Jazz is an area of music that seems resolutely impervious to childhood, performed as it is almost exclusively in venues that require proof of age prior to entry. And yet children are not impervious to jazz. The instruments are intriguing, the tunes are engaging, the solos are an exotic adventure in performance possibilities, what’s not for a kid to like? Piano teachers (from all kinds of places on this planet) will tell you that students come to lessons wanting to ‘play jazz’ even though they aren’t quite certain exactly what jazz is. And this is where my latest children’s book discovery comes in: a story book that is an almost faultless introduction to the world of jazz, jazz musicians, listening and jamming, Graham Marsh’s wonderful Max and the Lost Note, published by Frances Lincoln Children’s Books in 2009. Max is a jazz cat who plays piano and makes up his own tunes, but on this particular day he’s unable to
Piano Teaching
Playing Pop, and (all that) Jazz: Chord Chart literacy
A cliché I used to find myself confronting as a young musician in the mid-late 80s and the 90s was the idea that the world of pianists divides into the classically trained and those who can read chord charts. It shook the foundations of many a musician’s world that I had a B.Mus. degree and I could still read a chord chart. To be fluent reading a ‘chart’ while also being able to play the Pathetique seemed to be about as musically transgressive as it was possible to be. Needless to say I found the fuss rather ridiculous and just wanted to get on with making music. In 2000 I started presenting professional development seminars for piano teachers and when I would ask “who can read a chord chart?” maybe 10% of the teachers at the seminar might put up their hands. Eleven years on and that percentage has almost flipped: I estimate at least 75% of piano teachers these
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Can You Use the Same Pieces When You Try For An Exam A Second Time?
In response to google searches asking “can you use the same pieces when you try for an exam a second time?”: So, you (or your offspring) have failed a piano exam and you are wondering if you can just polish up the pieces you’ve already kind of learned and give the exam another go, hopefully with a substantially better result. The answer is usually yes, with the following proviso: Has the syllabus changed? The ABRSM syllabus (for example) changes every two years, and while there is a cross-over period worked into the system you might find that the pieces in question will lapse before the next opportunity for an examination. The AMEB syllabus changes at infrequent (and irregular) intervals, and at the moment there are two different syllabuses running concurrently for the Piano for Leisure exams. So check the syllabus to see if the pieces are still current. So long as your pieces are still on the syllabus you are
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Top 5 Reasons Why It’s Taking So Long
From time to time I find myself asking students “How long have you spent practicing this?”. My students mostly know that if I ask this it’s because I’m astonished at their lack of progress, so they find themselves delicately poised between wanting to appear diligent and not wanting to appear dim-witted, and an accurate answer is generally the compromise result. Sometimes I’ve been incredulous at the ridiculously lengthy times some students have declared. “REALLY?” I ask, examining their eyes for clues of madness, apathy or innumeracy. And of course they protest that they really did spend somewhere around their stated practice time working on the alloted work. That’s when we take a good look at exactly what they’ve been doing for all this time – and why their practicing has come to nothing. Here are the most common reasons for failure to thrive: 1. Starting at the start and playing to the end. Oh. My. Goodness. How do students get
A Teenage Cautionary Tale
In her marvellous memoir Piano Lessons, Anna Goldsworthy recounts a turning point in her relationship with her piano teacher. Anna had won an extraordinary string of awards, academic and musical, in her final year at high school, and she was being interviewed for a story in the paper. Anna describes the whole experience as being quite surreal, finding the questions put to her by the reporter as being weirdly disconnected from anything she might have wanted to say. When the story appeared in the paper then next day Anna was bemused to herself quoted as saying that she owed her success to her kindergarten teacher, and that she planned to move to Sydney to further her career. It’s not that she was misquoted exactly, but that the whole story skewed very far from Anna’s reality. Next thing Anna received a phone call from her piano teacher, very cold, asking her about her plans to relocate to Sydney. Long story short,
Piano Lessons for Life: Don’t Correct Mistakes
One of the most profound life lessons I’ve learned as a piano teacher is to not correct mistakes. Correcting mistakes can take up whole piano lessons, whole terms of piano lessons, whole lifetimes of piano lessons. It’s no fun for the teacher, even less so for the student, and what’s more it simply doesn’t do any good. Correcting mistakes means that all the attention is drawn to what is being done wrong, rather than to what one should be aiming to do right. This is not a good tactic in improving performance (on the piano, on the tennis court, and keep extrapolating as suits your own activities); the performer’s focus is drawn inward to the mistake rather than outward to communicating clearly. But correcting mistakes is an easy habit to fall into. A what-not-to-do list looks like ‘instruction’, and is much simpler to compile than a strategy for success, and that’s because at the piano (as in life) it’s
Piano Lessons for Life
Piano teaching has been a part of my life since birth (my mother resumed her at-home piano teaching when I was three weeks old) and a part of my professional existence since I was 14 and started giving lessons myself. Teaching at such a young age provided many lessons to me beyond the usual teenage job learning curve: I had to create invoices, prepare materials, plan learning sequences, discuss the progress of students with their parents, coordinate timetabling, engage in professional development, and so forth. This learning curve was much facilitated by teaching under the watchful eye of a mentor-mother, but even so, these are considerable responsibilities for someone who won’t be allowed to vote for another 4 years. The most challenging aspect of teaching as a 14 year old was, without doubt, talking with the parents. Fortunately my early students practised well enough, and everyone paid their fees on time, so two of the biggest piano teacher communication challenges
P Plate Piano Masterclass (VMTA January 19)
It’s been a while since I talked P Plate Piano. After a flurry of launch events introducing the P Plate Piano philosophy and publications in the last weeks of 2009 and the first six months of 2010, I’d had a welcome lull. But the new teaching year is almost upon us, and AMEB Victoria saw the Victorian Music Teachers Association Conference as the perfect opportunity to look at P Plate Piano one year on. One year on means that students (and teachers) have actually been using these books, playing the pieces, experimenting with the activities, and exploring the things they can do with this repertoire. One year on also means that the world has changed: touch-screen technologies have gone mainstream, with primary school students receiving iPodTouch and iPad devices for Christmas. [Yes, one would think they’d have had to be particularly good to have an iPad in their Christmas stocking.] Factor in toddlers and preschoolers expertly manipulating any range of
Repertoire Rules (for students): How to Transition
A long-promised follow-up to my Repertoire Rules (for students) post. The new teaching year is only three weeks away for
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When has a student ‘learned’ a piece of music?
I’ve had some interesting discussions over the past few months about how I define ‘learning’ a piece of music. This
Elissa Milne 