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Prospective Male Piano Teachers Are Like Volcano-Prone Golf Balls

In the field of private piano teaching, men make up a little over 15% of all MTNA members 1, but this low percentage isn’t all that I find peculiar about private male piano teachers. To help illustrate...

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The Pros and Cons of Music Lessons Via Skype or Google+

The age of virtual music lessons is here.  The computer geek music teacher is no longer the only type of teacher who gives distance lessons.  Catherine Saint Louis wrote a good article yesterday in The...

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Men In Private Music Teaching

It is no groundbreaking observation to note that the vast majority of piano teachers in the United States are female.  One only needs to attend any MTNA National Convention or other keyboard conference...

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Advanced Group Piano Class Listening Goals

In May 2011, I outlined in great detail what I and my students enjoy doing so much at group piano classes. In the “High Schoolers and Adults” section, I mentioned that I sometimes like to assign each...

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Chad’s YouTube Picks 1-3

As we prepare to move to Pittsburgh, PA in June 2012, my time to blog has been extremely limited. I still feel just as compelled as ever to write, but my life has been taken over by helping students...

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Chad’s YouTube Picks 4-6

I’ve been away from blogging for a few months now, obviously due to the time requirements of moving across the country.  Things are finally starting to settle down to the point where I can begin to...

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How Music Teacher Directories Hurt Private Music Teachers

“Why be the cow when you can be the farmer?” I’m not sure where this quote originates, but I heard it in a Leverage episode from season 3 titled, “The Studio Job”.  The context in this case was to ask,...

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How Multilevel Music Stores And “Schools” Hurt Private Music Teachers

“Why be the cow when you can be the farmer?” In my previous article, How Music Teacher Directories Hurt Private Music Teachers, I began with the same quote and compared music teacher directories to...

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Teaching My Own Children To Play Piano

Whenever I tell people that I give piano lessons to my own daughters, the most common response is any combination of joy and curiosity, such as, “That’s great that you are able to do that! I’ve known...

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The Reality of Music and Creativity

According to Władysław Tatarkiewicz (1977, p. 53), the concept of creativity didn’t belong to the arts until the beginning of the 19th century, and beginning in the 20th century, the sciences borrowed...

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We Need More Honesty in Music Advocacy

I recently wrote an article titled The Reality of Music and Creativity, and in that article, I made the case that development of creativity has no place in the music advocacy discussion, at least the...

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Thinking Twice About Strict Make-Up Lesson Policies

Get any group of 100 private music teachers into the same room, and more than likely a few of their discussions will find their way to the passionate subject of make-up lesson policy. Why such passion...

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Chad’s YouTube Picks 7-9

Speaking Piano For those readers who do play piano at a high level, surely you’ve had lessons at some point in your life during which your instructor asked you to communicate with the music, to speak...

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Piano Scale & Arpeggio Fingering Cards

In 2011, I created a scale and arpeggio fingering sheet that is downloaded on a daily basis, and I’ve received overwhelming positive feedback about these sheets. I must not be the only teacher who...

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Why Rubrics Do Not Work For Competitions and Music Festivals

Rubrics are not only indispensable, they are inevitable. We’ve all been on the receiving end of rubric scoring systems in our academic training, and we’ve dished them out when filling out surveys to...

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Music Teachers Associations: Stages for Showcasing or Hospitals for Healing?

In 2012, I moved across the country and joined two different music teachers associations. One of these associations held certain education and experience requirements for joining, a foreign concept...

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Hammering: Gaining and Maintaining Control in Dexterous Piano Playing

When students play piano passages that push the student to (or near) their limit of dexterity, every student except the extremely gifted will demonstrate a lack of control. Such passages could consist...

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Ten Rejected Topics For Piano Teacher Conferences

Adding Verbal Color to Clementi & Burgmuller Discover the excitement that so many teachers are missing out on by omitting profane language from their teaching of late beginning and early...

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Flat Tuition Payments For Private Music Lessons

Years ago, a piano teaching colleague and friend of mine gave up teaching piano and switched careers. I could hardly believe this, because whenever we talked on the phone, he always brought as much...

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Is Music a Language?

One of my hobbies is debate, especially when it involves a philosophical element. Years ago in an online piano discussion forum, someone declared that music is not a language after someone else had...

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