Learn to play beautifully

Piano exercises are something of a necessary evil in piano playing. Ideally, we wouldn’t need them; instead our fingers (and minds!) would get all the exercise they need from the pieces we play. In reality, however, practically the only players who are able to forego exercises altogether...

Practicing piano well is a far cry from just playing through our pieces. To learn effectively, our practice really needs to be systematic. Here are a few rules for effective piano practice.

Focus

Learning music requires our full attention. Practice while your concentration is at its peak. A...

For several years I’ve been using iPads for sheet music. Like countless musicians, they’ve become an indispensable part of my musical life. iPads are now standard onstage. When I go to concerts, now I see an iPad on a piano’s music stand much more often than paper sheet music.

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My music teacher colleague Diego Cardini was kind enough to write this post for Key-Notes readers. Rhythm is something most piano learners struggle with, and percussionists are experts at rhythm, so who better to ask for exercises to help piano students develop their rhythmic skills?

Intro

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Capturing the Viennese sound with Bösendorfer and Austrian Audio

How do you capture the grandeur of a concert grand? Imagine the technological wizardry it takes to compress the whispers and roars of nine or more feet of handmade master craftsmanship into just two tiny ear buds. This...

Welcome to a truly innovative tool that will greatly accelerate your learning of any piece. After months of development, I'm excited to announce a new kind of app that will enable you to learn the language of music at a speed that had never before been possible.

It's built directly into the ...

How do you prepare for rehearsals with fellow musicians? When playing chamber music or concertos, it’s essential to know everyone else’s part well enough to come in on cue and play together. Pianists play from a full score (or at least a piano reduction in the case of concertos),...

It's an extraordinary honor for an artist to have a work written for them by a major composer, and I'm thrilled to present "Les contrastes Étude," Op. 93, No. 1 by Nimrod Borenstein.

The piece was directly inspired by the challenging topic I presented at the World Congress for Family Law...

Today I'd like to share a special presentation with you. This was given by my former piano professor and mentor Dr. Steven Smith for the 2021 Pennsylvania Music Teachers Association conference.

The topic is "Bending Time: Understanding and Teaching Rubato."

The term rubato...

Musical interpretation is, in a word, storytelling. In a story, there are characters—in music, themes. In a story there is development—in music, variations on a theme, ornamentation, harmonic tension. In a story, there are scenes; in music, sections. In a classical story, the hero...

Doe, a deer…

Solfège is a system for singing notes. If you’re familiar with the famous Rogers and Hammerstein song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, you already know the solfège note names: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and ti.

A Brief History

The first and last...

Music is a language. Like spoken language, music is rhetorical. The language of music has grammar and punctuation. It has phrases and sentences, loud and soft, fast and slow, accents and dramatic silences. In speech and music alike, timing is everything.

As in speech, in music we need to...