Nota Bene Music Studio

Getting festive, thanks to our local Fortino’s! 😆 Welcome letters were sent out earlier today! I hope to send out book lists by tonight or tomorrow. I love this time of year! It’s always been far more of an exciting new start for me than New Year’s, which might indicate just how much of a nerd I’ve always been. 🤓 I’m looking forward to seeing my old students and some new ones next week! Enjoy your first week back at school or homeschool! 🍂

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Next up, a song called "Chrissie Swims No More!"

It can seem counter-intuitive to delay note-reading in music lessons. For years I was convinced it was a sign of insufficient academic rigour, and moreover I have a special affection for notation and didn’t want to consider delaying!

What I didn’t know, what Edwin E. Gordon discovered through his scientific research into how we learn music, is that training the brain to look for visual cues first can impede the brain’s ability to draw basic aural connections.

Have you ever noticed that beginning pianists very, very often have irregular rhythm? I started my piano teaching journey twenty-five years ago and I was surprised by how often students would treat bar lines like mini stop signs, pausing before continuing to the next bar.

Why does this happen?

Well, it makes complete sense that it would happen if notation is the hook upon which we hang our musical hat. The bar line is, visually, an obstacle and division. It does not express flow or movement.

On the contrary, if we approach music first aurally, we learn that music has phrases, movement, and direction. We learn that it moves in two or in three, in divisions or elongations, and sometimes in combinations of all those characteristics. If we notice such things first, and *then* we look at musical notation, instead of mini stop signs, we will see groupings of notes according the metre.

Students who have been trained to move to the music, feel the beat in their bodies, and understand aurally before symbolically are typically at an advantage. Yes, a student can be trained to read and perform musical phrasing even with a reading-first approach, but learning to read notation well is typically easier and more intuitive for those who already know what it is supposed to represent.

There are so many reasons to delay note-reading (it allows the student to focus on developing good technique! it encourages the student to think about melodic and harmonic patterns!) but the ability to maintain a steady, flowing beat is one of the most readily apparent ones!

What do you think?

The power of music! 🎶

Helen Keller’s Stunning Description of ‘Hearing’ Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony | Strings Magazine We often think of music as something we hear. This isn’t surprising. Our hearing is the main sense involved in the endeavor. But it’s not the only sense. We pay less attention to the wa…

I discovered last night that YouTube has a number of piano masterclass videos that are just wonderful. Isn’t it just a pleasure to listen to? I love studying music at every level, but it gets really fun when you’ve got mastery of the instrument and are working hard to interpret a piece well.

Seymour Bernstein on Beethoven: Technique & Interpretation (Interview at the piano) Join legendary pedagogue Seymour Bernstein for a fascinating and funny interview and lesson on Beethoven, hosted by tonebase Head of Piano Ben Laude.Ben play...

Take a listen to this very unusual but beautiful piece of music!

Gyorgy Kurtag : Jatekok _ Perpetuum mobile Gyorgy Kurtag(죄르지 쿠르탁) 曲Jatekok _ 게임, Perpetuum mobile _ 무궁동Piano: Zoltán Kocsis(졸탄 코치쉬)

Why is piano technique important? 💪 Piano technique—how the body moves to produce sounds at the piano—is important for various reasons. 1️⃣ Most fundamentally, we want to avoid injury! Much like a computer keyboard can lead to injury such as carpal tunnel syndrome, so too can the piano keyboard lead to injury if not manipulated carefully. 2️⃣ Good piano technique also allows for greater accuracy, alacrity, and virtuosity. Pianists with poor technique might play with feeling, but the excellence of their performance will be limited until they refine their technique. Recently my family has been getting into mountain biking and while I can ride some easy trails simply because I know how to ride a bike, I won’t be able to ride all the trails unless I learn some technique. Yesterday my husband shared with me a video of Amaury Pierron riding an insane course through Lourdes, and I figure he’s like the Franz Liszt or Paganini of the mountain biking world (Liszt and Paganini were famous nineteenth-century virtuosos of the piano and violin, respectively). Most of us probably won’t reach that level of technical excellence, but that doesn’t mean we should necessarily be satisfied with training wheels for our entire life. 3️⃣ Beauty, my favourite reason of all! Avoiding injury is essential, excellence is laudable, but beauty is our highest goal! Through the discipline of good technique, we are better equipped to communicate beauty and life in our music. Our touch will be more sensitive and our interpretation capable of greater nuance. Consider the difference between the Mona Lisa and my stick figure drawings. My stick figures might have some potential, but I’ll never be able to express the fullness of my (currently very hidden) artistic talent unless I practise technique.

Technique: it’s worth the effort. And once you learn it, do whatever you want with it! You’re in full control now. Become the e. e. cummings of the piano and subvert expectations! Decorate Carnegie Hall with musical stick figures!

🤣 When I was younger, I dreamed of becoming a conductor…

https://www.facebook.com/100064680457342/posts/927150276117646/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

Nadia Boulanger, when asked about being the first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony:
"I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think s*x plays much part."

What is technique? If you answered “scales and arpeggios” you probably took piano lessons at some point. But that’s only half the story: Technique is *how* we use and move our bodies to do something—in the case of piano, how to produce the desired sounds. In Music Moves for Piano, we focus from the beginning on that primary definition of technique and save the scales and arpeggios for later, once the student has formed excellent habits in approaching the keys of the piano with arm and fingers. Moreover, before the scale is learned with all the fingers, we first learn it with the middle finger only, training the arm to move properly before adding more complicated movements. Technique is less “What” and more “How.”

Why do my beginner students stand to play at the piano? Why not sit on the bench, like normal piano students?

Lots of reasons!

First, most children are too small when they begin piano lessons to be able to sit high enough at the piano for good technique. Some benches do reach that high, but then the student can’t maintain good balance with feet on the floor. Standing allows for good technique.

Second, we move *a lot* during beginner lessons. When a child begins piano, that child needs to learn rhythm, and one of the best ways to learn rhythm is finding it in the body. Have you ever seen Strictly Ballroom? One of the most amazing scenes in that movie is when a young man who’s been ballroom dancing since he could walk tries to learn a folk dance of his girlfriend’s Hispanic culture. His first attempt makes her relatives roar with laughter: he has the steps, but there is no deeply internalized sense of rhythm. Beautiful rhythm in music is not found in following a metronome and counting ad nauseam—although counting and metronomes can be useful, they are often over-used, for true rhythm comes from inside. A true musician *feels* the rhythm much more than he or she thinks the rhythm. So in my piano classes, we move. A lot.

Physical movement also allows students to gain a sense of musical movement. Is the music light? Is it tight? Is it expansive, or is it contained?

Physical movement is also good for active children, most of whom don’t just want to sit at a piano and intellectualize music by reading notes on a page. Most children are like to move more than to sit, so it’s a good arrangement all around.

We also stand to play at the piano in my beginner classes because we use the entire keyboard. If you’re just playing music around middle C, you can sit in the middle of the piano even if you are a wee little thing, but if you are exploring the entire keyboard landscape, it’s better to stand at the piano and walk to area you want to play in.

Lastly, we play music together. Yes, even at the piano. We play duets, sometimes even quintets, at a single piano. We can’t all sit on a bench! That would be silly.

So that’s why my beginner students rarely sit. 🎹