Piano Lessons, Musicianship, Accompaniment

View my website:
https://barrykatiekenny.wixsite.com/pianoteaching

Get Playing!

My teaching method for beginners nurtures developing musical talent right from the start. It eschews tedious method books and their emphasis on repetition and slow note acquisition and has you playing pieces from the first lesson.

I extend intermediate students (Grades 4-6) with increasingly challenging repertoire, structured graded exams, ear training and an analytical approach to the pieces being studied. An understanding of a work's harmonic structure and structural framework extends a musician from being merely a player or agent of a composer's work through to being a collaborator. Compositions serve as models for further exploration and an understanding of how their structures work not only stimulates an interest in composition but greatly enhances their interpretation and realisation.

Students in the later grades (Grades 7 and above) have quite often arrived at a good understanding of the music they are playing, demonstrate a preference for particular genres of music and have started to develop their own unique musical personality. With these students the emphasis is less on directed instruction and more on choosing repertoire that will suit their temperament, building confidence in presenting recitals, stimulating inquiry that leads to further exploration and sharing many of the piano teaching tools (i.e. fingering, practice techniques) that will ultimately make them independent learners.

For students wishing to move beyond written scores I can share my wealth of experience as a jazz musician – teaching chord comping, piano voicings (and practice routines to aquire these), improvisation, scales (traditional and jazz oriented) and their relationship to chords, arranging from lead sheets and arrangement techniques. All of these can either complement a study of notated music or provide a new path of discovery.