Keys to Wellbeing

🎶🎹The new year is just around the corner and the gift of music can last a life-time! Whether it is for someone else, or for yourself, grab yourself a fresh start with piano! 🎹🙌🏼

Until the end of January 2024, I'm offering all new students a 20% off any piano lessons or lesson pack of their choosing. Just simply use the code NY2024 at checkout. 🎉🎊

Grab yourself a deal and hope to see you soon!

Celebrate small wins along the way! 🎉 Acknowledge your progress, no matter how small. Whether you've mastered a challenging passage or improved your finger dexterity, take a moment to pat yourself on the back. Remember, every step forward is a step closer to your musical goals. Not only does this boost your confidence, but it also gives your brain that dopamine boost, triggering your reward system. This will have a positive impact in the long-term in bettering your relationship with the piano, strengthening your persistence in the long-haul. These will become your tools you will need to overcome the next challenges ⭐🎶

Now this is a HUGE topic and it applies to both the student AND the teacher. Mistakes are part of our living experiences and learning progresses. They are fundamental to build not only skills but also our characters.

As a student, we get to know our strengths and weaknesses better as we continue to grow, develop and learn. This means, mistakes are the essential tools to help us chisel our craft into a polished result. It's okay to slip up, have a mental blank or freeze during lessons or even in performances. What's important is how you manage the response to that, and look to the support systems you have in place for you to recover positively from this experience. The beauty of this process is, the more you practise minimising the possibility of mistakes, the higher chances you will in building resilience to failure in not only your craft, but you bring these skills into other facets of your life. Essentially, that's what learning music is about - to build a well-rounded, well-functioning human being in our society.

As a teacher, seeing your students make mistakes are the gems for you to show them an alternative option to reach their potential. Afterall, you are their coach, the keeper to share this knowledge with them, the one they turn to for guidance and support. Use these moments of mistakes as a gateway to consider explaining techniques, concepts and interpretations differently. Walk away from your anger, frustration and irritation, because not only does that not serve your students, it also does not serve your wellbeing as a teacher. Your energy will be felt by the student and that will also affect their response to you, to the music and to the overall learning imprint this may last in their learning progress. If you do find that this is an aspect that you find difficult to manage, then this also serves as a golden opportunity for you to re-evaluate your own teaching journey, as burnout is a HUGE thing in our industry. Do something to safeguard your own wellbeing, mental health and readjust what makes you thrive, to experience joy and to bring that joy back into your teaching and to your students.

"The idea, which is maybe specific to classical music, that there is the correct performance of a piece, memorialized in some recording 10 or 30 or 100 years ago, and that the concert should be a reproduction of that. That’s very anxiety-producing."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/music/2022/04/29/jonathan-biss-beethoven-cycle-anxiety/

For pianist Jonathan Biss, embracing Beethoven meant facing anxiety Pianist Jonathan Biss returns to the Phillips Collection to complete his ambitious cycle of all 32 of Beethoven's sonatas.

Thank you to Amani for a candid and authentic review 😘🙏

It's something I've always believed in, to harness the individual power of creativity and to feed it back into the self. I had a very different training process growing up and through trials, tribulations and support, I had the fortune of finding my own path and to share it with other pianists.

Let's keep exploring!

Something I get asked about often - "do you think YouTube or piano apps are good enough for learning?"

Yes to a certain extent! I think Ms. Joubert here summarises beautifully.

I know it's been radio silent here, but we've all been working so hard. Last year with the Melbourne lockdowns, all these amazing students had to learn online - and that's no easy feat when the ear is still developing fine tuning of colour, tone, touch.

We've been so fortunate to have this Student Concert today. Held at the 200 year old heritage building, these budding pianists were able to share their music, and show the fruits of their labour, with a very supportive and joyous audience. We witnessed joy, courage, pride, relief. We witnessed a collective sense of gratitude.

Thank you everyone. ❤️

Bach's 'musical signature'...

While Bach never actually used this clever signature, musicians devised the B A C H score in the 19th century and sketched it out in Bach's hand. In German musical notation, B flat, A, C, B natural are written as B A C H, cleverly spelling out the composer's name. By using a treble clef, tenor clef, alto clef, and another treble clef, this beautiful cross drawing spells out the word with a single note intersecting the four staves.

We've certainly had some interesting moments in our online piano lessons during our Melbourne lockdown too :"D

When online meetings didn’t go as planned From animal interruptions to catching fire, here's a look back at the year we spent (badly) online.

And that's a wrap! The last AMEB results are in and congratulations to all students who sat this year's exams, amid COVID, lockdown, transitions to online lessons and needing to do video exams! A huge congratulations to all my students who received A+ and was awarded their Diplomas - not an easy feat under these circumstances! Now it's time to rest, recharge and regroup. I look forward to working with you all again next year! So proud of you all!

This is a rake (rastrum in latin), a tool used to draw parallel staff lines in music manuscripts.

This is a wonderful event! I strongly encourage all adult piano players to consider joining.

A Zoom concert experience for all students and supporters! Super proud of everyone at for being a trooper in these challenging times as Melbourne goes into harsher lockdown. A bit shoutout to Rita Bee from Be Regen: EcoResilience Practice as co-host for this event.

A Zoom concert experience for all students and supporters! Super proud of everyone at for being a trooper in these challenging times as Melbourne goes into harsher lockdown. A big shoutout to .regen as co-host for this event.

A big shout out to all my adult students! Here to you all.

Like so many of us, Alan Attwood fantasised about playing a musical instrument. The difference is, he decided to do something about it. At age 57, he started piano lessons and embraced a mission: to learn the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
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In this Saturday's Good Weekend Magazine, he shares a glorious tale of tenacity: simply tackling the music bar by bar "like someone trying to read Le Monde using a French dictionary, word by word". By January 2016, he was into the fourth bar of 69; "early in 2017 I was still on Page 1. By October I had reached Page 4; before 2017 was over I had stumbled to the end.”
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For a self-confessed "smart-arse at school, determined to be kicked out of all music lessons" he's come a long way. Read his article here: https://www.theage.com.au/national/play-us-a-song-i-m-not-a-piano-man-yet-20200604-p54zn6.html Photo: Kristoffer Paulsen.
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- and I'll add something into that mix: MINDFUL repetition and practice heightens our relationship with our work, which is far better than MINDLESS repetition! Invite joy, curiosity and experimentation into what you do!

Did a snazzy whiteboard visual of a song with a student, who is learning this piece by ear, and with lessons online! Can you guess the song??

Lorna "Lorna" was composed during the first lockdown in VIC, Australia. It is dedicated to Lorna Breen, a medical doctor in the US. This is a celebration of her li...

"A good listener is not a sponge that absorbs but a trampoline to bounce ideas off!"

Sketchnote via
Ideas via Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman