The Story of the Online Academy
The Online Academy began with something many pianists struggle with: not knowing how to practise effectively.
Pianists spend far more time practising than they do in lessons, yet many are never really taught how to go about it. I certainly wasn’t. I had picked up a few useful tools, but not a systematic or strategic approach. I often knew what I needed to practise, but not really how to do it effectively.
Practising was only the starting point. Over the past ten years, those early questions have led us into technique, repertoire, sight-reading, musicianship, interpretation, performance and live learning, and towards a much larger question that continues to shape the Academy today:
How can online learning complement individual lessons and help more pianists experience a richer and more fulfilling relationship with the piano?
Learning how to practise
I first encountered Graham Fitch’s teaching in 2000, when he was head of keyboard faculty at the university where I was studying. He wasn’t my regular teacher, but his additional classes were my first exposure to practising being treated seriously as a skill and a craft in its own right.
My technical education had also been quite finger-centric and was beginning to hold me back. In my second year, my teacher suggested I get some help from Graham.
What struck me was his openness. He drew on ideas and exercises from a wide range of teachers and traditions rather than trying to fit me into one particular system. The focus was always on understanding what you were trying to achieve, noticing what was actually happening and finding an approach that helped.
I still have the rather battered collection of photocopied exercises and handwritten annotations he gave me at the time.
That openness stayed with me. So did the idea that practising could be systematic without being rigid, analytical without becoming mechanical and creative rather than merely repetitive.
Building something bigger
Graham and I crossed paths again after I moved to London in 2011 and started having lessons with him. By then, my working life had taken me into publishing and technology start-ups.
Graham was writing his Practising the Piano blog and we began developing some of his material into the four-part Practising the Piano ebook series.
The ebooks were a success and we began wondering how much further we could take the idea.
A crowdfunding campaign followed and the Practising the Piano Online Academy launched in October 2016. We wanted to do more than place videos, articles and downloads behind a subscription. The opportunity was to make excellent teaching and specialist insight more widely accessible.
In our birthday conversation, Graham and I look back at those early ideas, how we started working together and what we have learned along the way.
As the questions widened, so did the circle of people we worked with. Penelope Roskell brought deep expertise in healthy technique, Ken Johansen in sight-reading and musicianship and William Westney a very different perspective on performance and communication.
That breadth was a natural extension of Graham’s own open-minded approach and it became part of the Academy’s ethos. Different teachers may approach the same challenge in different ways. One of the Academy’s strengths is being able to bring those approaches together without insisting on a single prescribed method.
As a result, we have sought out contributors who are not only accomplished musicians but exceptional teachers and communicators with a particular ability to explain ideas clearly and connect them to the practical realities of learning and playing.
My own role has been rather different. I approach much of this as an amateur pianist and curator, asking questions from the learner’s perspective and working with contributors to shape their expertise into learning experiences that can make a real difference to someone like me.
Complementing lessons
I don’t believe online resources should try to replace a good teacher. Nothing online can reproduce the responsiveness, encouragement and personal relationship of individual teaching.
But lesson time is finite.
Online learning can extend what is available around those lessons. A student might explore practice tools and strategies in greater depth, work through specialist material on technique or sight-reading, or encounter ideas and perspectives that there simply isn’t time to cover in a weekly lesson.
Teachers can use online materials to support what they are already doing with students, while returning pianists and people learning independently can benefit from specialist guidance that might otherwise be difficult to reach.
Over time, the Academy expanded beyond online content alone. When workshops moved online in 2020, followed by Practice Clinics and other interactive sessions, it became somewhere people could participate, ask questions and learn together.
What started largely as a library had become something much more dynamic.
What really matters
The Academy now contains more than 1,000 videos, alongside articles, courses, repertoire resources and workshop recordings.
I’m proud of that, but creating a massive library was never the point. What matters is what all of this makes possible.
It might mean getting more from limited practice time, developing a technique that better serves your musical intentions, giving a teacher an idea that unlocks something for a student or simply discovering something that inspires you and makes you want to play.
Sometimes a single idea can unlock a problem that has frustrated someone for years. At other times, it is the gradual accumulation of different perspectives that changes how we understand and experience the piano.
The Academy cannot provide everything a pianist needs, nor would we claim that it can.
What it can do is broaden access to high-quality piano education, extend what is available beyond regular lessons and create more opportunities for pianists to develop their playing and engage more deeply with music-making.
Ten years on…
Our tenth birthday is a chance to celebrate the people and ideas that have shaped the Academy.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll revisit some of that work, hear from the people behind it and give you a glimpse of where we hope to take it next.
The journey began with practising, but the aspiration has always been larger: to help remove the barriers that stand between pianists and a more rewarding experience of music-making.
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