Do you play along with your students during lessons?  Clearly, much of the time it’s important for students to get used to playing on their own, and for you to be able to focus, listen, and watch them without trying to play yourself.  For piano teachers, of course, playing along requires a second piano or a high or low part on the same piano.

But sometimes it’s very useful to play along.  The benefits of doing this stood out this week with one of my students in particular, so I thought I’d throw it out for discussion.

As a student is learning a tune, or piece of music, playing with them can model for them what you find important.  At times, it may be your priority that the student play through a section for the sake of continuity.  By playing along and not stopping for mistakes, you communicate your priority without a word.

Another time, you may want to stop when a note is out of tune or a wrong note is hit, modeling a certain kind of awareness you want the student to think about.

When you play along, (more…)

Are you a member of any of the music organizations listed below? Maybe you can recommend a group that’s not on the list. Is there an organization, whether national or local, that you especially like (or dislike)? Please feel free to tell us, by adding a comment at the end of this article; we’d all appreciate hearing about your experiences.

Music teachers and performers are necessarily people-oriented, and yet many are freelancers, running their own teaching studios, and spend precious time alone practicing, listening, composing, arranging, preparing materials.

Bringing them together is the goal of professional music organizations, which offer networking opportunities, educational workshops and conferences, publications, grants, awards, competitions, insurance, websites, with annual dues ranging from $35 to $120.

Before listing some organizations and their websites, I must confess that the reason I first joined a national music organization was to get half-price instrument insurance. (more…)

In a previous post, we told you of a site where you can download all of Mozart’s music for free.

Well, here is another site that offers a more limited, but still free selection of sheet music downloads from various composers, from Bach to Stravinsky. The scores are public domain editions of the music, which are out of copyright and are therefore free. (more…)

When you play music, how do you think about the beat?  Musicians often think of the beat note as the beginning of something, probably because of written music.  After all, the beat note begins every measure, and beamed notes usually connect the beat note with those that follow.

But is that how we hear it?  Is that how we play it?  Maybe most revealing, is that how we sing it?  Not really.  But I suspect that whichever way we think about this can make a big difference in how we play, practice, and teach music. 

Think of the sentence, “The cat climbed up to the top of the tree.”  If you wrote the rhythm of this sentence in music, it would look like this:

              (more…)

You may have noticed various websites popping up to match people up–some are for dating, of course, but others are for matching artists and performance venues, such as www.matchbook.org in New England, and others are for helping students and teachers find each other.

I checked out a few of these student-teacher services to review and describe a bit about how they work, how much they cost, etc. One seems a bit better organized than others, so that’s the one I’ll discuss this week. It was started a little over a year ago, and is called Click For Lessons.

Based in San Diego, the site has grown tremendously. It matches students with potential teachers not only in music, but also in dance, singing, languages, acting, and art. A lot of the categories are musical instruments, so at first I assumed the main use of the site was for music, but the site’s blog has an article listing the most popular lessons requested in 2006, and many of them were for dancing.

The site’s most popular lesson requests last year were, in order: (more…)