Booth: 206
Promo Code: QRSNCKP
20% off and free shipping on any product purchased within 14 days of the show.
Giveaway: Fun Exploding Piano Gag Gift: One drawing per day, an hour before the end of the day. Register at the booth through the kiosk or drop a card.
Booth Schedule:
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Booth: 510
Promo Code: TBD
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Giveaway: TBD.
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Booth: 508
Promo Code: TBD
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Giveaway: TBD.
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Booth: Digital Booth 701
Promo Code: SHOW20
SAVE 20% OFF all Ultimate Music Theory Workbooks, Exams, Answer Books, Whiteboards, Games & More! Shop.UltimateMusicTheory.com A Proven Step-by-Step System to Learn Music Theory Faster. Fun to Learn & Easy to Teach! BONUS Music Teaching Success Formula Masterclass at MyUMT.com.
Giveaway:
Click “Contact Us” and Enter to Win – Three Months FREE inside the Ultimate Music Teachers Membership including UMT Downloadable Workbooks, Music Theory Games for all levels, Lesson Plans, Music Theory Teaching Activities, PLUS the Momentum Course & Resources and Weekly Group Coaching Calls. BONUS 3 Free Teacher Gifts when you register. Get ready to Learn, Plan, Teach, and Grow your music business! Check out the UMT Teachers Membership at TeachUMT.com for details.
Booth: 407
Promo Code: musicalfreedom
Showcase:
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Booth: 305
Promo Code: Stop by the booth 305 to pick it up!
Exclusive Offer! 🎹 Order the ATHENA Narrow Key Digital Piano by July 31, 2025 and receive 20% OFF! Visit www.narrowkeys.com use promo code to purchase. Don’t miss this limited-time deal on a piano built for small hand success!
Giveaway:
Win the Athena Narrow Key 5.5 Digital Keyboard! One lucky piano teacher will win the Athena Narrow Key 5.5, the first 88-key digital piano with narrow keys. It features graded hammer action, triple sensor touch, along with other cutting-edge features. Perfect for all levels of piano teaching and performance.
Eligibility: Piano teachers in the USA or Canada. Enter the giveaway during the conference for your chance to win this groundbreaking digital keyboard!
Booth Schedule:
At 10:30am everyday meet co-founder Linda Gould as she
highlights the narrow-key design, explaining how it can benefit your teaching studio.
Showcase Schedule:
Booth: 106
Promo Code: TBD
Get your first month of Vibrant Music Teaching membership for half price! Click here before August 1st to register.
Giveaway: TBD
Booth Schedule:
Meet and Treat! Come by the Vibrant Music booth at lunchtime on the first day for some free treats and meet like-minded, creative teachers.
Showcase Schedule:
Booth: 107
Promo Code: NCKP15
Get 15% off anything in the Let’s Play Music ‘Shop’ until July 28, 2025. Orders will be shipped. Visit our booth for the prize drawing on July 26th at 1:00pm.
Giveaway: Enter to win a large magnet board and magnet set. Perfect for tactile hands on learning. Create chords, inversions, read notes, make rhythms and take dictation on this dry erase, double-sided, easy to use magnet board. Giving it away at our booth on July 26th at 1:00pm.
Booth Schedule:
July 23 at 11:00am showing you our toddler program for a caregiver and child ages 0-4.
July 24 at 11:00am learn how we take advantage of the music learning window for children ages 4-6.
July 25 at 11:00am see how we teach group lessons to ages 8-12. We have the secret to successful group piano lessons.
Showcase Schedule:
Booth: 410
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Booths: 301 & 302
Promo Code: TBD
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Giveaway: Register to win prizes at our booth!
Booth Schedule: Join us at the Keys to Imagination booth to play music theory games with your fellow teachers and snag incredible prizes! Don’t miss out on exploring games like Rhythm Riot, Spelling Bee, Harmonic Hike, Note Wordy, and more—perfect for helping your students master theory skills in the most exciting and effective way possible! Don’t miss this!
Thursday, July 24
12:45 – Note Wordy
1:00 – Rhythm Riot – Eighth time
5:00 – Composer Chaos
Friday, July 25
12:15 – Spelling Bee
12:30 – Rhythm Riot 3
12:45 – Harmonic Hike Demo
Saturday, July 26
10:00 – Spelling Bee
10:15 – Legato Lake and Symbol Shark
With gratitude we welcome one of our NCKP 2021: The Piano Conference Research E-Poster Award Winners, Robin S. Heinsen, to our Discovery Page. Heinsen is Assistant Professor of Music Education at Miami University, and provides helpful insights based on her experience as an NCKP poster presenter. We invite you to submit e-posters, teaching demonstrations, performance videos, and Collegiate Connections projects to our Call for Participation for The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025 by Monday, March 31, 2025, at 11:59 PM PDT.
Our pathway to The Piano Conference: NCKP is probably different from most other presenters because we are not pianists—we are music education professors who became curious about how school music teachers use the piano in their classrooms and wondered whether there were relationships between how teachers learned to play the piano and how they use it in their teaching. We had previously shared our findings in music education circles, and subsequently sought out this conference as an opportunity to share with the piano pedagogy community. We all have a stake in what our students learn and retain from university class piano.
First, ask a great question! What are you curious about, what do you wonder about, and how can you design a project that can help answer that question?
Once you’ve done that, practice condensing your research question, potential findings, and implications into only a few sentences to ensure your own thinking is clear about what you want to propose and why it matters.
Then, once you start writing, make sure a reader can extract that information from your proposal so the significance of your work stays prominent instead of getting buried. This may be best accomplished by asking someone else to read your proposal and then tell you about the project they think you are describing.
From what we remember, it was a pretty intuitive interface. It was easy to navigate, customize, and upload materials into the platform, and it integrated well with the conference page. We had never used it before this event, but we found it to be straightforward with little to no learning curve.
We approached our e-poster as if it was a slide deck (such as in PowerPoint or Keynote) and each square was a “slide” that contributed one piece of information. We titled the squares with short questions so that the reader knew what to look for as they clicked on each one. We frequently utilized charts and graphs to make it easier to visualize the data and answer the title questions, and avoided extensive prose or paragraphs of text when possible. Our introduction and conclusion were larger boxes that bookended the smaller content slides.
As non-pianists, we were hesitant to enter this space and initiate these conversations, but we felt extremely welcomed and enjoyed our time at the conference. We had many great conversations with participants who were interested to learn more about our findings and eager to share ideas and collaborate. It was an important reminder that all of our work can benefit from interdisciplinary dialogue.
We are pleased to offer multiple opportunities for participation in The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025! The deadline to submit is Monday, March 31, 2025, at 11:59 PM Pacific. We seek programming in a variety of formats and are currently accepting submissions of Collegiate Connections projects, e-posters, performances, and teaching demonstrations.
The Committees of The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025 work to research, compile, or otherwise address issues of ongoing significance to our participants and the piano teaching public in meaningful and substantive ways. As we eagerly anticipate NCKP 2025, we asked our committee chairs to give us a sneak peek into their respective tracks. Keep reading to see what you can expect from the Collaborative Performance and Research Conference Tracks! Please note that the schedule of The Piano Conference: NCKP is subject to change. The most up-to-date listing can be found here.
By Alexandra Nguyen, Chair
Sunday, June 8, 2pm-3pm
Friday, July 25, 10am-12pm
The mission of the collaborative performance committee is to promote and support collaborative music making at every level. By its very nature, the field that is called collaborative piano encompasses a wide range of activities: performing with others, teaching, coaching, working as rehearsal pianists… the list is diverse, providing an endless list of potential topics for conference sessions.
At The Piano Conference: NCKP 2023, the collaborative performance committee hosted a town hall where questions and topics for discussion were collected from the attendees. The session was energizing, interactive, and informative, providing us with first-hand insight into the concerns and issues faced by pianists working in a broad cross-section of settings. This collected information served as the impetus for the design of this year’s online and in-person collaborative performance sessions.
The Collaborative Performance Track will support the dual facets of being a musician: the artistic soul seeking inspiration and the working professional dealing with pragmatic and financial mechanics, as well as to build and nurture a sense of community. Despite the fact that collaborative pianists are constantly working with others, it is not unusual for us to feel solitary – that those we interact with may not have a clear understanding of our work nor be a knowledgeable resource. To this end, a town hall will be held to offer a space for open discourse and exchange.
This track will also address logistic and financial management for collaborative pianists. What constitutes a reasonable workload for a staff pianist? How should salaries, honoraria, and fees be set? How can one establish healthy working expectations and boundaries? In reaction to this, the collaborative performance committee will host Behind the Curtain: Labor Relations for the Collaborative Pianist, with the goal of providing concrete guidelines for the working collaborative pianist, and perhaps for the industry at large.
A highlight of this year’s collaborative sessions is the online forum Iconic Conversations: Insights from Leaders in Collaborative Piano will bring together artist-pedagogues Jean Barr, Anne Epperson, Margo Garrett, Warren Jones, and Martin Katz for a stimulating discussion, offering a rare opportunity to gain insights into the artistry, challenges, and evolving role of collaborative pianists from the perspective of these incredible leaders in the field. It is an event not to be missed!
We hope that all who attend the collaborative performance track sessions will leave with a renewed sense of inspiration, intention, and purpose.
By Alejandro Cremaschi, Chair
Sunday, June 8, 2-3:30pm
Thursday, July 24, 10:30am-12:30pm
As teachers, students and musicians we often encounter situations that make us wonder about questions such as the root causes of problems we experience, the most effective solutions to those problems, or the effects of our decisions, actions and strategies on our performance and our teaching. At times, we find answers by reading the research others have conducted to answer similar questions. Other times, these questions prompt us to become researchers ourselves, to look closely and systematically at these phenomena. The Research Track presentations and poster sessions will provide attendees with both: opportunities to learn about exciting research projects in a diverse range of areas and the tools to get started and to further develop research skills.
The online June event will feature fascinating studies on how we read music, use peer teaching in group classes, and use movement to play the piano. Sumi Kwon and Su-Young Bae will discuss their findings about eye movements during the perusal time prior to sight-reading, taking into account the musical structure of the piece being read, and sight-reading ability of the participants. Jinnan Liu will share the results of a quantitative study in group piano teaching. She will explore the ideal approaches for using reciprocal peer teaching in the learning of repertoire, sight-reading, harmonization, and transposition. Paloma Monteiro will then present on her study that used Motion Capture and MIDI technology to analyze the impact of diversifying repetition in practice on synchronization between the pianist’s hands.
The in-person track will open with with presenters Sarah Jenkins, Curtis Pavey, Helena Hyesoo Kim and Carla Salas-Ruiz discussing the findings of project that investigated the evolving definitions of success among American music professionals without full-time academic positions, and essential skill sets for new graduates and recommended curricular modifications. Then, researcher Todd Van Kekerix will discuss how music is making an impact in addressing the elevated levels of stress among healthcare workers, nurses, nursing students, and long-term care workers. His session will share research on the impact of group keyboard music-making sessions on the changes in mood states, blood pressure, and burnout.
The second hour of the in-person track starts with a presentation on pianistic movement and how it communicates artistry. Researcher Carla Cash will focus on recent research from an ongoing collaboration with her university’s biomechanical engineering department using a Motion Capture System to examine the mechanics of piano technique. She will present data tracking the body motions of a professional pianist with over 40 years of playing experience and a college undergraduate pianist with 15 years of experience, demonstrating differences between the players’ use of their upper torsos in performance. Following this, Stephanie Archer will discuss the findings of a research project that polled piano teachers about the order of introduction of technical skills at the beginning level, and their beliefs about the relationship between beginner-level technique instruction and injury prevention.
We hope that you will join us for these fascinating and informative sessions. They will likely inspire and empower you to seek answers, apply research in your own teaching, and to start your own research inquiries.
Join us for The Piano Conference: NCKP 2025 as we gather together in person and online. The Piano Conference seeks to explore the challenges and opportunities facing our international community at this inflection point for the profession. Full conference registration includes four days of engagement, including the summit, concerts, keynotes, PEDx presentations, and more, as well as access to the online event and online event archives. Student, Single-Day, and Online-Only registration options are also available. Early-bird registration is available until May 1, 2025, at 11:59 PM Pacific. Subscribers receive an additional 10% off; log into PianoInspires.com and go to ‘My Discounts’ to find your discount code. Learn more and register for The Piano Conference by clicking here.
