Sometimes it’s the little things that grab our attention and influence the way we teach. That’s how the session on Motivation, Mindset, and Grit by Chris Fisher was this spring. It completely revitalized my final month of lessons, and may have even contributed to one of my pre-teen students making the decision to continue lessons this fall after wavering for months in indecision (I decided to push her a bit harder on some music she had expressed interest in learning and she realized that if she didn’t continue lessons this fall she would never finish learning it!).
This month, I was reading the American Music Teacher magazine published by MTNA and especially appreciated an engaging article by Steven Graff titled, “Incorporating Improvisation into Classical Piano Lessons.” He shared a number of helpful ideas, but this is the paragraph that really grabbed my attention:
“Cadences that appear at the end of scales in many method books, such as I-IV-I-V7-I, are important for classical improvisation skills and the ability to tonicize a key. I ask students to prolong each harmony as long as they can. They hold the pedal down and gently arpeggiate each chord up and down the piano, using hand-over-hand groupings, or thumb under style, or preferably a creative combination of both. Scale and chord practice should never be mechanical but rather a small reflective journey that takes a note from point A to point B, something as beautiful and meaningful as possible.”
I love the reminder that even something as simple as playing scales and cadences can be infused with creativity and artistry. My hope is that as I start back into another year of teaching that I will do a better job than ever of encouraging and guiding my students toward creativity and artistry in their playing. Of course we’ll be working hard toward reaching specific goals and developing specific skills (that’s what I love about our practice incentive themes!), and as we do I want to make sure that we always take time to stop and “smell the roses,” or, in musical terms, to appreciate the beauty of every harmony and every cadence.
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