Creative Education

Fostering Creativity

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

To become a three-dimensional pianist we need to focus on developing our musical soul: that is, our latent musicality, aural internalisation, deep engagement, and creative expression. These qualities are nurtured by listening with focused intention, and developed through playful exploration at the piano.

Creativity is expressed through composing, improvising, and by developing a personal interpretation when playing the music of others. These are too often neglected in formal education and assessment, but they maximise our fulfilment at the piano and promote lifelong musical engagement.

Beethoven’s legendary quip that “to play without passion is inexcusable” points us toward the importance of nurturing the expressive and creative impetus at the heart of our playing.

A Dozen a Day • Counting Rhythm

Educational Resources

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

Fans of the beloved A Dozen A Day series of piano exercise books from the Willis Music Company (reviewed here) may have noticed the recent arrival of a new title in the series. A Dozen A Day: Counting Rhythm supplements the popular piano books with a slim volume of “pre-practice rhythm exercises for all instruments”.

The book’s writer remains uncredited, but is not Edna Mae Burnam (1907-2007), who created the original classics. Nevertheless, this modest addition to the series respectfully aligns with the look and feel of her originals, as well as progressively matching the concepts, rhythmic values and meters of the first four Dozen A Day books.

I have begun trialling this material with a few elementary learners, and am finding it a distinctive and useful studio addition…

Kerstin Strecke • Little Moods

Pianodao Music Library

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

If you are familiar with Breitkopf & Hāretel’s Pädagogik series you will likely have come across the name Kerstin Strecke, composer of their delightful and inventive series of childrens’ books featuring Tio, the Little Keyboard Man.

Strecke’s latest is a collection of 15 original pieces, Little Moods, about which we are told,

“Little Moods aims to be a building block for versatile piano lessons with children, teenagers and adults. The 15 self-contained, round-sounding miniatures are musically easy to grasp and therefore easy to learn. They are suitable for sight-reading and are especially good for practising the use of the right pedal. If the one or the other piece is then transposed into other keys in a courageous and experimental way or taken as a starting point for one’s own improvisations, the purpose of the collection is more than fulfilled.”

When the review copy arrived a few weeks back, it got buried somewhere in the pile on my piano. Happily it has resurfaced: I am genuinely excited by this beautifully presented and keenly priced collection, and think it could prove to be a real winner….

The First 50 Chords

Educational Resources

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

Hal Leonard’s First 50 series has been a popular success, offering bumper collections which each include 50 very simplified arrangements of songs ranging from jazz standards to West End hits, TV favourites and more.

I often advise players to adapt such “easy piano” arrangements to include authentic rhythms by ear, and amplify what is on the page by turning to the chord symbols. Happily, such symbols are included throughout the First 50 series, although for beginners approaching this material they, too, may seem a foreign language.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a simple primer introducing all the basic chords in a logical sequence, linked to their use in well-known songs?

Well now there is. Written by Alistair Watson and joining this growing songbook series, First 50 Chords You Should Play on Piano recently landed from Hal Leonard, and could well prove to be more than just a useful supplement to the songbooks in the series…

Paul Harris’s Musical Doodles

Educational Resources

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

From time to time I have the good fortune of enjoying a curry with my friend Paul Harris, and as often as not we end up sat at a piano, diving into his latest musical doodles…

“I’ve been working on my next Piece a Week book, and this is what I’ve got so far”,

…or similar words will precede his playing, with the modest disclaimer,

“I’ve only spent a couple of days on these, so they aren’t all quite as I want them yet.”

This is followed by a performance of some 20 pieces, all composed within the preceding 48 hours or so. And even though I know that Paul, genius that he is, can routinely pour out another set of brilliantly characterful and playable pieces, I am consistently amazed at how creative yet well honed his gift for composition is.

Bartók famously resisted teaching composition, and he had a point. How does one even begin?

With his latest creation, Musical Doodles, Harris perhaps offers something better: an opportunity for any musician, however elementary and whatever their instrument, to have an enormous amount of fun exploring the nuts and bolts of creativity, quite possibly developing their understanding, experience, engagement and musical inspiration in the process.

Let’s take a look at Musical Doodles…