In this week’s blog post, Penelope discusses the importance of teaching healthy technique and shares a few tips and suggestions for doing so!
Developing a Balanced Technique
Mastering core piano techniques is essential in order to have the freedom to successfully express musical ideas at the keyboard. Like a ballet dancer is required to do physical training to achieve perfection on the stage, pianists too must train their bodies to enjoy playing with ease. In her new video lecture series, Ilga Pitkevica shares approaches and strategies for development of a balanced, holistic technique based on her personal experience of the traditions of the Russian School of piano playing. The following is an excerpt from the introductory video examining the importance of technical development: The introduction is followed by videos focussing on the main areas of technique: Scale patterns or “finger technique” Broken chords and arpeggios Chords Thirds Octaves Each of these videos starts with suggestions for how to develop a specific area of technique from the early levels. There are numerous tips for developing speed, fingering suggestions and many solutions to common problems at various stages of development. The videos will be useful to pianists wanting to improve their technique to enhance their enjoyment in playing. Teachers will also find the videos invaluable for helping their students build a good technical foundation. Two further videos providing tips on how to use the popular exercises in Hanon’s Virtuouso Pianist effectively to develop specific areas of technique will be added to the series shortly. *** Developing a Balanced Technique is available for once-off purchase here or with an Online Academy subscription. Please click here to find out more about subscription options, or click here to view the series index if you are already a subscriber. Be sure to sign-up to our newsletter for further updates and subscribe to our YouTube channel for previews and video excerpts! Further links & resources Foundations of Good Technique – […]
Teaching Bach’s Musette in D without the Score
At the start of my teaching career I taught a number of child beginners who I soon discovered were capable of playing more difficult and interesting pieces than they were able to read from conventional staff notation. In addition to giving them a thorough grounding in theory and note reading, I developed a system of teaching them certain pieces where the score assumed secondary significance. Not only did this keep them motivated, it helped them build coordination and listening skills that accelerated their technical and musical development so that they could make very quick progress without missing out any important steps. If you think about the stages involved in learning other skills, such as language, the reading part comes quite a long way down the road. The child learns to speak by hearing and imitating, the reading following later (the study of grammar later still). How many youngsters keen to explore the exciting journey of learning to play the piano have had their enthusiasm dampened or completely killed off by boring pieces using a few notes in the middle of the keyboard, and an over-insistence on theory? Using this approach exclusively they would need to wait quite a while before they could play pieces that capture their imagination, and they don’t need to. Patterned pieces, such as Kabalevksy’s 24 Little Pieces, op 39, are ideal for the sort of learning I am describing. But I am going to jump ahead a little, and show how we might present Bach’s Musette in D, BWV Anh. 126 from the Anna Magdalene Notebook to an elementary level student who already has a bit of background and experience with piano lessons. Rote Learning? I don’t like the term “rote learning” because it doesn’t really […]
New Piano Pedagogy Course at Morley College
I am delighted to announce that the PTC (Piano Teachers’ Course) UK is going to teach a new Piano Pedagogy course at Morley College in London. This course is specifically for pianists and piano teachers who wish to enhance their professional teaching skills, come together for inspiration and become part of a motivated & supportive musical network. The PTC is delivered by a dynamic team of experts, each specialists in their field, in classes, lectures and workshops exploring the very latest in piano teaching pedagogy. By the end of the course you will be able to expand your knowledge of good practising habits demonstrate skills for deep learning, memorisation and security in performance deal with difficult situations piano teachers face demonstrate skills on how to motivate your students present yourself as a piano teacher is a professional way overcome the particular challenges in teaching different compositional styles of writing Class format and activities This is a 10-week course and each workshop will focus on a different aspect of piano pedagogy. The course will be delivered by Graham Fitch (Course Leader), Lucinda Mackworth-Young, Sally Cathcart, Ilga Pitkevica, Masayuki Tayama and Beate Toyka. Workshop 1: The Practice Tools Workshop 2: How to Introduce Style and Texture in the Early Stages Workshop 3: Practical Psychology 1: New Beginnings Workshop 4: Beginners Need the Best Teachers Workshop 5: Being Professional Workshop 6: Baroque to Modern Style Workshop 7: Working with Intermediate Pupils Workshop 8: Demystifying pedalling Workshop 9: Practical Psychology 2: Dealing with Difficulty Workshop 10: Developing Skills for Deep Learning, Memorisation and Security in Performance In order to ensure that you make the best possible progress on your course, you will have regular feedback from your tutor, in a constructive and supportive environment. Entry requirements You should […]
Free Practising & Technique eBook
We’re delighted to announce our collaboration with Casio Music UK to make various resources on practising available to pianists and piano teachers alongside their Grand Hybrid Teacher Network. Initiatives arising from this partnership include a workshop on the Practice Tools in central London and an eBook titled Practising the Piano – An Introduction to Practice Strategies and Piano Technique. Based on excerpts of popular content from our Practising the Piano multimedia eBook series, the eBook is available for free download and features the following topics: Building firm foundations when learning pieces Using quarantining to tackle trouble spots Organising a practice session for the best results The feedback loop A brief history of piano technique Selected walk throughs from our Online Academy series on Burgmüller’s 25 Easy and Progressive Études The eBook also introduces the reader to Casio’s Grand Hybrid Teacher Network, ensuring all that download the material have an opportunity to join a piano teacher community offering rich teaching resources, FREE workshops and special offers. Click here to download ‘Practising the Piano – An Introduction to Practice Strategies and Piano Technique’ from the Casio Grand Hybrid Teacher Network site. Links & resources Practising the Piano multimedia eBook series – click here for more information Practice Tools Lecture Series – click here to view the series index Burgmüller’s 25 Easy and Progressive Études – click here to view the series index Casio’s Grand Hybrid Teacher Network – click here for more information
The Piano Teachers’ Course Online
We’re delighted to announce the launch of a brand-new initiative on the Online Academy, PTC Online. Developed in partnership with the The Piano Teachers’ Course UK, this series features in-depth videos and downloadable content from expert tutors Lucinda Mackworth-Young, Graham Fitch, Sally Cathcart and Ilga Pitkevica. Aimed at piano teachers, the tutorials are based on content from the acclaimed Piano Teachers’ Course UK and provide handy teaching tips to view, download and use at your convenience. There are six modules available, covering teaching beginners, practising, piano technique, improvisation and playing by ear, and psychology for teaching and learning. If you have wondered how to instill a genuine and long-lasting love of music in your beginner pupils, or you’ve been baffled about how to teach good technique even at advanced level, help is now available all in one place! The videos with accompanying downloads allow you to progress through each module at your own pace, return to the materials as often as you like, and start using the information straight away in your teaching. Even if you are not a piano teacher, a number of the modules will still be invaluable for the purposes of improving your playing and enjoyment of the piano, whether you are a beginner or accomplished pianist. To give a taste of what you can expect from the videos, the introductory sections of Anyone Can Improvise, and the first two videos of Graham Fitch’s Practice Tools and Piano Technique lecture series are freely available and can be viewed using the links below. These modules are all included as part of an Online Academy subscription or can be purchased individually. A complete bundle of all six is also available and can be purchased […]
Thinking Aloud
The first time I listened to a recording of Glenn Gould it was late evening and I was alone in the house. I swore I could hear someone singing along from the kitchen. I even ventured there, fearing an intruder had fallen under the spell of the music and had joined in with it. After a few minutes of unease, I finally realised my stereo system was playing tricks on me – the singing was coming from the recording and the pianist himself was the culprit. I encourage my students to sing all the time, to feel the direction of a line and also where the high points, low points and breathing places are. When it comes to shaping a melodic line, I find the voice never lies (no matter how croaky or unappealing you think you sound). Try conducting, and even moving around the room too – use as much of yourself as possible before relegating the job to your hands. But by doing this will I accidentally sing when I perform? I believe most people have a built-in mechanism for switching this voice off when they are actually performing, because this is rather important. I shall assume this to be the case as I write my post today. Memorisation In addition to singing, I have found thinking aloud as I practise can be extremely beneficial. The idea came to me years ago when I was memorising a particularly complex work – there was a section that my brain couldn’t seem to grasp despite having done a thorough harmonic analysis and found plenty of memory cues. In frustration, I found myself slowing down the tempo and calling out the chord labels and memory cues just before I […]
Cavaliers and Roundheads: Developing Performance Skills
Last night I watched a fascinating documentary on the BBC about how English history was forever changed by the civil war. The characteristics of the two opposing forces (the puritanical, serious-minded, hard-working and religious Roundheads, and the devil-may-care, spontaneous, reckless and flashy Cavaliers) ended up contributing to the make-up of the national psyche, and we have each got a bit of the Roundhead and a bit of the Cavalier in us. You may be wondering what this has to do with the subject of developing piano performance, but actually there is a lot we can draw from it. “Practise like a Roundhead, perform like a Cavalier” would be my best advice. To practise effectively demands time, energy and discipline, a seriousness of purpose and an almost religious attitude to the work. But if we take this attitude on to the stage with us, we are likely to bore the pants off our audience. We need a sense of daring-do, spontaneity, bravado and display in its place. Perhaps we can leave our trusty Roundhead in the green room, and adopt a cavalier attitude when we walk onstage? Youngsters generally have no fear about public performance. This tends to be something we learn later, if we learn it at all (there are those who seem undaunted, but they are few and far between). There was one first-year college student I had who came in with new pieces each week, learned and memorised. All his performances were fluent and confident until one week, during a studio class, he had his first major memory slip which he could not recover from, and only then did I need to give him the tools so he could memorise consciously. As I […]
A Supplement to Slow Practice
A few weeks ago, I gave some suggestions for practising Mozart’s Rondo alla turca and I would like to apply this principle to another piece, which really couldn’t be more contrasting in style and effect. I have just been working with a student who this week made a start on Tchaikovsky’s fabulous Dumka. He was struggling with this spot: The reason for the struggle was because he had not realised there would need to be an additional process after practising hands together slowly note for note, that no amount of slow practice alone is going to enable a reliable, let alone virtuosic performance of this extract. Don’t get me wrong – regular readers will know what a diehard fan of slow practising I am, but there are supplementary ways of working that do the job better at a certain stage in our learning of a piece. Why plod through something in this way for weeks on end when we might need a more energy-efficient and artistically satisfying way of doing it? I asked him to play the left hand melodic line (the tune at the top of the bass stave), or the theme in all its heroic, brassy glory. I wasn’t interested in a spelling-out of the notes, but a vivid, up-to-speed characterisation of the theme. We worked on this until the shapings and timings were just right, and the character could stand proud on the stage (albeit deprived of fellow cast members and scenery) and deliver his lines from memory (the register dictates that this is a “he”). Then we connected the theme to its lower bass notes, and found a way of making this physically comfortable by pivoting on the E flats in the first […]