Songbird Piano Lessons

   As a teen just discovering the thrill of classical music, I remember eagerly picking up Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers  by P. Kavanaugh. Surely its contents would delight me. Surely it would reveal that these great artists were also men of God, a side of music history never taught.    (By the way, this was before I took the course on music history. Hence my naive expectations.)    I was sorely disappointed. In fact, to this day I still hold that book as the most discouraging book I've ever read.    All the composers had spiritual lives. Most were very strange about it! I found among the composers a good dose of fascination with the occult, inconsistent and immoral lifestyles, and other inconsistencies that were very confusing to my idealistic mind. These men were musical giants, yet they were not spiritual heroes.    It only gets worse when one actually starts studying their music and reading secular sources abo...

Rubato A flexible tempo

Congratulations to this year's participants in Parkland Music Festival!    Parkland Music Festival, like other festivals throughout Alberta and Canada, is an opportunity for students to perform, compete, and receive feedback from a highly qualified musician. The Festival started off on the 11th, and ran till the 16th, with the Gala concert on Sunday the 17th.    On Wednesday the 13th, I cleared my calendar and headed to the church where Festival was being held to watch my students compete in their appropriate class.    They did really well! And I had a lot of fun listening to the adjudicator, Dr. Leanne Regher. Honestly, I could have sat there all day and listened to her teach. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible.   :( As it was, arriving 15 minutes early gave me the advantage of listening in to the class ahead of my students.    The next day, those same students came for their weekly lesson. Between one going out and one c...

Con Pedale With pedal

So ... I got no feedback on the "Listen!" series. None whatsoever. So I figured I'd write a little about some of my memories as a child being dragged to music lessons, and later as a teen discovering the joy of making music for the first time. After all, don't we all like to read about other people's lives? ;)    Welcome to my story -- how God led me to be a piano teacher and more.    I was around 8 years old when one of my mom's friends suggested putting me in piano class. This friend was enrolling her two oldest in the MYC program, and she explained to Mom that music is beneficial for the brain, and that learning the piano first gave a solid foundation for learning other instruments. So Mom enrolled me in the same class as my two friends.    I was thrilled! I didn't know the first thing about music -- besides the fact that I liked it, as all children do.  At that point, I had one of those Fisher Price xylophones. What a racket I must have cr...

Ostinato Continuous, without stopping

If I didn't have much to write about last time I did studio updates, the last two weeks have made up for it!    I'll try to keep it short and sweet, but I am really excited to share with you all the things that have been going on.  Improv: Twice the Fun with Two    I enjoy getting my students to do rhythm-based improvisation. It's good for their creativity, and I think it's also a nice break from some of the more rigorous parts of learning piano. (I haven't tried chord-based improv yet. It's another thing on my to-try list.) But I just discovered, through buddy lessons, a way to get more out of improv. When I put two students to improv using the same rhythms at the same time, I was able to point out to them, "See how nice these two notes sound together?" or "See how these notes don't really sound good together?" or "See how these notes sound good, but they don't sound like the end of the song?" Basic harmony simp...

Bravura Boldly

   I feel like I can't overemphasise enough the huge role that parents play in their children's lives. (Take heart, discouraged moms!) I mean, all I have to do is look at my own parents. I could go on and on and on about them -- but to stay on the topic of music, they've been actively supporting my music for 14 years, ever since the day I started piano.    When I started under the MYC program, it was a requirement for the parents to sit in on their children's music lessons. Mom, at that point, had very little musical training. Yet by sitting in on the lessons, she was able to understand what was going on -- enough to keep on top of me, not only making sure I got my 30 minutes of practice in, but also making sure I was doing it right. In my mind, this is the ideal scenario.    But ideal is not always possible.    I'm well aware of that. Parents are busy people. So if you can't sit in on your child's piano lessons, for whatever reason, what...

Nobile Noble, grand