Author: The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Frances Wilson is a pianist, writer, music and arts reviewer, music PR, and blogger on classical music and pianism under the pen name 'The Cross-Eyed Pianist'
Performing, Piano teaching, Practising, Students, Studying music

Telling stories, painting pictures

The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Music is all about story-telling and painting pictures. Pop music helpfully has titles and song lyrics to tell us what it is about, but Classical music can be more difficult to interpret unless the performer or performers give us "signposts" to help us understand the composer's intentions. The simplest "signposts" in the score are tempo,… Continue reading Telling stories, painting pictures

Performing, Piano teaching, Practising, Students

Describing and imagining music

The Cross-Eyed Pianist

My students will remember we did an exercise earlier in the year called The Musical Adjectives Project, where we each wrote down 5 words to describe a piece of music we were studying. You can see the results of this fun exercise here, together with the Word Cloud I created from the all the adjectives… Continue reading Describing and imagining music

Piano teaching, Practising, Students

Guest post: More than Just Piano Trivia

The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Pianist, teacher and writer Catherine Shefski studied at Smith College, Massachusetts, and at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, where she was taught by EPTA founder, Carola Grindea.  Catherine has performed as a soloist and chamber musician, has taught “virtual” piano lessons, and writes an informative blog, All Piano, with the mission… Continue reading Guest post: More than Just Piano Trivia

Students, Studying music

Guest post: Being a music student…..

The Cross-Eyed Pianist

Stephen Gott is a piano student in his first year at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance. Since moving to London from Halifax, West Yorkshire, I have been studying at Trinity Laban Conservatoire (music college) in Greenwich.  I can safely say that studying music whether at primary school, GCSE, BTEC/A-level or Conservatoire is the… Continue reading Guest post: Being a music student…..