Our seventh annual Halloween Piano Party was small, but meaningful. Five students, three in costume, gathered on Saturday, October 18th, to share their piano pieces and candy with each other. I introduced a new interval game as part of the games portion of the party. I combined this with the Hasbro game Don’t Break the Ice.
Continue reading “Halloween Piano Party 2025”This past Saturday, April 1st, we had our second annual Late Patrick’s Day Piano Party. I’ve typically held a springmusic festival warm-up event, but it was only recently that I added the fun components. This year, an extremely warm sunny day plus a lack of written communication from me meant that we had fewer participants than normal. Those that attended seemed to have fun.
Continue reading “Late Patrick’s Day Piano Party 2023”This past Saturday, October 22nd, we had our fourth annual Halloween Piano Party. The event debuted in 2018, but we skipped it entirely in 2020 due to Covid-19 concerns. Each year I try to do something a little different and learn along the way what worked and what didn’t! The participants had a good time, including the chance to play a piece or two in a low-stress environment.
Continue reading “Halloween Piano Party 2022”On the last day of 2021, I had the time to take a look at what went wrong with my social media strategy. I’m all for being active on social media, but I need to find out how to be more efficient or I’ll just abandon it for weeks at a time. What I discovered is that I wasn’t delineating between the two separate things I do, teaching and performing. Each needs to have its own strategy, and from there I need to develop easier tactics to manage content for each audience.
Continue reading “Tough Social Media Decisions for 2022”“Never good enough” was the original title I proposed for this post. That along with “How to discourage and demoralize a piano student” as the short description. I hope it’s obvious I don’t endorse any of this “never good enough” stuff. However, I experienced it first hand during my first two years of piano study at music school. I noticed a lot of this, across many students and teachers, during the six years I spent earning my BFA and MM degrees.
Continue reading “Good Enough”I found my Website hacked on November 11, 2021, and spent half the night trying to recover it. I found this out by accident while I was doing some other maintenance. Before explaining more, here’s my setup: This WordPress instance is pre-loaded using what’s called WP Hosting. That means that I don’t have cPanel for this instance, which turned out to be a minor detail in how I proceeded. (I do use cPanel on a separate server that I use strictly for testing.)
Continue reading “Lessons from My Website Hacking”This past Saturday, October 23rd, we had our third annual Halloween Piano Party. The event made its debut in 2018 but skipped last year due to the pandemic. I decided to do things a little bit differently this year. Instead of doing one event for all, I set up four rolling start times each half-hour so that people wouldn’t have to stay for the entire event. It enabled folks to rotate people in and out of the room so that we had adequate social distance. We all wore masks (the Covid-19 type) except during photos and playing.
Continue reading “Halloween Piano Party 2021”Many prospective piano parents ask me how I teach. I prefer to answer with what a lesson looks like since that removes a lot of the variables that go into this very loaded question. Just to simplify this a bit, I’m going to describe here what a lesson looks like for a beginner. I teach intermediate and advanced students as well, but they tend to be much more customized since they involve older students.
Continue reading “What A Lesson Looks Like”Playing Guilmant is something any serious organist will have to and want to do at some point. Félix-Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) was an iconic composer in the romantic style for the organ. As a composer, he almost exclusively wrote for organ solo or for choir and organ.
Continue reading “Playing Guilmant”Christmas songbooks that are sold in the mass market, like at Sam’s Club, on Amazon.com, or at your local bookstore, are not thoughtfully compiled with piano students in mind. You’ll get a lot of songs at a reasonable price, but the arrangements will vary in difficulty from page to page. They’re often too complicated for beginners, but too easy and boring for advanced students.
Continue reading “Find the Best Christmas Sheet Music”
