Thanks to Music Matters Blog reader Victoria Shaw for alerting me to this collection of free on-line courses from Coursera on the topics of music, film, and audio engineering! In addition to music and education, I am also fascinated by the world of film and drama and writing. There are so many parallels in the […]
Philosophical Musings
Monday Mailbag – What’s the Point of Teaching Pieces by Rote?
You suggest teaching by rote, and your website lists “24 Piano Pieces Perfect for Rote Teaching”. I certainly appreciate that you took the time to develop this list. But I don’t get it. Why teach by rote? How does learning a piece by rote develop skills necessary to aid in learning the next piece of […]
Monday Mailbag – What Curriculum Do You Use?
Do you have any set “curriculum” you follow as far as what you expect students to learn/cover over the course of a year? I know there is the Carnegie Hall Achievement Program that provides “expectations” for each year of study. Is your incentives program for setting goals for students each year? Yikes! These are the […]
What do you want to be able to do by next May that you can’t do right now?
One of the quotes from The Creative Life conference that gave me lots of food for thought was one by Michael Card, “You can’t say everything all the time.” The more I pondered this, the more I realized how much I try to do this as a teacher. I want so much to equip my […]
Pattern Play Teaching Intensive Day 2
It has been a remarkable two days full of music-making, learning, growing, questioning, and thinking. Lots of thinking. I have greatly enjoyed sitting under the instruction of Akiko and Forrest. Even though it was stretching in a lot of ways, I know it is good for me to feel like a beginner and be forced […]
I Finally Get It!
It took two and a half years and an 8-hour teaching intensive, but at the end of the Pattern Play workshop today I had an epiphany. The philosophy undergirding this series is not that improvisation is a skill to be worked on as part of the piano lesson, but rather that improvisation (or creativity at […]
