How Do You Teach Students to Plan Fingering?
Keyboard Companion Spring 1995; Vol. 6, No. 1
The subject of fingering may be one of the most neglected aspects of reading. I suspect we might all be surprised if we really knew how much fingering affects the student’s ability to read. And, we might all be surprised at how many things about...
When is it appropriate to leave rhythms UNperfected for a given student? Have I mis-assigned a piece in that case?
Keyboard Companion Autumn 2008; Vol. 19, No. 3
from the series: The Heart of the Matter: Rhythm Sometimes quantity is quality. As a young teenaged pianist, I had great fun learning transcriptions of Dave Brubeck improvisations. His was the first jazz piano music that I sunk my teeth into. I loved the sound of...
How do you help your students achieve rhythmic continuity in slow pieces without sounding mechanical?
Keyboard Companion Autumn 2004; Vol. 15, No. 3
from the series: The Heart of the Matter: Rhythm The music must proceed forward at all times, and in an inevitable and seemingly uniform way. My most memorable musical moment at the 2003 National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy was during one of the short student recitals...
What are some interesting rhythm challenges found in intermediate-level Scarlatti Sonatas?
Keyboard Companion Autumn 2007; Vol. 18, No. 3
The music of Scarlatti appears to be frequently overlooked by many teachers. It is more common to hear intermediate-level pianists playing much more of the music of other Baroque composers such as J.S. Bach. Part of the challenge for us as teachers is simply that there...
The Art of Practicing: I Really Should Be Practicing Well
September 2017; Vol. 9, No. 5
I do apologize to Gary Graffman for filching his title as blatantly as I have, but let’s face it—although the quality of one’s practice may be just one factor in determining how fast and far one progresses at the piano, it’s a critical one. In the studio...
What Aspects of Teaching Pedaling Do You Think are Most Important?
March 2013; Vol. 5, No. 2
Most aspects of piano playing and teaching show characteristics of both science and art. Some appear to be more on the “method” side of that spectrum, others on the “intuition” side. Pedaling seems to be significantly more than fifty percent art, due to the enormous...
Extraordinary Teaching Spaces
January 2013; Vol. 5, No. 1
The cedar exterior of the Epperson Studio in Anchorage, Alaska. In my travels around the country as a clinician over the past decades, I have enjoyed meeting many new people—students of various ages, independent and community music school teachers, university professors, and music store owners....
How Do You Teach Memorization to Elementary and Intermediate-Level Students?
July 2013; Vol. 5, No. 4
Last year I attended an excellent lecture that John Ford did on the teaching of memorization. I enjoyed his extensive summary of mainstream ideas on the subject, as well as several novel ones. I asked him to share his thoughts with the readers of this...
The great compensator
July 2015; Vol. 7, No. 4
A full range of expressive gestures evocative of other instruments is always at our disposal. We pianists are constantly grappling with the fact that our instrument cannot truly sustain tones. A few fractions of a second past its production—marked by a meteoric rise in loudness—every...
Drifting toward interpretation
May 2014; Vol. 6, No. 3
by Bruce Berr Among musicians, the word “interpretation” appears to be undergoing what linguists call semantic drift—a past meaning changing to something slightly different in the present and immediate future. For example, the word “silly” originally meant happy, then morphed several times into blessed, harmless,...
What is Your Plan for Teaching A New Piece? How Does It Vary for Different Levels of Students?
March 2009; Vol. 1, No. 2
Learning a new piece is like building a house. First there is a conception of the end result. The foundation is then laid – the more solid and stable, the better. Then the frame is erected and the most basic infrastructural elements are added. The skeleton then has...
How Do You Teach Polyrhythms?
January 2009; Vol. 1, No. 1
In my college years I encountered a recurring four-against-five pattern in a 20th-century piece, and my initial attempts to do it were not successful. My teacher recommended that I approximate the pattern (“fake it”) while I learned the rest of the music. He also suggested that I...
“Is a Physically Gifted Student Likely to be Rhythmically Reliable and Musically Aware?”
Anyone who has taught piano or any other instrument for more than a short time invariably must deal with one of the major challenges facing a music teacher. That is, becoming a good player simultaneously involves diverse kinds of learning: perceptual, physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, etc. To make...
How do you teach the rhythm challenges in Debussy’s Clair de lune?
March 2010; Vol. 2, No. 2
In this department over the past thirteen years, many authors and myself have alluded to two different meanings of the term “rhythm.” Prosaic rhythm (also called counting rhythm) is the mere timing of events decoded from the printed page using counting or other methods. Poetic rhythm is much broader, encompassing virtually everything...
Can young students learn rhythmic flexibility?
November 2011; Vol. 3, No. 6
It has been said by many that in music, rhythm is what happens between the beats. That is true, yet those words don’t sufficiently communicate what we actually experience in rhythm. Much of what we teach is from notation, an inherently artificial and scant symbolic...