5 Brilliant Ways to Begin Teaching Improvisation to Beginners
Making things up seems like the polar opposite to learning how to do something. And most very first piano lessons
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Very Easy Little Peppers
Animal Farm (or, published piano pieces by Elissa Milne with titles that refer to living creatures)
The cataloguing continues, tonight with a view to fauna. I was born in Australia and then raised in New Zealand, and
The Collected 12-bar Blues for Piano (published) of Elissa Milne
The first “blues” I ever wrote was a song I concocted for my primary school friends to sing one lunchtime
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Series 17 – Part 2 (some answers)
There’s really no bad news, not even a single bit: the AMEB’s Series 17 is a collection that does exceptionally well in catering for the vast range of interests, urgencies and fixations of the Australian piano teaching world. David Lockett and the review team (Glenn Riddle, Jody Heald and Helen Smith) have taken a meticulous approach to delivering a series of repertoire collections that will serve the assessment process – as well as piano pedagogy – well. Let’s start with that grade-deflation question. Have we seen a shift in the goal posts of any of the grades? Is Preliminary continuing the march to Grade One standard repertoire?! Short answer – no. All the pieces are very well graded. There are some easier and some harder pieces in each grade collection, but nothing to elicit outrage or confusion. More detail from me soon in a separate post. Appropriate length? Delightfully so! Very few works that take too many pages, and none that are garrulous
Series 17 – Part 1 (the questions)
The Australian Music Examination Board issues a new series of piano exam books every 5 or so years, and this
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
Examination Rules: How Many Hours Practice Does it Take?!
One of my ‘rules’ for a while now has been that students need to do at least 100 hours practice
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Elissa Milne 