Piano Teaching

June 30, 2010June 26, 2015

How Hard Is a Piece of Music: June 2010 Installment

Exam boards release new graded material from time to time, unpredictably in the case of the AMEB, every two years like clockwork in the case of the ABRSM, and it’s an exciting moment when piano teachers get to take a look at the new material they can/will use with their students over the next few years. Particularly exciting when a personal favourite makes the cut, or an appealing piece one hasn’t come across before, but the downside is always possible: discovering inclusions that simply are too hard for students to seriously consider performing them in a graded assessment context. ABRSM doesn’t often stray in this regard – in fact, I’d say that teachers with more than 20 years experience would say that the selections have been getting easier (not harder) over the years. But the AMEB, with its 100+ pieces per grade syllabus, seems to lurch all over the place in terms of the grading of pieces, often with the

June 28, 2010June 28, 2010

What Does an Exam Result MEAN?!

What does the result a student gets in an AMEB exam actually mean? It’s a letter (sometimes with a + attached) and it’s easy to think that this result relates to the A/B/C/fail system we know from general education. But is it so? Just this last week my mum, Anita, and I were organising entries of our piano students for AMEB exams. Not all our students sit exams, and not all the students who sit exams do so every year; the decision to take an exam is not one made on automatic pilot. It’s not just about whether the student is ready for the next grade, it’s about how an exam will impact on their other (pianistic, musical, educational, experiential) goals and plans for the year. One of the considerations we take into account is the likelihood of a pleasant to exciting experience and an excellent result in the assessment. This seems somewhat obvious, and one would think that any

April 27, 2010April 27, 2010

Mikrokosmos Heresy

So of all the composers in the twentieth century it seems that Bartok is the one we piano teachers revere the most, and of all the works for students of the piano ever written by Bartok we reserve our highest regard for that collection of the pieces he wrote for the lessons he gave to his son, Peter: the Mikrokosmos. It’s systematic, it’s progressive, it was written for the composer’s own nine year old son, it’s designed to be used from the very beginning (Bartok’s own words), it draws on the folk music of a wide area of eastern Europe (at least we think it does) and it represents a very ‘modern’ (in that first half of the 20th century sense) way of playing the piano. What’s not to like? And yet, whenever I speak with piano teachers about the Mikrokosmos the same guilty secret is whispered all over the land: we respect this collection above all others, and yet

Major Harmonic Revisited

The last scale-of-the-day I blogged about (back on February 20) was the Major-Harmonic scale, and when I wrote my post about this particular pattern I found myself with little good to say about it (much to my own surprise). I complained about the clichéd cadence that this pattern allowed, and surmised that it may well have been the first scale to which I was impelled to give a thumbs down. This negative assessment was no doubt impacted on quite considerably by the fact that that weekend I was supposed to get my first 8 hour sleep since 2006 (pregnancy, newborn, toddler who doesn’t sleep through) and thanks to noisy hotel neighbours it just didn’t happen. But I think maybe more germane to my disdainful summary was that I was only thinking about this pattern in its C incarnation. This is an important point, because I know full well that the physical sensation of any pattern changes from one semitone to

Balanced Programs for Exams

I’ve been running around Australia saying to piano teachers not to bother trying to create balanced programs with their students pre-Grade 8, and of course teachers have been responding with “but students are required to present balanced programs”. Some exam boards, like Trinity College London and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, allow a very narrow choice of repertoire (just 6 pieces per list for ABRSM) in comparison to the AMEB, and students are completely free to choose any of these six pieces to make up a program of three works. The assumption from the examination board is that your program will be balanced because they have grouped pieces in such a way that you will always end up with a range of styles, speeds and moods. But teachers believe that the AMEB syllabus requires them to select a ‘balanced’ program, in addition to selecting pieces from each of the three or four lists, and so students

The rationale behind the Getting to books

Back in January I had a great time doing a short tour (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth) with Samantha Coates (of Blitz Books fame) and Abe Cytrynowski (the inventor of the fabulous ScaleCard system). In Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth we just did a long morning session at one of the larger retailers in each city, but in Sydney Samantha hired the Music Workshop at the Sydney Conservatorium and we did a full day event, along with amazing catering and an events team that worked like clockwork. The day ended with an energetic panel discussion. We took questions from the more than 100 teachers present, and did our best to cover everything in the 45 minutes scheduled for the panel. Despite our best efforts there were still questions left unanswered, and we collectively promised we would address each question at http://www.blitzbooks.com.au but as it turns out many of the questions aren’t really appropriate for Sam’s theory/sight-reading/note-reading/general knowledge oriented website. So here I

March 14, 2010

P Plate Update: meeting with examiners.

P Plate Piano (and its various launch and discussion events) have kept me outrageously busy of late, and I’m ashamed to note that it’s been close to a month since I last posted anything to this blog – a record time without new contributions. All the more shameful as I’ve set myself the task of discussing a scale every week, and that’s looking a bit like a failed New Year’s Resolution at present. But back to the topic of today’s post: an update on P Plate Piano. The website is increasingly functional, and the forum for teachers has been up and running for a week or so. Not many posts as of yet, but 19 members, which (by Australian piano teaching demographic standards) is not a bad start! The last two weekends of February saw me tearing around southern Victoria doing my final launches for teachers in that state. Ballarat, Bendigo, Traralgon (I had to look that one up on

February 15, 2010

P Plate Piano website is live!

One of the most exciting aspects of creating the P Plate Piano series with the Australian Music Examination Board has been their corporate commitment to the project. So many times in business (let alone the print music business) lateral thinking is simply not part of the equation, so it has been a joy to be involved in a project that really is designed for the 21st century. So this is the first examination board-produced repertoire series ever to have its very own website, and that website has just gone ‘live’ at http://www.pplatepiano.com.au Still not live are the online student journal, the teachers forum and some other bells and whistles, but this website does have some nice features already, including some short videos we made at the end of last year. And I’ll be reporting on when new features are added as the year goes on. I’m still very much involved with the project, with launch events still running til the

February 11, 2010

Links to Vodcasts……

My blog has featured my ideas in written format, venturing as far as to include some scored examples – so I am hardly pushing the envelope of the available technology. I’d love to change the status quo, but for now I’ll just include some links to vodcasts that have just gone up on YouTube with me discussing teaching ideas for three pieces in the P Plate Piano series (and hopefully this style of link isn’t too irritating to click through on). From P Plate Piano Book One, a discussion of the fabulous Jane Sebba piece Quick as a flash: http://tinyurl.com/yjboyp8 And from P Plate Piano Book Two an exploration of Daniel Türk’s Presto: http://tinyurl.com/y8jzpzx And from P Plate Piano Book Three an explanation of the stunning little Too tired for anything from the fabulous 2 volume series, Seventy Keyboard Adventures with the Little Monster published by Breitkopf Hartel: http://tinyurl.com/yjy4sx4 There will be a dedicated P Plate Piano website, which is truly

Anita Milne is my mother

It’s time to write a piece about my mum. Mums are self-evidently worth writing about, but in my case I am further motivated to do so knowing that about 10 people have discovered my blog in the past seven days because they were wanting to know more about my mum, Anita. A brief history: Anita was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1943 and started piano lessons at the age of nine. She progressed rapidly, and was teaching the piano herself by the time she was in her late teens, as well as working as an accompanist and organist. She married Richard Milne (born in Prosperpine, QLD, and working in Christchurch at the time) in 1963. I was born when Anita was nearly 24 and living in Wahroonga, Sydney, and I grew up listening to her piano lessons (as a baby) and hearing her students practice (as I became older). When she was 27 our whole family moved to the

Elissa Milne

ideas about music, and about playing, learning and teaching the piano, with unexpected extras