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 In this video, I am introducing a new piece to a new student in his second private lesson online. He took early childhood music classes two years ago, but this is his first experience with private piano lessons, and this is my first time starting a private student exclusively online. He was very excited to see the chipmunk appear on the scree...

 This student just started lessons in March. We only had a few lessons before moving to online lessons. In this clip, I'm preparing him for the first piece in the method book that involves dotted half notes and triple meter. The rhythm patterns that we do in the video are in the piece, but he hasn't seen the piece yet. I'm reviewing steady bea...

 Neisha started lessons in August 2016 and she is 9 years old. She completed CA Certificate of Merit Level 2 in February and is working primarily from Keith Snell's Piano Repertoire Level 2. She recently finished Streabbog's Pleasant Morning and Mozart's Minuet in F Major. Current repertoire includes Schumann's Wild Rider and LaTour's Sonatina...

Piano playing requires the involvement and simultaneous coordination of many different parts of the brain and the mind.1 The aural center forms an image of the way a piece should sound—a goal for performance. Motor processing directs the arm, hand, and fingers in controlling the piano keys. Visual and reading processes are required for decoding mus...

Children are excited by sound, they want to make sound, and they want to explore possibilities and express themselves at the keyboard. Children are brilliant— until someone tells them they aren't. When faced with too many rules and layers of abstract concepts at the beginning stages of study they are often just overwhelmed by information they don't...

The Music of Teaching: Learning to Trust Students' Natural Development by Barbara Kreader Skalinder By inverting two words—teaching and music—Barbara Kreader Skalinder changes what could have been a fairly mundane title to one that intrigues and gives us pause. But it is her subtitle, Learning to Trust Students' Natural Development, that grabs you ...

You may think that I'm losing my mind—that my elevator no longer stops at all of the floors (and you may be right), but I just saw Mozart in Motown. I wasn't in Detroit, and there wasn't any time travel involved. Indulge me for a moment, and I'll try to explain. It was late afternoon, another beautiful day in northeast Georgia. The sun was starting...

Editor's note: In the November/December 2014 issue, Clavier Companion launched a series of articles addressing the future of piano teaching. This article is part of that series, which will continue in future issues.  "The popularity of this new pastime among children has increased rapidly . . . This new invader of the privacy of the home has b...

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...

Learning a new piece is like building a house. First there is a conception of the end result. The foundation is then laid - the more solid and stable, the better. Then the frame is erected and the most basic infrastructural elements are added. The skeleton then has more "flesh" progressively added until the process is nearly complete. The fini...

That's a phrase we hear and say all the time, but until recently I hadn't put too much thought into what it really means. We say it when we want to imply that a task is natural, instinctive, and easily recalled by our memory - typically our kinesthetic memory. We use it when we want to describe something that ...

from the series: Issues and Ideas: Perspectives in Pedagogy Rebecca Johnson, Editor Over the years, I have received requests to teach students with various disabilities. I have always refused because I felt ignorant and ill-equipped to work with children who have these kinds of challenges. However, about a year ago I accepted into my studio a ...

from the series: Issues and Ideas: Perspectives in Pedagogy Rebecca Johnson, Editor One of my favorite comics in the Columbus Dispatch is called "Zits." As you might surmise, it is about a teenaged boy and his often befuddled parents. Occasionally, when his mother is particularly at a loss she opens a door in his forehead and peers in to see w...