Mastering Piano Technique

The past few days saw me busy in front of the TV trying out the exercises of Prof. Seymour Fink (State University of New York) in his DVD on Mastering Piano Technique and the accompanying book.

Let me quote and paraphrase some of Prof Fink's thought-provoking lines:

He believes that " focusing on the body's movements with their inner kinesthetic sensations creates the condition of awareness, flexibility, and refinement that allows the performing pianist to physically mirror and reproduce the finely tuned nuances of musical thought. Technical development implies the abilitiy to accomplish this with greater and greater subtlety and power. In effect, pianists are dancer-athletes of the keyboard: to perform is to move in ways that give birth to the products of music imagination."

So, what is the role of the teacher?

1. "They can first make students aware of their movement patterns, both the helpful and harmful."

2. " Advise students about posture, efficiency of movement, habit formation (progress from conscious to subconscious), learning strategies, various kinds of simple and combined coordinations, keyboard shape and tactics, and instrumental mechanics."

3. How these relate to serious music making

4. Increase their awareness of their movements, learning new coordination, improve analytic and problem-solving skills and forge links between technique and musical conception while cultivating efficaciois practice habits.

Interesting software for the young beginner

You may like to connect your electronic keyboard to your PC via USB and turn piano learning into a interactive session.

The software featured here is from eMedia My Piano

Exploring Technology to engage 21st century music students

I enjoy exploring the use of technology to engage our 21st century music students in the music studio. One of the useful links that I chance upon this morning follows below:

http://teach-yourself-piano.no1reviews.com/

Have fun exploring!

Game Time!

Students love games! This gameboard together with the cards teach several music concepts

The picture shows my effort in reinforcing the concept on "intervals" and "half-steps". The players (could be just teacher and student) start their game pieces on "Home". Two dices are rolled and the player take turns to move their games pieces to the next space by counting the number of half-steps (or whole steps) determined by the dices. Then the play tries to answer the question on the card. A correct answer allows the player to stay on the new space on the board. Otherwise, s/he must to go back to previous position. There corner spaces are tricky. They could be "miss a turn" or "take 2 turns". The first player to reach "Home" again wins the game. Try it!

A boost to theory and aural training

I enrol my students to the following website that reinforces theory concepts taught during the week and provides extra aural training:


http://www.tonictutor.com/

I assign the online lessons to last for about two weeks. These come in the form of games that are both fun and educational. It's free for the first ten students. Have fun!
 

Staircase as Teaching Tool

A staircase is such a useful teaching tool! Mine happen to have 5 steps - perfect for teaching pentascales or intervals.

I get my students hopping up and down while I announce different intervals such as up a 2nd, down a 3rd, etc. For pentascales, they place the correct alphabets on the first five degrees of the scale as labelled.

Matching Key-signatures

Here I'm trying to help my students match the pentascales to their keysignatures.

Musical Alphabets - help students recognise

Young students can recognise the Musical Alphabets by using this chart. Each alphabet has a character and colour associated with it. This chart is laminated and students can write over it with dry-erase markers.

Large-size Keyboard picture to identify Music Alphabets

In order to help students make the connection between notation and musical alphabets on the piano, I use a giantic 5-octave delicious chocolate piano keyboard and equally large alphabets and grand staff.

You may access this chocolate keyboard in my dropbox. Print and laminate as many octaves as you like.