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Pianodao is the piano music, education, and wellbeing site of teacher, writer, consultant, and composer Andrew Eales.

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Summer Repertoire Project

The summer months provide plenty of shared opportunity to celebrate our Active Repertoire pieces with others. Join the Project here…

ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2027-28

As ABRSM publish their 2027-28 Piano Syllabus, the big question is whether the latest pieces will live up to the board’s high standards. That’s the question I hope to answer in the Pianodao review…

LCME’s 2026 syllabus is out today, and I’ll not hesitate to declare this one of the most educationally rewarding and musically inspiring piano syllabuses I’ve seen, which is high praise indeed. Find out more here…

The Three-Dimensional Pianist

Understanding the importance of the three dimensions of musical learning, Musical Mind, Body, and Soul, empowers us to teach, learn and practise music holistically, making effective and lasting progress.

ADHD • Insights for Pianists

Bringing together expert clinical insight and piano education advice to support pianists and educators.

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Arise and Shine

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Back in 2023 I reviewed two collections of Piano Music of Black Composers compiled by the American performer, scholar, and educator Leah Claiborne for Hal Leonard’s Expanding the Repertoire series.

The two books offered a varied and engaging, if in hindsight slightly inconsistent, potpourri of little-known music by Black composers, and at the time I concluded,

“It’s a great pity that this fabulous pedagogic repertoire hasn’t been a standard feature of our piano education culture, and Leah Claiborne has done us a superb service in providing these slender volumes. We must hope more will follow.”

More has indeed followed, and I was delighted to receive Claiborne’s latest anthology, Arise and Shine, which offers 28 piano solos by Black composers suitable for intermediate to early advanced players (I would estimate UK Grades 2-8).

Jason Sifford • Here Be Dragons

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Jason Sifford has established himself as one of America’s most respected composers of educational piano music, and a jewel in the crown of music publishers The Willis Music Company.

Promoting his music more widely, I wrote a rave review recommending his two KEYBOP books when they appeared, and subsequently selected three of his pieces to appear in my Willis Student Recital Collection.

Introducing Sifford’s lavishly illustrated new collection, Here Be Dragons, Willis Music write,

“Cultures from around the world tell of thrilling tales and legends about magical flying creatures. This intermediate piano collection was inspired by these fantastical beasts and aims to provide performance material and adventurous music-making for all pianists with vivid imagination.”

This new collection is billed as suitable for Intermediate to Early Advanced players, and sounds exciting, so let’s brave ourselves and take a look…

The LOTR Piano Anthology

Pianodao Music Library

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Faber Music have now been producing their series of deluxe piano anthologies for around a decade, with one or two new titles appearing each year, each volume generally bringing together an eclectic but appealing mix of music grouped around a specific theme: Christmas, Jazz Standards, Women Composers, and so on.

You can explore my reviews of the series here.

A previous title in the series broke the usual pattern by focusing on a specific movie series. The Harry Potter Piano Anthology was produced in association with the US publishers Alfred Music, who own the rights and arrangements, and in my review of that title, I concluded that it was “an exceptional publication which is unlikely to disappoint”.

Revisiting that partnership, Faber Music now bring us The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Piano Anthology, again in partnership with Alfred. The cover announces that the book includes:

“The best-loved themes from Howard Shore’s landmark scores along with other featured songs, arranged for intermediate piano solo.”

The anthology is as lavishly presented as ever, and likely to tempt all those who appreciate Shore’s superb movie scores, so let’s take a look…

ADHD and ‘micro-breaks’

ADHD • Insights for Pianists

Education Strategies • Andrew Eales
Clinical Expertise • Louise Eales RMN, NMP

Everybody seems to be talking about Molly Gebrian’s book Learn Faster, Perform Better (OUP 2024, available here) and rightly so: it is a superb read, well argued, engagingly written, and filled with brilliant tips and advice on how musicians can practise more effectively.

Author Molly Gebrian holding a viola, with the book 'Learn Faster, Perform Better' displayed next to her. — Molly Gebrian with her book ‘Learn Faster, Perform Better’

We all want to improve, and Gebrian offers insights from neuroscience that back up many of our well-established strategies for effective practice, along with some interesting newer nuggets of advice, including what has become one of her signature suggestions: incorporating “micro-breaks” between repetitions when perfecting technical passages.

ABRSM Piano Syllabus 2027-28

Educational Resources

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

It’s that time again: right on cue, ABRSM have published their latest piano grade exam syllabus, accompanied as usual by a raft of resources to support players and teachers. With their 2027 & 2028 piano syllabus, they promise:

Refreshed repertoire for Practical and Performance Grades, Initial Grade to Grade 8, with new Piano Exam Pieces books for each.
A separate, 68-page Teaching Notes booklet.
A new online Piano Learning Hub with video demonstrations and learning resources.
Audio recordings, available on all major streaming platforms.

They also confirm the following useful information:

There are no changes to the scales and arpeggios or sight-reading and aural tests for Practical Grades.
You can continue to use repertoire from the 2025 & 2026 Piano Syllabuses until 31 December 2027. During this overlap period you must choose all your set pieces from the same syllabus.

The first of these points may be disappointing for educators, but given the shift towards digital performance grades won’t perhaps come as a surprise. You can read about the pedagogy problems with their scales syllabus here, and significant concerns about the validity of their aural tests here.

My coverage of ABRSM always aims for balance and impartiality, and while critical of their support tests, my reviews of their Piano Exam Pieces books have regularly heaped praise on the board. Rightly so, because in recent years they have brilliantly balanced returning favourites with new commissions and inspiring discoveries.

So the big question is whether the latest Piano Exam Pieces will live up to the board’s high standards, delivering diversity, musical quality, educational value, and genuine appeal. And having had three weeks to live with and play through all these pieces ahead of their publication, that’s the question I hope to answer.

Post-Pandemic Piano Teaching

The pianodao Guest Book

Opinions • Guest Posts • Interviews

In this insightful guest article, best-selling author and teacher KAREN MARSHALL points to the continuing challenges faced by those whose childhood and education were disrupted by the pandemic, and offers powerful hope that through piano lessons, we can help rebuild that generation…

The Long Shadow, Lost Learning, and the New Reality

Back in 2023, when the dust was finally beginning to settle on those surreal lockdown years, I wrote a series of blog posts about “Post-Pandemic Piano Teaching” for the previous Musicroom site.

At the time, many of us hoped, and I was definitely one of them, that by 2026, the phrase “things will never be the same again” would have been a distant memory. Perhaps we imagined we would be back to business as usual, with the fallout of those disrupted years safely behind us?

Yet, standing here today in 2026, the reality on the ground, both as a classroom music teacher and a private piano teacher, tells a very different story. The landscape didn’t just temporarily shift; it permanently fractured.

When I first examined “lost learning” a few years ago, I focused on immediate, obvious gaps: the physical absence of live performance, the technical difficulties caused by internet lag during online lessons, and a sudden drop-off in fundamental musicianship due to the rise of performance-only digital exams.

Personally, I treated it like an emergency to be managed with quick-fix, pattern-dense repertoire, and short-term interventions. What I perhaps didn’t fully anticipate was just how long the shadow of the pandemic would be, or how unevenly its impact would be felt across society.

Music Teaching for Special Educational Needs

The Pianodao Bookshelf

Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
Find out more: About Pianodao Reviews

Faber Music continue to produce outstanding books to support instrumental teachers, the latest of which is Music Teaching for Special Educational Needs: a guide for instrumental teachers, written by David Baker. According to the publishers,

”This comprehensive guide provides a solid foundation for teachers wanting to understand and support music students with additional needs. It covers dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder and visual, auditory and physical disabilities, and is packed with up-to-date information, helpful pedagogical starting points, case studies, practical advice, ideas for reflective practice and further reading.”

This is undoubtedly a timely book, and one which promises to usefully fill a significant gap in the market for an accessible introduction to these topics, so let’s take a closer look from a piano teaching perspective…

Summer Repertoire Project

Active Repertoire Project

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Summer is here, and as John Kirkwood puts it in his book The Way of the Five Seasons (2016):

“Following the rapid upward growth of spring, it is as if nature is now reaching outwards to fill as much space as it can.
Like a ball tossed in the air which reaches its apogee before descending, summer is the highest peak of growth when things can grow no further, and seem to hang in mid-air for a time, celebrating the fullness of expansion.”

As nature “reaches outwards to fill as much space as it can”, we too step into a larger vista, embracing the season with outdoor events, barbecues, social gatherings with family and friends, summer courses, camps and festivals.