Songbird Piano Lessons

Recently I bought a music history book with an unusual twist. It's called Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys  by David W. Barber, who delights in inserting the most hilarious composer facts and cutting remarks on standard music history into his book. Definitly a good book for hard-to-find and completely irrelevant facts, showing off the quirks of the famous composers. It's also definitely a 'mature-reader' book.  Here's one example that caught my attention immediately and made me think. In the preface, Anthony Burgess remarks, “ I mean, we know what hamburgers are for . . . but we don’t know the purpose of music.”  The purpose of music? How much time and thought have you given recently to the purpose of music? Isn't beautifying the world enough purpose?  Hmm. Let's get back to basics for a moment. When an object has a purpose, there had to be a creative mind behind the purpose. Something that happened by accident won't have a purpose. But music d...

Welcome, everyone, to my new Student Challenge!    Here's the rules of the game: Once a month, I will post a Youtube video of a classical piano piece. If you are my student (or if you are not and just want to do it for fun), I want you to listen to the piece. Not just play it in the background while you're doing your homework (although that's very beneficial to your brain too), but to sit down and pay close attention to what's happening. Here are some suggestions for things you can look for: Tempo -- how fast is this piece going? Dynamic -- how loud are they playing this? Be sure that you set your volume about midway if you have speakers attached to your computer. ('But it sounded really loud to me! I only had the speakers set at 100!') Mood. What do you think is the mood of the piece?  Different sections where the music changes. Maybe it speeds up, is suddenly softer, or changes from a quiet mood to an energetic and cheerful mood. Maybe you're not s...

Hi, everyone,    For nearly three weeks I have come up against the same problem. Every single week.    "What do I put on my blog this week?"    Now that I've started blogging, I realize it's hard work. You have to put something interesting up that people will want to read. And you have to do it regularly, not when inspiration hits. Kind of like piano practice, except when you're practicing, someone already wrote the piece for you!    Finally, this week, I thought, "I should just do a series -- each week, have a topic that I'm going to think something up for and post on." So with that in mind, here's what you can expect in the weeks to come! Piano parent helps (and student helps too!). I've already written a few of these, and I fully intend to keep helping you help your child in their piano lessons. Piano student challenges. The current challenge that I'll start putting up will be called, "Listen!" The Christian Mu...

When it comes to customer satisfaction, my piano parents seem to have been very satisfied this last school year.    75% of my piano parents took my Teacher Survey at the end of May. Among them I rated an average of 9.3 out of 10 in parental satisfaction, and 8.3 out of 10 in student satisfaction. And under the question, "What did you think was the worst part of your children taking piano lessons from me?" only one dad had something to say for that answer: driving in the winter. (He lives in Spruce Grove. For a parent coming from Onoway or Alberta Beach, it's really a very straitforward drive with no dangerous roads.)     But there was a different standard that I was holding myself up to.     As I wrapped up the year, I thought of the two very best teachers I had in my music education. Now, I had a lot of good teachers, and I certainly don't mean to put any of them down! But the two best teachers were distinct. They taught me that makin...