Practical Piano Pedagogy

Accompanying CD-ROM contains forms from the text.

This second volume of Professional Piano Teaching is designed to serve as a basic text for a second-semester or upper-division piano pedagogy course. It provides an overview of learning principles and a thorough approach to essential aspects of teaching intermediate to advanced students. Special features include discussions on how to teach, not just what to teach; numerous musical examples; chapter summaries; and suggested projects for new and experienced teachers. Topics: * teaching students beyond the elementary levels * an overview of learning processes and learning theories * teaching transfer students * preparing students for college piano major auditions * teaching rhythm, reading, technique, and musicality * researching, evaluating, selecting, and presenting intermediate and advanced repertoire * developing stylistic interpretation of repertoire from each musical period * developing expressive and artistic interpretation and performance * motivating students and providing instruction in effective practice * teaching memorization and performance skills

How can piano teachers successfully foster student participation and growth from the outset? How can teachers prepare and sustain their influential work with beginner student musicians? This book presents answers to these questions by making important connections with current music education research, masters of the performance world, music philosophers, and the author’s 30-year career as a piano pedagogy instructor in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. It investigates the multilayered role piano teachers play right from the very beginning – the formative first four to five years during which teachers empower students to explore and expand their own emerging musical foundations. This book offers a humane, emancipatory, and generous approach to teaching by grappling with some of the most fundamental issues behind and consequences of studio music teaching. More experiential than abstract and cerebral, it demonstrates how teaching beginner piano students involves an attentiveness to musical concerns like our connection to music, learning to play by ear and by reading, caring for music, the importance of tone and technique, and helping students develop fluency through their accumulated repertoire. Teaching beginner students also draws on personal aspects like independence and authenticity, the moral and ethical dignity associated with democratic relationships, and meaningful conversations with parents. Further, another layer of teaching beginners acknowledges both sides of the coin in terms of growth and rest, teaching what is and what might be, as well as supporting and challenging student development. In this view, how teachers fuel authentic student musicians from the beginning is intimately connected to the knowledge, beliefs, and values that permeate their thoughts and actions in everyday life. Fundamentals of Piano Pedagogy stands out as a much-needed instructional resource with immense personal, practical, social, philosophical, educational, and cultural relevance for today’s studio music teachers. Its humanistic and holistic approach invites teachers to consider not only who they are and what music means to them, but also what they have yet to imagine about themselves, about music, their students, and life.

This is the first book that teaches piano practice methods systematically, based on mylifetime of research, and containing the teachings of Combe, material from over 50 pianobooks, hundreds of articles, and decades of internet research and discussions with teachersand pianists. Genius skills are identified and shown to be teachable; learning piano can raiseor lower your IQ. Past widely taught methods based on false assumptions are exposed;substituting them with efficient practice methods allows students to learn piano and obtainthe necessary education to navigate in today's world and even have a second career. See http://www.pianopractice.org/

How can the studio teacher teach a lesson so as to instill refined artistic sensibilities, ones often thought to elude language? How can the applied lesson be a form of aesthetic education? How can teaching performance be an artistic endeavor in its own right? These are some of the questions Teaching Performance attempts to answer, drawing on the author's several decades of experience as a studio teacher and music scholar. The architects of absolute music (Hanslick, Schopenhauer, and others) held that it is precisely because instrumental music lacks language and thus any overt connection to the non-musical world that it is able to expose essential elements of that world. More particularly, for these philosophers, it is the density of musical structure—the intricate interplay among purely musical elements—that allows music to capture the essences behind appearances. By analogy, the author contends that the more structurally intricate and aesthetically nuanced a pedagogical system is, the greater its ability to illuminate music and facilitate musical skills. The author terms this phenomenon relational autonomy. Eight chapters unfold a piano-pedagogical system pivoting on the principle of relational autonomy. In grounding piano pedagogy in the aesthetics of absolute music, each domain works on the other. On the one hand, Romantic aesthetics affords pedagogy a source of artistic value in its own right. On the other hand, pedagogy concretizes Romantic aesthetics, deflating its transcendental pretentions and showing the dichotomy of absolute/utilitarian to be specious.

Dynamic Group-Piano Teaching provides future teachers of group piano with an extensive framework of concepts upon which effective and dynamic teaching strategies can be explored and developed. Within fifteen chapters, it encompasses learning theory, group process, and group dynamics within the context of group-piano instruction. This book encourages teachers to transfer learning and group dynamics theory into classroom practice. As a piano pedagogy textbook, supplement for pedagogy classes, or resource for graduate teaching assistants and professional piano teachers, the book examines learning theory, student needs, assessment, and specific issues for the group-piano instructor.

So many of the great pianists and teachers have come out of Poland and Russia (Rubinstein, Anton as well as Arthur, Leschetizky, Paderewski, the Lhevinnes, Gilels, Richter, and others), yet we know little about their methods of learning and teaching. George Kochevitsky in The Art of Piano Playing supplies some important sources of information previously unavailable in the United States. From these sources, tempered by this own thinking, Kochevitsky formulated a scientific approach that can solve most problems of piano playing and teaching. George Kochevitsky graduated in 1930 from Leningrad Conservatory and did post-graduate work at Moscow Conservatory. After coming to the U.S., he taught privately in New York City, gave a number of lectures, and wrote for various music periodicals.