Pathways for Teaching

ABRSM Performance Diplomas

Supporting Your Piano Playing Journey
Written by ANDREW EALES

A few months ago I brought news that exam board ABRSM had announced their intention to replace their range of diploma assessments in performance, teaching and direction with a new set of digital qualifications from 2024.

The popularity of that article underlined the point that these diplomas are not just of interest to several of my regular students, but to a far wider community within the piano playing and teaching world.

Now, with additional information available from ABRSM, it’s time to retire my previous post and bring you this updated one to replace it.

Active Repertoire, Winter 23/24

Active Repertoire is the music we can play any time, any place. These are the pieces we can perform without notice, without any embarrassment, and even from memory.

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ACTIVE REPERTOIRE DOWNLOAD • WINTER 23/24

We often fret about the things we can’t do, the music we can’t play. It can lead to a negative spiral that leaves us feeling defeated and deflated.

But what if we recalibrated our expectations and turned our focus positively towards what we can do, and what we can play?

The Active Repertoire Challenge is all about rediscovering our enthusiasm for playing our favourite pieces, developing confidence, and even sharing the music we enjoy the most with others,

The challenge encourages piano players to develop their own Active Repertoire of three or four pieces which can be played any time, any place: without notice or embarrassment, and hopefully over time from memory.

Take up the challenge, download your FREE Active Repertoire Challenge sheet, and make a decision that will change your piano journey forever. By making Active Repertoire our top priority, we can:

start our practice sessions positively, with music we enjoy
more quickly memorise our favourite pieces
overcome our anxiety and feel more at ease playing to others

Winter 23-24

A new Active Repertoire challenge sheet is issued each quarter, and can be freely downloaded here on the Pianodao website. For the coming months, the sheet includes sections for the following:

My Active Repertoire
Use the spaces here to list pieces which you can play to performance standard. To find out more about how to continue working with these pieces, read the Getting Started Guide below.

Pieces I am working on
These are the pieces that you are currently practising, and which are not yet ready to perform.

Warming pieces for colder evenings
Each quarter the sheet includes a more imaginative and thought-provoking section. For these coming months, consider which pieces remind you of warmth, home, comfort. List any that you can play or would like to play here.

Piano Goals for 2024
This season sees the move into a fresh year, and as always it is good to consider what our goals are. This section could include ideas you want to discuss with a teacher, mentor or piano friend, and which excite you as ongoing possibilities.

Disney @100 – my favourite songs
This year we have marked the Disney centenary year, with a wide selection of sheet music available for pianists to explore. Do you have a few Disney songs that you especially enjoy? List them here!

The Active Repertoire Challenge offers an exciting pathway to a more motivated and truly rewarding piano journey.
Are you ready to take part? If so, here’s your FREE sheet to plan and track your progress:

ACTIVE REPERTOIRE DOWNLOAD • WINTER 23/24

Printing directly from the web may work, but it’s best to save the download as a PDF file, and when printing check the “scale to fit page” and “plain paper, best quality” options.

Please also check out the Getting Started Guide, which includes full instructions for how to use the sheet to support your piano journey in the coming year…

ACTIVE REPERTOIRE • GETTING STARTED GUIDE

Your Active Repertoire is at the heart of your piano journey!

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Active Repertoire • Autumn 2023

Active Repertoire is the music we can play any time, any place. These are the pieces we can perform without notice, without any embarrassment, and ideally from memory.

And for the Autumn, Pianodao has a new FREE challenge to download and take part in, aimed at giving you positive, realistic piano goals that will enable you to thrive and develop confidence…

Essential Piano Education Resources 2023-24

PATHWAYS FOR TEACHING

Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES

Last year’s roundup of the most essential piano teaching resources proved one of the most widely popular of the year, which makes perfect sense. It can be overwhelming keeping track of all the latest and best resources, and a handy annual roundup is actually just as helpful to me as it is for other teachers reading this.

As we approach another academic year, I am therefore once again sharing my list of some of the most essential educational resources and piano music publications of the recent months (and years). The idea is that we can all bookmark this page, and refer back through the year.

To read my in-depth evaluations of each publication shared below, and to get a better understanding of whether it will suit your and your students’ particular needs, simply click on the titles to open the full reviews. Better still, right-click to open in a new tab.

Putting the PLAY back into Playing the Piano

PATHWAYS FOR TEACHING

Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES

A Radical Manifesto for Piano Education

According to Plato, “life must be lived as play”.
How might this attitude to life benefit piano education?
We teach others to play the piano, but what do we really mean by play?

Why use Graded Anthologies?

PATHWAYS FOR PLAYING

Supporting Your Piano Playing Journey
Written by ANDREW EALES

It’s hardly a secret that I have long had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards graded music exams. Certainly, many of my students have found them positive, and over the years it’s been a joy to watch players that I have taught getting distinctions, with plenty of success stories across all eight ABRSM grades and beyond.

But while supporting independent assessment for its recognition and celebration of achievement, I am less enthusiastic about the extent to which a syllabus can skew the curriculum and compartmentalise learning. Worse, pressure (explicit or implicit) to take regular exams can for some cast a long shadow over what should be a joyous journey.

When it comes to Graded Anthologies, I have a more unequivocally positive view. As a general rule, these seem to me to offer most of the benefits of a progressive graded system, with few of the problems that mitigate against effective musical learning, and none of the exam-based issues that can so easily discourage and demotivate players.

Without further ado, here are four key benefits of using Graded Anthologies which I value, and which students have clearly found helpful over the years:

The Three-Dimensional Pianist

PATHWAYS FOR TEACHING

Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES

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

Paying attention to all three dimensions in equal balance gives us a solid educational philosophy, a foundation for practice, and the insight needed to foster deeper learning. Teachers have long done exactly this, knowingly or intuitively, to deliver a well-rounded music education.

While the concept of a “three-dimensional” pianist may sound new or even exotic, it really isn’t. All successful musicians engage Musical Mind, Body and Soul in their performance. The purpose of the terminology and perspective shared here is simply to illuminate more clearly what it is that makes some more successful at the piano than others.

In this article I will consider these three dimensions of musical learning in turn, explaining how we can nurture and monitor each, and suggesting how our recognition of Musical Mind, Body, and Soul can help us develop as teachers, learners, and players.

The Appeal of Einaudi’s Music

PATHWAYS FOR TEACHING

Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES

The inspiration for this article came from a discussion with my wife Louise, who is a clinical specialist in mental health; I am immensely grateful for her insights, which are peppered throughout.

I was recently amused by a message I received from a parent of one of my teenage students, who contacted me saying,

“I thought this might make you smile. Over the last 7-10 days I have never heard the piano practised so much. A beautiful piece which I am told is called Nuvole Bianche. When I enquired why I was hearing more practise I was told (and I quote) ‘it’s a proper piano piece’.”

It’s a story which I am sure could be echoed by many of my colleagues, both in communities up and down this country, and far beyond. And yet, many of my musician friends seem to regard Einaudi’s music with a sniffy contempt, a disdain that appears out of proportion to any offence it could possibly have caused.

In some cases this is undoubtedly rooted in a sense of injustice that he has enjoyed such commercial success from doing, in their view, so little.

More often perhaps, they are baffled that music so lacking in the complexity they themselves enjoy could be so highly prized by others. According to this view, Einaudi’s work is, at best, a gateway that might lead the uninitiated into the more rewarding musical territory that they inhabit, albeit a gateway they personally prefer to position themselves a very long way away from.

To adopt such a viewpoint is potentially to deprive ourselves of a deeper understanding of what it is exactly that makes Einaudi’s music so very appealing, and to so many. And if we can understand that, we might be better equipped to perform and teach Einaudi’s music with sympathetic intelligence, and more effectively decipher and communicate with audiences when promoting other music.

Should Piano Teaching Be Regulated?

PATHWAYS FOR TEACHING

Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES

Please note: this intended audience for this article is UK educators. The regulation of music teaching in other countries may vary considerably, and is not discussed in this post.

The thorny question of whether piano teachers should be legally required to have particular qualifications before “being allowed” to teach cropped up online this week. Sadly, I once again found myself consoling able teachers who felt invalidated by the comments and hubris of others.

It is surely obvious that gaining qualifications should be a basic goal for all professionals. However, it seems equally evident that here in the UK, music teachers enter the profession via many different but complementary routes. A background in performing, the knowledge and skills developed in other professions and through our lived experience all contribute to who we are as teachers, and that’s a virtue which many rightly celebrate.

I believe that it is a mistake to conflate good teaching with qualifications. Consider the point that most of us can remember qualified teachers from our school days who weren’t very good. Similarly, most of us have met truly inspiring music educators with little or no formal training.

Minimum qualifications could only be mandated in a context where the music teaching profession becomes a regulated one, in which private teaching is monitored and many excellent professionals are shut out. I would hate to see this happen, and in any case very much doubt that politicians have an appetite for imposing regulatory monitoring of private tuition or musical activity in the community.

That said, for the benefit of those colleagues who apparently remain more interested in the idea, let’s consider what a regulated music teaching profession might look like, and how that might impact educational opportunity and community music making…

Why do we play the piano?

PATHWAYS FOR PLAYING

Supporting Your Piano Playing Journey
Written by ANDREW EALES

The question of why we play the piano would seem to be both an obvious one to ask and an easy one to answer. And yet it rarely is.

In this article I consider four “types” of player, while recognising that many of us combine aspects of most or all of them.