Using Sight Reading Pattern Cards and Updates

I think I've posted before about how much I enjoy using the Sight Reading Pattern Cards at Jennifer Fink's Pianimation site. (They're free!) I use them with every beginner starting at about the 4th lesson while they're still in pre-reading notation as an introduction to how notes move on the staff, and I continue to use them throughout the first and second year. I pulled them out for a 2nd year student yesterday. She came up with a great variation for using them all by herself, and I thought you would all enjoy seeing it!

She wanted to make a composition with them. So, I let her choose 2 at random (pick a card, any card), and then she assigned a rhythm to the notes. We considered  rhythms in 3/4 and 4/4, and she chose this one. My cards are laminated, so we can write on them with dry erase markers. As a follow-up step, we could notate this on a full staff. 

Here she is, with her 2-measure composition. 

On other fronts, I thought I'd update you on how our covid policies are working out. So far, everything is going well. I did resort to online lessons for a couple of days while one of my family members had a cold and waited for the results of a test. Thankfully, it was negative. One of my students had the same situation, and returned to in-person lessons after her negative test. I'm lucky to have a great group of families, and we all benefit from the mutual trust that everyone will do the right thing.

I tried out this barrier tape on my piano as a way to cover the finish so that I could wipe it with a clorox wipe. Meh. It did work, but it looks messy because you can't pull out one long strip. It's perforated, and too flimsy to cut the width to the right size. While it didn't hurt the finish doing it one time, I felt that prolonged use might. So, I'm sticking with my original plans as described in this post. 

The masks I sewed for students turned out really cute! You can find the link to the pattern in this post. Several of my students wear them to every lesson. This is the child size on one of my first graders. It's slightly big, but she'll grow!!

I hope you are all faring well during this crazy corona year. My tech skills have improved exponentially, so I guess if I look hard enough, I can find a silver lining! 

New Christmas Sheet Music - He Is Born

Why, yes, I do realize that today is Halloween! I also know that musicians everywhere are already working on Christmas music. If you need an intermediate level Christmas arrangement for solo piano, I hope you'll check out my latest upload to Sheet Music Plus Press - "He Is Born." I did some product testing last week by playing it for all of my students and my worst critic of all, my 14-year-old daughter. It's got a 100% approval rating! I'm a no frills kind of girl, so there's no cover art or illustrations. Just an appealing, pedagogically rich arrangement. Teaching opportunities in this piece include:

     Alberti bass
     octave changes
     grace notes
     descending scales over primary chords
     mordent
     trill
     variations on a melody
     melody embedded in figuration
     light thumb
     frequent dynamic changes
     terraced dynamics

I needed to make an mp3 recording to upload to SMP, and this sound file is not just low budget but no budget! It will give you a chance to hear it before purchase, though. Maybe if I write a bunch more of these and sell them, I can improve my no budget recording situation! 

Thanks for checking out "He Is Born." I also have a late intermediate arrangement of "Jesus Loves Me" and a LH alone arrangement of "The First Noel" in case you have a student with a RH injury at Christmas. Bookmark my publisher page for more titles coming soon.

Pentatonic Power

Last Friday, I provided the program for our local Music Teachers' Association. My title was "Unlocking Your Students' Creative Potential:  A Report From The 88 Creative Keys Conference."  If you read here, you know that I attended this conference in Denver last summer, and have been inspired to incorporate many more creative elements in my teaching. It makes sense to me to think of teaching music as teaching a language. Just as we learn to read and interpret, we learn to express our own thoughts with it. As I explore how to teach my students to do this (and how to do it myself), I am finding that the pentatonic scale may be the most powerful tool at my disposal. Don't know what the pentatonic scale is?  Keep reading!

In this video Bobby McFerrin plays the crowd, quite literally, using the pentatonic scale. You'll laugh out loud at how he sets up expectations and, using no words at all, gets the crowd to sing exactly what he wants. He says this works everywhere he goes as long as he sticks to the pentatonic.


If you have a couple of hours, you can watch the whole panel discussion that took place at the World Science Festival in 2009:  Notes & Neurons:  In Search of the Common Chorus.  (I haven't watched it myself yet - it's a long video.)

In my presentation, I asked for a show of hands to this question, "Who has heard of the pentatonic scale?" Only about 20% of an audience of piano teachers raised their hand. Everybody in the room had a music degree, but most of them looked puzzled. The person who confidently gave a definition was the one whose dad is an accomplished jazz player. Go figure. I should point out that pentatonic scales are not the same as pentascales. The words are similar, but "pentascale" refers to the first five notes of the regular 8-note major or minor scales. The pentaTONIC scale is something different. I think the lack of knowledge about the pentatonic scale among piano teachers is a big problem. Here's why.

The pentatonic scale is probably the most widely-used scale in the world. It is used in the folk music of almost every culture from Appalachia to Germany to Greece to Africa to the Far East. There are even those who suggest that the pentatonic scale is a universal human phenomenon, that we are biologically predisposed to it. It's ubiquitous in jazz and pop music. Composers who were inspired by folk music (Bartok, Dvorak, etc.) used it widely. You'll hear it in Chopin (think Black Key Etude) and Debussy (think Pagodes from Estampes). You'll hear it in playground chants  - nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah sung to the scale pitches 5-3-6-5-3. You know how it goes!  

Let's put this in context - lots of pianists with music degrees are unfamiliar with the most widely-used scale in the world.

This fact is amusing since the pentatonic scale is visibly evident on the piano. It corresponds to the black keys!

How does this happen? Is it because we're too sophisticated for folk music idioms? Chopin and Debussy weren't. I think it's more likely due to the fact that our piano degree programs are so focused on teaching literature. The music ed. majors are ahead of the pianists in recognizing the power of the pentatonic because Orff and Kodaly methods draw heavily on pentatonic material. Those of us who teach piano to children can take a cue from our music ed. friends and start making use of the power of the pentatonic scale to teach our students how to speak the musical language for themselves.

While there are several versions of the pentatonic scale, the most common form is very easy. Take any major scale and leave out the 4th and 7th degrees - that's a major pentatonic scale. So, C Major pentatonic is C, D, E, G, and A.  The Gb major pentatonic scale is just the black keys on the piano. Elementary school kids learn it with ease. This scale demystifies melodic improvisation instantly because all of the notes will fit in reasonably well with any diatonic chord progression within that key. In fact, one of my favorite slogans from the 88 Creative Keys conference is Bradley's famous advice about improvising a solo line: "When in doubt, pent out." Of course, if you are improvising in a classical style, there are voice-leading concerns, but as a precursor to more sophisticated improvisation in either a classical or jazz style, learning to "pent out" over diatonic chord progressions is a good way to develop your ear and your internal musical vocabulary. It's an ideal way to help young piano students (and anyone new to improvisation) grow comfortable speaking in the musical language.

Check out Pentatonic Power Part 2 for some very practical suggestions for incorporating pentatonic activities into your piano lessons.

Improvisation Inspiration - See How Lame I Am!

While looking for something else today, I discovered a fantastic set of videos by Dr. Peter Schubert of McGill University. Using an exercise first conceived of by Mozart to help a piano student who played well but "had no ideas" for creating her own music, Dr. Schubert coaches a student through the creation of his own piece. Supposedly, Mozart presented the student with an opening phrase and said, "See what an ass I am! I've started this piece, but I can't think of anything to come next! Can you add something to this to finish it?" While you might want to change the name of the exercise to something more kid-appropriate, it should be something funny! Off the top of my head, I can imagine calling it "See how lame I am!" Maybe you can think of something better. Incidentally, the existence of the story is evidence that even amateur students were expected to compose and improvise in those days.

In no particular order, here are some factors that I think make Dr. Schubert's exercise successful:

1. No wrong answers. Dr. Schubert makes a big point of this in one of the videos.
2. It's playful. They're laughing and having fun.
3. They're singing rather than laboriously picking out the notes on the piano. That can come later. Singing is instant.
4. Dr. Schubert is liberal with compliments and encouragement.
5. Rather than trying to manage full chords as accompaniment, they use only one note. This student is clearly already thinking of the harmony and playing a chord root, but with a younger piano student, the accompaniment could be delayed until the melody was worked out.
6. They work on one short phrase at a time.

What other aspects do you see that make this work so well? How could you adapt it to piano students at a variety of levels?

Review: Creative Chords, Bk 1 by Bradley Sowash

A couple of weeks ago, I shared that I'm very excited to be going to the 88 Creative Keys educators conference with Bradley Sowash and Leila Viss in July. What neither of them knows is that my decision to go was strongly influenced by my recent purchase of Bradley's book, Creative Chords, Bk. 1. I've felt for a while now that I wanted to do more with improvisation in my studio, but my efforts were haphazard and catch-as-catch-can. The students weren't progressing toward a goal, and I wasn't really teaching a skill so much as throwing out a fun activity to take up the last few minutes of a lesson. I don't want to downplay the value of that fun activity, (in fact, I wrote about how valuable I think it is a couple of posts ago) but I found in Creative Chords a method that is exactly what I needed - a well-planned pathway to concrete skills that is appealing and paced just right.

Skills Taught in Creative Chords

• Recognition of triads, triad inversions, primary chords, and the function of those chords in a musical composition - i.e., where does the V chord want to go?
• How to embellish melodies and create your own personal variations.
• How to read and improvise with chord symbols on a lead sheet.
• How to play your own improvised accompaniments in a variety of styles.
• How to use music theory knowledge as a way to be a more creative musician.

How Does It Work?

Creative Chords is perfect for a mid to late elementary student. Using familiar folk tune melodies (this isn't a jazz method), Sowash sets the stage for students to approach existing music with a creative attitude. He applies the acronym P.L.A.Y.  (Prepare, Learn, Add, Your Way) to each piece and gives specific instructions for each step. Students create their own accompaniments and learn to embellish the melodies. This gives the student permission to treat the existing music as a malleable work of art - not as something to be preserved intact in every detail. I think this is a great approach to musicianship in general, not just a method for improvising, and it's an approach that has been neglected in traditional teaching. I've heard myself say to students, "Sure, you can create your own ending to this method book piece, but I wouldn't let you do that to Mozart." Now, I'm rethinking that. We wouldn't have Beethoven's Diabelli Variations or Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Paginini if Beethoven and Brahms had considered the works of the masters to be inviolable. We would have very little Baroque music, for that matter, since the composers of the Baroque period so frequently borrowed and adapted from others. When we limit ourselves to teaching students how to "recite" music without also giving them license to use those pieces as springboards for their own creative ideas, we might also be burdening them with the unattainable ideal of always being 100% original if they dare to compose or improvise. We would have a very small canon of great music literature if the great composers never fiddled around with other composers' material. (Just for fun:  Theft or inspiration?  What Robin Thicke Has In Common With Bach And Mahler.)

By the end of the book, students play a simple folk tune in 3 different keys, applying an improvised accompaniment using chord symbols, and embellishing the melody to make it their own. But, that is the simplest possible way to describe what the student has accomplished. Over the course of completing Book 1, students will gain an experiential (rather than merely academic) understanding of the importance of chord inversions. They'll learn the pattern of whole and half steps in a scale and why this produces the key signature. They'll gain an aural understanding of tonality by playing a tune in 3 keys. Unit 3 includes a great exercise that is now my go-to method for introducing 2-octave scales and helps students connect the learning of scales with literature. Students improvise scale passages over primary chords, learning from experience which scale tones sound good or resolve to something good and simultaneously improving their ear and their muscle memory for playing pleasing sounds. They will also begin to intuit which of the primary chords will sound best under a melody note.  In short, this method is a very comprehensive approach to musicianship. Considering that it also includes technical "workouts" and a bunch of theory information about chords and scales, dynamics, symbols such as ritardando, a tempo, fermata, articulations, and phrasing, it could be used as a primary method for the student who mainly wants to pursue a creative track.

Elements I Love

-The optional duets for the teacher are written as a bass line with chord symbols.

-Chord indications include both Roman numerals and jazz style chord symbols.

-Great verbal and graphic explanations that anticipate common student problems.  For instance, rhythms are mapped out in "rhythm boxes" that show exactly how the rhythm is distributed throughout the measure - super helpful for students who struggle with dotted quarters.

-A review at the end of each unit that includes a checklist of topics covered and review questions to assess the students mastery of concepts.

-An amazing amount of additional material in the form of videos, documents, worksheets, and backing tracks are provided free for a year after purchase at the Kjos website Interactive Practice Studio. You can even create recordings of yourself improvising along with the backing tracks, and then email the recording to others.

-Well-designed page layouts that are not overly cluttered.

-Adorable illustrations! I laughed out loud at this one while reading through the book in my dentist's waiting room!

I am very excited about using Creative Chords with my students, and I'm eagerly looking forward to Book 2.  Even more than that, I'm looking forward to learning more about all of these things at the 88 Creative Keys conference in Denver this summer. If you haven't added this conference to your summer plans, I hope you'll consider it!

*I received no compensation for this review.

Letting The Agenda Go

Photo by Wel Han Frank Lin

Today, I had the most delightful lesson with the most adorable 6-year-old boy. He's my only "little" this year - actually, my only one in two years now. I remember in former years feeling so pressured to cover so much material in the first lesson because I wanted to be able to send the student home playing the first pieces in the lesson book. And, in order to get to the first pieces in the lesson book, I had to cover the first several pages, teaching how to sit at the piano, how to hold the hands properly, which end of the piano had high sounds and which had low, what a quarter note and a quarter rest were, etc. Then we had to learn how to follow the directions on the page and what all of those words said. I always felt like I was spewing information, not really teaching them to be excited about making music.

Today, I let the agenda go.

We started by reading Mole Music, as recommended by Andrea at Teach Piano Today. I loaned him the book to take home. Next week, I'll use her printables to help him apply the story to his own study of music.

Then, we explored the piano. We opened up the top of my console piano, and I let him stand on the piano bench and peer in. We watched the hammers dance. We learned the names of hammers, strings, dampers, and keys. We explored what the pedals could do.

We talked about high bird sounds and low bullfrog sounds and made up a name for the middle keys. They are the Panda keys. Doesn't make any sense, but does it really have to?

We traced around his hands and learned that "King Thumb is No. 1."  Then we played the worm game. The fingers are worms, and when I call out the worm numbers, they come out of their hole and rest on the keyboard cover. But, birds like to eat worms, so they have to jump back into their hole quickly before my hands (the birds) can grab them. Many giggles. He had a little trouble with fingers 3 and 4. No matter. We focused on fingers 1, 2, and 5. When his fine motor control is a little better, 3 and 4 will come easily enough.

In a few short minutes, he learned how to clap quarters and quarter rests, saying "one" for the quarters and "sh" for the rests. In no time, he could do 4 measures all by himself. Then, we made up our own song using our four-measure rhythm which I had written out on a sheet of paper. He wanted to play clusters of keys on the quarters. No matter. They were on time. His hand position was not correct. There will be time to address that later.

Forty-five minutes went by before we knew it, and I had never cracked one of his books, Yet, not a minute of that lesson was wasted, and not a minute was dry. He went home with permission to create his own music. If my measure of success was to send him home playing a piece in his book, I failed.

I don't think that is my measure of success any more.

Helping Composers Stay in Business

Wendy Stevens recently wrote a very informative post at ComposeCreate.com about the financial realities of being a freelance composer. Generally, the composer earns only 10% or less of the retail price of the music. For a piece of sheet music that costs $3.50, the composer earns a whopping 35 cents per copy sold. A thousand copies would earn around $350, which is still not much considering the time invested in the composition and the additional time invested in negotiating with the publisher. It blows my mind that a degreed professional is offered so little for their creative work, and yet this is also true for writers. Spend a year writing a book that sells for $12 per copy, and you'll be lucky to earn $1.20 per copy sold. In order to earn as much as 20K for your year of work, you'll need to sell 16,666 copies. You'll invest additional time doing most of your own marketing, and then you'll lose a healthy chunk of that 20K to taxes.

Of course, this raises the question of whether it's worth it to go through a publisher at all. These days, self-publishing has lost the stigma it once had and technology makes marketing and distribution much easier. On the other hand, the music publishing industry provides a valuable service to music distributors and consumers by sorting through the tons of available material and endorsing those that are worthwhile. Imagine how difficult it would be for a music store owner to select their inventory from a million different freelance sources. It's a tough call. I don't want music publishers to go out of business. But, neither do I want composers to be so discouraged that they don't even bother trying to compose, much less publish.

So, what can you do to keep a composer in business? Don't photocopy. When you get complimentary copies of music, use them for your personal library and have your students purchase their own. And, send some encouragement to a composer! They obviously work for love, not money.

Photo by Darren Hester.