Music Teacher's Helper Blog

Usually new resolutions are made to break a habit–over eating, avoiding exercise, partaking in a favorite yet unhealthy past time.

Why not add a habit that my enrich your skills as a musician and enhance your students’ experience at the keys? Join the Eye Ear Revolution….Here’s the scoop:

Eye players read music; Ear players improvise. To broaden their musical creativity and stylistic range, contemporary musicians need instruction in both. Reading music and playing by ear used to be common among European classical musicians until about 100 years ago. Then, as the minimum technical abilities required to interpret and play the repertoire grew with increasing complexity, creative music making gradually ceased to be a part of formal music education.

Creative Keys, a joint effort of Bradley Sowash and me, Leila Viss, is carving a path for 21st century strategies that balance and combine the eye and ear. At 88CreativeKeys.com (a blog founded by Creative Keys) you will find the following:

1) Exercises to develop ear skills

2) Articles about what inspires the mind of an improviser and composer

3) Outside-the-box ideas to color your teaching, playing, performing…

4) AND….We’re promoting the first EVER: Eye Ear Revolution

In 2013, make a RESOLUTION to join the EYE EAR REVOLUTION and IMPROVISE every week, why not every day. Summon the artist inside you along with your students and friends.

For the month of January, the weekly “color” or tip will be associated , appropriately, with the

number one.

Click here for the first of 52 hues, and pull out that paint brush.

Instead of focusing on breaking an old “bad” habit, why not add a new, “good” habit, too?

There’s a black and white canvas waiting for you!