The Pathways Series – Page 3

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Pianodao features hundreds of FREE articles and reviews to support pianists, teachers, and students everywhere. Explore recent highlights:

Spring Repertoire Project

There’s perhaps no better time than the Spring months for embarking on exciting new piano projects, but let’s also remember to give our perennial ‘Active Repertoire’ a timely spring clean…

Written in partnership with musician and broadcaster Jack Pepper, with a foreword by Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, ‘Music We Might Have Played’ brings together nineteen stunning piano solos for early advanced players.

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

ADHD has had a huge impact on my piano journey. And my wife has three decades clinical experience treating ADHD. Together, we have created this page to offer expert advice and support.

10 Piano Resolutions for 2026

HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2026! And good news for piano players looking to turn over a new leaf in the coming weeks and months: there’s no shortage of positive goals that we can embrace…

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Putting the PLAY back into Playing the Piano

Pianodao Articles • Full Archive

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
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?

Pianodao Articles • Full Archive

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

It’s no secret that I have 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 however, I am absolutely a fan! 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.

Here are four key benefits of using graded anthologies which I value, and which students have clearly found helpful over the years, followed by recommendations of some of the very best graded anthologies available today.

The Three-Dimensional Pianist

Pianodao Articles • Full Archive

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Understanding the importance of equally training, nurturing, and developing our musical mind (understanding), body (technique), and soul (musicianship) empowers us to teach, learn, and practise the piano holistically.

Paying attention to each of these 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 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 their importance can help us develop as teachers, learners, and players.

The Appeal of Einaudi’s Music

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
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.