Many junior students fear sight-reading, and for most it's the part of the practical music exam they dread: being asked to play a short piece of music, unseen. Sight-reading is an important skill for any musician, professional or amateur, and being able to sight-read - and sight-play - well allows one to learn new music… Continue reading Be a super sight-reader
Category: Piano teaching
Telling stories, painting pictures
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
Describing and imagining music
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
Guest post: More than Just Piano Trivia
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
A Piano Teacher Writes... 