The circumstances of the pandemic taught teachers in 2020 and 2021 to be creative and use technology in ways that they might not have otherwise. While there appears to be a relative return to normalcy and face-to-face lessons in sight, we have learned a lot this past year in order to stay connected with students f...

Technology Town Hall with Mario Ajero, João Paulo Casarotti, Alejandro Cremaschi, Shana Kirk, George Litterst, & Stella Sick  Did you enjoy this webinar? Please complete our brief survey to help us improve our webinar series and continue to bring you the highest quality resources in piano teaching. 

 Town Hall Discussion: Technology Tips with Mario Ajero, João Paolo Casarotti, Shana Kirk, George Litterst, and Stella Sick Did you enjoy this webinar? Please complete our brief survey to help us improve our webinar series and continue to bring you the highest quality resources in piano teaching. 

Jai Raman, a sixth-grade student at the New School for Music Study, was not excited to study Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude in C Minor, BWV 999. When he began the piece with instructor Kristin Cahill, Jai was quite adamant that he had no desire to play the music of Bach, or any composer prior to Brubeck. Jai thrives on jazz and contempor...

Rilley is a five-year-old piano student in her first semester of piano lessons. We are using the Piano Safari Book 1 and are working on both rote and reading pieces (mostly with intervals of 2nds and 3rd). We used the Flashnote Derby app in order to introduce new notes as well as to reinforce notes she has already learned. In this clip, I introduce...

Over the course of a few days in mid-March, the University of Colorado (CU),as many schools, quickly and suddenly transitioned to distance learning.All students who were able were asked to move home. All face-to-face engagements, including classes, private lessons, and committee meetings would move online. In short order, piano teachers everyw...

In this unprecedented time, we are finding that technology is crucial to our success, both on the student and teacher sides. Teachers who have not embraced technology in their studios are now finding that they must, and the learning curve can be overwhelming. Students who have not embraced using technolo...

Our New World Our current pandemic has us all teaching in new ways. I have long thought of online learning as an opportunity, a way to indulge in creativity. It represents, however, a significant challenge when it becomes forced upon us in times of global strife. We are all accustomed to conventional in-person weekly studio teaching. In-p...

The advent of COVID-19 has forced teachers to move group piano instruction online. While the online medium is not ideal to teach performance skills, there is a silver lining. Online learning does present many benefits; chief among them is the great degree of flexibility it gives students and teachers. Students can watch and read instructional ...

My recent lessons with elementary and intermediate students have been filled with music making and sweet moments of personal connection. I enjoyed a student's smile with a first lost tooth, another's excitement in showing off her scales with both hands, and exclamations of "I love this piece!" and "That's Treble G!" While these experience...

During a recent tour at the Bell Homestead in my home- town of Brantford, Ontario, Canada, I came across an interesting fact. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell set up a demonstration of his new invention, the telephone. He arranged for friends to play a melodeon and sing over a telephone line in order to show that sound could be transmitted ...

All of us have spent the last several weeks adapting to the reality of a world where the COVID-19 pandemic has acutely changed nearly every part of our lives. For many piano teachers, it has been a time of sink-or-swim adaptation. Our teaching spaces...

During a recent tour at the Bell Homestead in my hometown of Brantford, Ontario, Canada, I came across an interesting fact. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell set up a demonstration of his new invention, the telephone. He arranged for friends to play a melodeon and sing over a telephone line in order to show that sound could be transmitted over the tel...

Now that we have entered the third decade of the twenty- first century, I find myself looking back at the previous three decades and wondering: Did technology deliver on its implied promises? With advances in music technology, do piano students learn music faster, enjoy their practice more, and perform with greater confidence?  These are impor...

Did you enjoy this webinar? Please complete our brief survey to help us improve our webinar series and continue to bring you the highest quality resources in piano teaching.

In many fields, it can be hard to find central figures who aren't men. In the niche of keyboard pedagogy technologies, however, many significant practices and developments were LARGELY pioneered by women. So, for this very special issue of the ​Piano Magazine​, I am honored to celebrate a few of the women who paved the paths that led many of u...

The advent and popularization of historical performance practice in recent years has led to some wonderful innovations in piano performance. In many circles, Mozart's original and intimate ideas of phrasing are now readily reinstated and relegitimized over more long-line Romantic approaches; familiarity with Bach's ornamentation and practices of ar...

A 2018 McKinsey report exploring the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of work predicts that 50 million jobs in the United States will be eliminated as a result of robots and automation.1 Other reports suggest that, while the workforce will change substantively and irreversibly, AI will help humans work smarter and faster, includ...

​Music teachers who collaborate with other equally busy musicians, must find creative ways around full schedules and unusual working hours. Email, text message, and social media platforms are cumbersome when communicating about team teaching, shared events, and group organizations. Consider a new tool to facilitate shared correspondence: Slack...

​Q: I've read that robots and artificial intelligence will eliminate 50 million jobs in the US within the next few years. Are the robots coming for OUR jobs—even in the arts? Even in music and teaching? A: The source of the statistic you cite is a 2018 McKinsey report that explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and related technol...