The title of this blog entry is a little misleading, as in fact I wonder if anyone ever did teach transposing to more or less every student who passed through their door. But be that as it may, I genuinely do wonder if anyone does teach transposing anymore. Once upon a time piano exams would include some kind of exercise that needed to be performed in a variety of keys. In the 70s and 80s (when I was taking piano examinations myself) the English examination board Trinity College required students in the lower grades to perform the first few bars of some of the exam pieces in either the dominant or the subdominant, or a tone higher or lower, or some other pair of transposing options according to the grade of the exam. During this time both the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and Trinity College also offered Keyboard Musicianship examinations, which consisted of aural, sightreading, transposing and
Song of Middle C
Ever since I started my piano teaching career at the age of 14, I’ve attempted to provide appropriate ‘waiting room’ materials for my piano students, things that are engaging enough to promote quiet waiting behaviour for the the 2 or 3 minutes (hopefully no more than that) that might pass between the student’s arrival and the start of their lesson proper. Good and well, but finding books or activities that fit the bill is actually quite a bit more difficult than it seems. One solution, Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-sections series, seemed ideal – lots to look at, an educational element, all the kinds of things that one looks for in this circumstance. But one day the students started giggling as they looked through, and giggled loudly enough that it was distracting to the student whose lesson was just concluding. Turns out Mr Biesty has incredibly included somewhere tucked away on every page of his cross-sections one poor soul caught in
Big Bear Little Bear
This book came into our library as a gift a year ago, and to my way of thinking was far too advanced for our then 18-month old. But it quickly became a favourite, and has remained so ever since. This is a tale about a little (toddler) polar bear who is keen to be as big and run as fast as his mother. Each page is illustrated with the mother and child bears playing together, either wrestling in the snow, diving into the water, or stretching up to the sky. And each charming illustration of the two bears is further enhanced by a velvet feely-touchy sensation wherever they have fur. It’s a simple story of how a child yearns to have mastered all the skills required for adult life, and how the parent is there to guide and teach. And to cuddle! I love a lot about this book, and the aspect I love the most is the depiction of
New Metaphors for 21st Century Harmony
I’ve been dismayed by the degree to which traditional theories of harmony are tangental to the working keyboard practice of a 21st century pianist working in collaborative contexts. A knowledge of figured bass is fantastic if you are working on the harpsichord with period repertoire, but for most pianists the kinds of harmonic thinking that underpin the repertoire they are asked to perform finds no clear expression in traditional music theory. Today I’ve been mulling on whether our metaphors aren’t the problem. Once upon a time it made perfect sense to say chords have a hierarchy, made up of the most important chord relationships (primary chords), and chords which play a complementary role (secondary chords). And once upon a time the idea of modulating really did describe the journey-like characteristics of the harmonic experience throughout a composition. But for the best part of the 20th century composers have shown remarkably little interest in modulating, and their use of chords suggests
The Harmonic Language of Ringtones
I’ve always been a Nokia phone user until now, the arrival of my new generation iPhone, and checking out the new ringtones in such close proximity to writing my Scales as Propaganda blog entry made me listen to my options with slightly different ears. Each phone I’ve upgraded to has had improvements in the quality of sound used for the ringtone, but each new upgraded phone has also had a completely new suite of tiny compositions competing for my approval. How do these micro-musics reflect the pitch patterns of our day? A quick analysis of my new iPhone options: To start with let’s subtract from the 25 standard ringtones the non-pitched or single-pitched options: ‘Bark’, ‘Boing’, ‘Crickets’, ‘Duck’, ‘Motorcycle’, ‘Old Car Horn’, ‘Pinball’, ‘Robot’, and arguably ‘Digital’ which is pitched, but basically just use old-fashioned fax or dialup-style harmonics, ‘Alarm’ which is also a harmonic-derived sound which really only signifies ‘alarm’ in any sonic sense, ‘Timba’ which is a drumming
The Price v The Value of Music Books
There’s that lovely Oscar Wilde quote about cynics being people who know the price of everything and the value of
Parents who sit in on piano lessons
Parents of piano students: you immediately subdivide into Those Who Send Their Children In, and Those Who Sit In On
P Plate Piano: What is it and why?
On November 1, 2009, throughout Australia, a new series of books from the AMEB (Australian Music Examination Board) will be available in all good music shops: P Plate Piano Books 1, 2 & 3. Australian piano teachers will be quite curious about these new books. The AMEB only publishes materials that are for use in conjunction with their examinations, and the title P Plate Piano doesn’t sound like anything like an examination! And it’s not an examination. But it is an assessment. And there’s a difference… But we’ll come back to that later. Firstly, P Plate Piano is a series you can use alongside any of the method books you use now, and the first book corresponds roughly to the skill level a student would have achieved at the end of the first book of any of the well-known method books. The idea of this series is to map out the various keyboard skills and techniques that students need to master
The Dominant is Daggy
For readers from the northern hemisphere and non-English speaking backgrounds, “daggy” is a wonderful word used in Australia and New Zealand to denote that which is embarrassingly out of fashion…. It was back in 2005 when I attended a Rolling Stones concert (for the first time in my life) that I realised what made the Rolling Stones so ‘cool’: the almost complete absence of the dominant chord in their tunes. More than that, in fact, because this absence of the dominant was accompanied by an abundance of the subdominant. This is all classical-speak for saying that the Rolling Stones use chord I and chord IV (C and F, for instance) and almost no chord V (G). Now, I haven’t sat down and catalogued the occurrences of the various kinds of chords in Rolling Stones numbers to be able to support this assertion, but certainly in the play list the Rolling Stones for that September 2005 Madison Square Gardens appearance the
What are we teaching for?
The purpose of having piano lessons is quite straightforward (one would think): one wishes to learn to play the piano, and by taking lessons one assumes that one will learn to do so. The thing is that ‘playing the piano’ can mean so very many different things. I have often made the joke that when an adult student starts with me they tell that they want to learn to play the piano, but what they really mean is that they want to learn to play “Piano Man”. And in this there is a big clue. What each person intends when they say that they want to learn to play the piano is highly dependent on the music they know and the music they have seen being made. So, by ‘playing the piano’ do we mean being able to play a Chopin Nocturne? Do we mean being able to play keyboard in a pop/rock group? Do we mean accompanying other instrumentalists
Elissa Milne 