their pieces
15 Things You Need to Know About Supporting Your Child Learning to Play the Piano
This list was first published in It Takes Two Generations at the end of 2013. If you’re a parent who has
read more 15 Things You Need to Know About Supporting Your Child Learning to Play the Piano
These ARE The Good Old Days
This last weekend I attended the Kennedy Awards, a New South Wales-based peer-awarded recognition of excellence in journalism, in the role of handbag to my journalist husband (who also happened to be nominated for, and go on to win, an award). Many stories were shared over the course of the night – events that had transpired behind the headlines, hair-raising exploits of reporters whose recklessness was matched by their journalistic brilliance. At some point in the evening, my husband noted that, for all the journalists in the room, these were ‘the good old days’ that would be recounted 20 years, 30 years, 50 years hence. From the premier undone by a bottle of wine through to disgraced former policemen being arrested for murder; from pervasively corrupt infrastructure deals involving Sydney’s water supply and regional mining leases through to politicians being handed paper bags of $10,000 cash just prior to elections; these are the good old days these journalists will look back on. This last weekend
Being Musical… Being a Music Teacher…
March was a month of conferences for me, the most recent of which was a conference where I had been
Has Parenthood Changed My Teaching?
Back in second half of 2006, and then again in the early weeks of 2007, when I was in my
Elissa Milne 