Songbird Piano Lessons

"Last week most of my students' parents decided to go on vacation," I remarked off-handedly to an acquaintance.    She motioned out the window. "With all this, yeah."    "All this," if you're not local, refers to the weather. It's been freezing cold! As in, averaging minus 20 Celcius. And snow, yes. And sunshine on snow, which is beautiful -- as long as you're indoors with a nice mug of hot chocolate and nowhere to go!    Can't blame my piano parents for hopping on the planes. In fact, I'm almost jealous!    So, yes, I had a very quiet week last week. And this week, a resulting mixed-up schedule (due to make-up lessons and sick students). In short, there's not much to write about.    I try to use unexpected days off to develop new plans and ideas. But then there's other things to catch up on, and I always have more ideas than time to develop them. :(    However, I will confess to stocking my brain with all kin

Mosso Movement or motion

   No, I'm not going to go into whether syncopation is right or wrong, how much or how little you should or shouldn't use, or anything like that. Someday I might. Today's not that day.    Instead, this post is for the Christian songwriter who already knows something about the syncopation debate, and who finds themselves in the same place I was not that long ago. Not that long ago, I didn't want to add to the list of syncopated Christian songs. But sometimes, when I was songwriting, it felt like it just had to be syncopated and there was nothing I could do about it.    Did you know: That feeling is 100% false.    Every day, we're surrounded by syncopated music. Everywhere. The rhythm, whether we're aware of it or not, gets into us and influences what kind of music we're writing. But there is a way to counter it, to write the music that you want to write even if it's different than that which surrounds you.     The #1 rule about writing music is to

Lento Slow

...but that hasn't stopped me from pulling out the Valentine's Day activities a week early!      Well, when you have these great seasonal activities from  TPT  to use, might as well use them, right?     Actually, that improv above got a new twist in one of my two-student lessons. One student improvised. The other, given only the starting note of the first student, had to play it back. I love it when I find a new way to use an old favourite! Because that particular improv is one of the first teaching games I printed out, and a complete introduction to improv for me. I had never done it as a student, so how was I supposed to teach it? Now I know several ways, but these with their phrase-rhythms are still my favourite.     The "vase of roses" in the corner is for practicing random note reading. That idea also came from TPT.    Here the student arranges the paper flowers based on which notes are in the measure of music I pointed to.     Last week,

Inquieto Restless, uneasy

Hello, everyone,    Just a quick question for you all:    This weekend's post was supposed to be the  "Listen!" challenge.  But life got busy, posting got pushed to today, and then I started thinking. The whole idea of the "Listen!" challenge was for students and/or others to leave a comment with three things they'd noticed about the music video I'd shared. However, no one has really been doing it. I know part of the problem is that I've spent a good chunk of that time doing trial-and-error with the comments box -- Blogger's default setting is for Google users only to be able to leave comments, and then I was playing with the settings and accidentally messed things up for a while. But if there's also not a lot of interest or time to do it in among my students, maybe there's something else I could be blogging instead of that particular challenge. I also realize that the age of my students has a lot to do with it, since my target age

Glissando In a gliding manner