Tag: piano drum teacher

When a student enters my room, I don’t have any preconceived ideas. I look at her in the moment. I have only the faintest idea of what to expect. She could have had a great week of practice and be ready to tear it up on the piano. But she might have struggled to find…

For the longest time I thought that my students were only interested in the data. If I was teaching piano or drums, it had to be about technique and what’s on the page. I was forgetting something, students are people and music is a universe, when the two meet there is a great amount of…

Taylor Hawkins took on an incredible challenge when he joined the Foo-Fighter. I would be frightened to play for Dave Grohl, and more than that, play the very drum parts he wrote (Let’s not forget that Dave Grohl did his own drumming during the first album of the band. As a matter of fact, he…

Because music notation wasn’t perfected before let’s say the 1400, we have very little ideas what the Greek listened to, or the Romans, for that matter. By the way, the music notation we have is French. Just saying. Anyway, besides the lack of music notation, there’s another obstacle: the instruments. Very few, if any of…

We admire the music of Mozart. Its beauty, its grace, its power touches our heart. On any given day there is a concert on earth featuring a composition by the great master. And that fact would surprise Mozart himself because he was a man of his time and wrote for his time. He never thought…

I am always amazed at what twelve sounds can produce. I am talking about the chromatic scale here. The whole of western music was written with exactly that number of notes. Now, the laws of harmony restrains the use of some of those sounds. For example, it is advised not to use minor seconds, or…

In winter 1838-1839, the composer Frédéric Chopin, and his partner back then, the writer George Sand, and her two small children, settled temporarily on the island of Majorca (Balearic Islands). They settled in Cartuja de Valldemossa, an old palace and later on a monastery situated in a paradisiacal and romantic place, where Chopin composed some…

I am practicing the piano again. I must be doing about two hours minimum per day. I know, I know it is nowhere near enough, that I should be  doing around 5 to 8 hours per day. After all, my kids are now out of the house, my job is not too demanding and I’ve…

Nowadays we listen to music without the musicians present. Whether it in our car, in our earbuds, through the speakers of our sound systems or through the radio by the time we are actually hearing the notes, the musicians who produced them are doing something else, like working on another album, another tour, or just…

I love Victor Borge. He’s a piano player that had a whole show as a comedy, only the main subject was always the piano. Here, I’ll share a video. You’ll see, it’s irresistible: The page turner is his son, by the way. They were touring together and bringing good old fun to the masses. Now,…