By Craig Sale Q: I've enjoyed your Frances Clark Center webinars on preparation activities. I am unsure of what activities I should do with and without the keyboard and would appreciate some specific ideas and guidance. A: The key element in preparation activities is experience! Before encountering a new musical concept in a piece, the st...

Timing is Everything: Establishing a Rhythm for Online Lessons with Elaina Burns & Leah Claiborne  Did you enjoy this webinar? Please complete our brief survey to help us improve our webinar series and continue to bring you the highest quality resources in piano teaching. 

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 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...

This video shows the introduction of a new piece in a group class online. The students work through the preparation steps as a group, practice the piece on their own, and play for the teacher to receive feedback.Music Featured: "On Tiptoe" from Music Tree 1, AlfredTopics: Elementary StudentsOnline Group PianoReading and RhythmStudent Independence

I give my piano students many tools to improve their practice, such as logging their time and playing their music backwards, but one of the most useful tools is counting while playing. This technique is one of our most-loved pedagogical practices, and its benefits cannot be understated. By outlining these advantages for ourselves and our stude...

As piano teachers, we strive to instill a love of making music in our students. The inevitable process of making mistakes along that journey, however, creates challenges and intriguing mysteries to be solved. "Why did the mistake happen?" "What in the score did the student not understand?" As I searched for answers, I discovered that a clearer...

One of the most frequent problems I have encountered with students in my teaching, examining, and adjudicating is their approach to cross-rhythms. Yet, a lack of confidence—even fear—can easily be overcome by informed analysis and practical application. I therefore encourage students to accompany me through the following stages. My examples come ex...

It's the last lesson before the recital. Garrett, age five, is playing "Graduation March," the final piece in Time to Begin from The Music Tree. The B section is made up entirely of half notes and whole notes. The good news? Garrett's rhythm is perfect; a huge improvement over last week, when all of the long notes were being cut short and the accom...

My last two columns introduced the placement of Xs in boxes to help beginning students understand rhythms better. Now, I'll wrap up this series with ideas about how to use rhythm boxes to practice more complex rhythmic concepts. Start by using a word processor to make and print blank tables like those below. Then, try these activities with your adv...

Rhythm boxes, Part II by Bradley Sowash  The last column introduced placing Xs in "rhythm boxes" to represent well-known tunes. Here are more ideas to enhance rhythmic understanding by teaching with this versatile tool.   Rhythm box activities Start by making and printing blank tables like those below. Then, try these activities with...

When asked to teach a music course to undergraduate dance majors, I soon realized that decoding written rhythms does not come easily to non-musicians. For these students, writing Xs in "rhythm boxes" was easier to understand than learning to read music notation. Later, I transferred the idea to my books and lessons, providing music students an...

Music is at once simple and complex. We hear it, and we are moved by the feelings the music evokes. Yet, it is also a complex matter. There are eight ingredients of music: medium (the sound), meter-tempo-rhythm (the time), melody (the tune), harmony (the chords), texture (the thickness or number of voices), form (the organization), dynamics (t...

Rhythm is everything The pianist's bible begins: "In the beginning, there was rhythm."This quote, often attributed to Hans van Bülow, has been heard in countless piano lessons. In this TEDIndia "talk," not a word is uttered (there are some rhythmic vocalizations). Instead, the percussionist Sivamani takes the audience through a sixteen-minute rhyth...

Many piano teachers believe that it is imperative to teach students to count aloud when learning a new piece, and they certainly have support in many of the popular teaching methods. However, I have to ask: if counting aloud while playing is so important for developing good rhythm skills, how do trumpet and clarinet players learn to perform in rhyt...

Louise Goss was a superb clinician and speaker. She had great clarity in her thinking about musical learning and an extraordinary vocabulary, but the quality that stood out above all else was her immense practicality. Most of these quotes are excerpts from transcripts of her public lectures delivered to groups of piano teachers.  I often wish ...

Add improvised pizzazz to the easy rhythms found in beginner tunes by asking your students to identify "dot spots." These are places where students can substitute dotted rhythms in place of quarter notes. Instead of this: Students play this: Listen and play It's not necessary for students to know how to read dotted rhythms prior to exploring their ...

"As teachers, what we want is a student who owns the rhythm. He owns it, he doesn't have to borrow it from the teacher. He can use it whenever needed, in any piece in the whole wide world. He's got it for life! " – Frances Clark After my year as an intern at the New School for Music Study, I was teaching at a school with thin walls. Without meaning...

In this issue, we address the teaching of a basic, but often challenging, skill—the dotted-quarter eighth note rhythm. We wanted to take a different approach and survey several teachers to assemble a wider collection of ideas for you, the reader, to consider.  Nine teachers of pre-college students submitted their thoughts on teaching this rhyt...