Music Education — piano teaching

If you work with teens, you have probably had at least some of them bring their favorite tune off the radio into their lesson. Supplementing with music they enjoy can be a great way to keep teens motivated and involved with their lessons and working from lead sheets gives you the opportunity to teach them a whole new set of skills. But in order to play from a lead sheet, one needs to know how to play chords. And memorizing chords one chord at a time can be a long and frustrating process. There is a better way! I learned...

The challenges of scale technique As I am sure that most of you would agree, necessity, Plato's famous Mother of Invention, is at the very least a powerful driving force for change. Three years ago, I sat quietly contemplating the awkward hand position of an otherwise talented young student, as he whizzed up and down an A flat major scale in thirds. His tone was, as usual, harsh, with an abundance of undesirable accents – the obvious result of a massive accumulation of tension in his body. His knees were squeezed together, his shoulders hunched and his narrow fingers rigidly...