I find teaching addictive. It’s problem-solving, anecdote-sharing, exploration, creation, drama, psychology, youth culture, and every now and again a little bit of inspiration. But, for me, part of the addiction (I think) is the honesty you need, as a teacher, to bring to each lesson: admitting you get things wrong, not persisting with an approach that doesn’t connect with the student, not refusing to adapt your plans to real life, being prepared [and yes, I’m now specifically referring to instrumental and vocal teachers] to find new repertoire when a student (for no discernible reason) simply hates the fabulous music you’ve assigned. And then there’s the very humbling moment when you realise that something has gone under your radar for far too long – a student is missing something you assumed they knew, and you’ve both been going on for weeks, months, terms, or even years without the omission being noticed. That happened to me on Monday when my gorgeous young
Piano Teaching
Redefining ‘enough’ – is it even possible?
There seems to be broad agreement amongst piano teachers with the idea that half an hour is not enough time
Half An Hour Is Not Enough
Since 2000 I’ve been talking to piano teachers around Australia (and from time to time around New Zealand, even less
Key Signature ≠ Key
It’s the 21st Century. We’ve had modulations and chromaticisms, bitonalities and even atonlities, and you’d think that in 2011 we’d have a modicum of sophistication regarding the tonal centres and key relationships we discover in the music we play. But no, an insistence that the key signature tells us the tonal centre of a piece of music has gone from being an example of anachronism to being a deplorable trend in most major Australian cities (!). To be fair, we do call those congregations of accidentals at the beginning of each line of music a key signature; that is, this term implies that the accidentals signify a key rather than simply the notes required to be played a tone or semitone higher than the straight note name pitch. But in a post-atonal, neo-modal world it defies experience to assume that an absence of key signature signifies the C Major/A minor duopoly. Imagine my horror/bemusement/outrage/despair some 10 years ago on seeing a
10 Things You Should Do BEFORE Your Child Begins Piano Lessons
This is a quick checklist of things to do, buy, learn and decide before your child has their very first
read more 10 Things You Should Do BEFORE Your Child Begins Piano Lessons
Teaching Beyond Major-Minor
Disclaimer: if you live in the 19th century or earlier this post won’t have much relevance for you. Working on the P Plate Piano series (back in 2008/9) I was struck by how insidious the two-tonality (major-minor) system is in educational piano publications for beginners. Method book after method book sticks resolutely to major and minor sounds only, with not the slightest acknowledgement that other tonalities are the everyday musical reality in the 21st century. This is true right from the accompaniments teachers are given to play with students in their earliest lessons, through to the five finger positions introduced later on, and then into the repertoire collections groaning with originals from the late 1700s. My suspicion is that the music tonality discourses of the twentieth century have created a false dichotomy in the minds of piano pedagogues: if we aren’t diatonic anymore then we must be atonal, and vice versa (if the music isn’t atonal then by default it
Standing-Up Music
A question that comes up all the time when I present seminars to piano teachers: what about the students who are too small to reach the pedals/the extremes of the keyboard? The answer: Standing-Up Music. This is the same music as the normal kind, but you (the teacher) decides when the physical reach of the child requires the music to be ‘standing-up music’. Move the piano bench away from the piano, and let the child find their own standing-up position that allows them to access the bits of the piano they otherwise could not, and they’re away. Don’t be concerned too much about posture in this circumstance – the goal here is complete engagement with the instrument, and working towards an ideal sitting posture that the student will use in diploma examinations and the like is a completely inappropriate goal/fixation. Work with the body of the student the way that body is today. Teachers with experience know that once students
Safari (AMEB Preliminary, Piano for Leisure)
Quite a few visits to my blog are made by (who I can only assume are) students and teachers who want more information about specific pieces of mine included in examination syllabuses. So I’m setting myself the goal of writing a post about each of these pieces – it might take a while to get there, but one by one I’m determined to work my way through them! Safari comes from Very Easy Little Peppers, and is a piece written entirely on black notes. There’s a lovely tradition of black-note-only pieces written for students in the first years of study and when writing this piece I deliberately set out to add to that oeuvre. Many of the most popular piano methods (in 2011, maybe not when you took piano lessons!) start students playing on the black notes (the antithesis to the March of the Middle C Thumbs approach). I have thoroughly enjoyed incorporating into my teaching a wonderful black-note-only improvisation activity for students
Inadequate Indoctrination (or, a practical instance demonstrating why scales matter)
Scales matter. Piano teachers are renowned for insisting that this is true, examination boards reward mastery of these patterns, and piano students compare speed and distance as if they are training for field and track. I talked before about why I think scales matter, in my Scales as Propaganda post, and this post follows up a lot of the ideas I put forward there. One of the main ideas in the Scales as Propaganda post is that the reason scales are important is not for technical facility per se (finger strength, fluency, tonal control and so forth) but for a broader (and fundamentally imaginative) ideational and geographical facility with the diatonic patterns that underpin music from the Baroque through to the end of the Romantic period (chromaticisms notwithstanding). What this means in practice is that if you know how to play the major scale in each of its 12 permutations you will have a reasonably high fluency in sight reading
read more Inadequate Indoctrination (or, a practical instance demonstrating why scales matter)
Grouch: some teaching notes from the composer
This post is woefully overdue: Grouch has been on the Trinity Guildhall Grade 3 piano syllabus since 2009 (the syllabus expires at the end of this year, 2011), and YouTube has its share of student performances from around the world! Grouch is an unusual composition in the Little Peppers series in that so much of the piece is built of a single unaccompanied line (albeit shared between the hands). This means that clarity is especially important, as is tone. With the melodic material cascading from one hand to the other students will need to give particular attention to matching the sound from one hand to the next, and be warned: this is far more challenging than matching tone from one finger to the next! An additional challenge is that the melody-sharing does not always happen in the same way: the right hand plays a D at the start of bars 1 and 2, but at bar 3 the left hand plays
Elissa Milne 