Fascinating for anyone interested in the piano, music or art..." wrote John Rockwell, former Arts Critic of the New York Times. Brian Levine, Executive Director of the Glenn Gould Foundation, called Piano as Art "a wonderful re-imagining of the piano as sculpture, architecture, and the stuff of mythic creatures." What are they talking about? It's a...

Q: What does the Teaching Artist movement have to do with me as an independent piano teacher? A: In the last column (November/December 2013), I responded to a question about Teaching Artists. We discussed the underlying value of "engagement before information" and briefly examined two types of activities pioneered by Teaching Artists: Interact...

Probably the most important thing we can teach our students is how to practice. And, one of the most challenging things we teach is how to practice well. When we teach practice strategies that instill attention to detail and develop problem-solving skills, we help students understand how to organize life's challenges into daily, weekly, and longer-...

At my house, it takes a ladder to reach Richard Chronister's book, A Piano Teacher's Legacy. It is on the top shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookcase next to my grand piano. This seems like the perfect resting place for it, because I always did put Richard on a high pedestal. I still do.  This fall I began my forty-fourth year of teaching. My s...

Do you have an iPad or some other type of tablet? How about a smartphone? Do you use them in your lessons? A large number of responses would probably be in the affirmative, but how are university pedagogy programs training the next generation of piano teachers to use these and other technologies? Are collegiate piano pedagogues grappling with new w...

In a perfect world, our only preoccupation as teachers would be with training our piano students. Unfortunately, we live in an environment where there is little available time for music-related activities, and we often find ourselves battling against soccer and baseball games each time we plan our weekend festivals and piano recitals. Yet, despite ...

Catherine Rollin's early-intermediate solo Winter Waltz (Alfred) is a heartwarming way to welcome the coldest season of the year Its mature sound will inspire students to stay inside and practice. The A section looks easy to learn; nonetheless, it is loaded with wonderful technical opportunities for the student. Set in A minor, the left-hand melody...

Country songs often use quite simple chords, so let's start with a very straightforward chord progression ​using only chords I, IV, and V (including inversions to create better voice leading). Play with your right hand only: To get a country swing feel, you can split the right-hand chords up, with the bottom note of the chord alternating with the o...

Johann Sebastian Bach's Eighteen Short Preludes are exquisite miniatures and exceptional teaching pieces that provide a necessary stage of development from the shorter works in the Anna Magdalena Notebook to the Two- and Three-Part Inventions and other larger works of Bach. Far from easy, they are often glossed over in favor of studying the In...

So, your students can play the melody and chords in a lead sheet...now what? Played at a medium tempo, this classic tune lasts about thirty seconds: How could this be stretched it into a complete performance? For inspiration, we can turn to legendary trumpet man and singer, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong. When asked about his ability to spin seemingly e...

During my first ten years of piano study, starting at age five, the term diatonic scale was never taught to me. Nor had I realized that there existed an entity called a natural minor scale, inasmuch as I had been directed to practice only major, melodic minor, and harmonic minor scales as part of my daily practice regimen at the keyboard. Additiona...

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art. Claude Debussy With the rise of program music in the nineteenth century, composers of piano music turned to the visual arts for subject matter and inspiration. This reflected the Romantic concept of combining arts, culminating in the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] of Richard Wagner.1 Gen...