I like teaching piano, especially when the students like music (even if they don`t care much for the piano).  I have taught privately to learned pianists and musicians just starting on the piano, class-piano to non-piano music majors and a sight-reading class for piano majors.  I also have guest lectured in piano repertoire class and have presentations on practicing to develop implicit memory, and the golden age of piano playing in light of Ervin Nyiregyhazi that I am always happy to give.

Some Informal Thoughts

  • My undergraduate teacher most influenced me by teaching me how to be my own teacher.  I try to do the same.  Technique, musicality, interpretation, it's all useless unless you can listen, be self-critical and adjust your work.
  • I get easily agitated listening to poor, inefficient, mindless and unhelpful practice.  And I hear it all the time.
  • Making music out of a notated score is not like solving a math problem.  Searching for clues that the composer apparently left regarding his `intentions`-I just really don`t believe that that is a “thing”.  Sometimes the composer marked many of his musical and interpretive ideas into the score.  But you must still impose your own musical ideas in the context that he left, if you want to make anything musically worth saying.
  • The learning of music is not natural...you have to train an awful lot of minuscule coordinated activities in your brain and in your body. You are going to run into a thing called cognitive dissonance.  I find most people tend to try to work around cognitive dissonance-they make a mistake, say missing a jump between two distant chords, and they hesitate and go searching for the missed notes, rather than practicing the jump itself. YOU WILL ALWAYS MISS THAT JUMP UNLESS YOU FIGHT THE COGNITIVE DISSONANCE CAUSING YOU TO MISS IT.  Go for the jump and miss it, then do it again and again until you get it. The hesitating and searching is teaching you to use a ridiculous amount of motions to execute something that ultimately has to be one motion, so just practice one motion from the get-go.  Fixing something in the moment, rather than in context is not addressing the cognitive dissonance but letting it win.
  • I'm very curious about how much what we hear in recordings and performances effects how we interpret music.  I have found myself playing incorrect notes or rhythms before realizing I was doing it that way because I had heard it done incorrectly in a recording.  Same thing with interpretation-I sometimes take a step back and realize I am playing something in a way I would have never decided to do if I had thought about it critically, but am doing it that way because other recordings I've heard have done so.  I plan on studying this phenomenon in my doctoral work.