Pedagogy Advice – ‘Dear Abby’ panel discussion

Seeking Pedagogy Advice – How I found myself in Ohio one hot weekend in June…

Seeking pedagogy advice is much easier to do now with the internet, e-mail, Facebook forums, and pedagogy conferences. After hearing such great things about the MTNA National Conference in Texas a few months ago, I was really excited to attend my very first piano pedagogy weekend seminar in Ohio. I had made connections with Dr. Christopher Fisher, Chair of Keyboard Studies at the Ohio University School of Music (and also the Artistic Director of the Piano Pedagogy Seminar) and creators of Piano Safari: Dr. Julie Knerr and Katherine Fisher. Seizing the opportunity to travel, (12-hour drive anyone?) I rearranged teaching schedules, found substitutes, gave last minute recital advice, taught a full day of lessons, then hopped into the packed van. My husband drove through the night to get me to the 11:00 a.m. registration! (Thanks hubby!)

Dear Abby: A Pedagogy Advice Column

After a wonderful seminar weekend, I had a head crammed full of ideas, learning, and excellent music. The weekend was filled with electrifying masterclasses, clinics, and concerts. Dr. Christopher Fisher kindly gave me permission to record the final informal panel discussion called “Dear Abby: A Pedagogical Advice Column” with the view of turning it into this article.

Panelists included Greg Anderson, Elizabeth Joy Roe, E. L. Lancaster, Gayle Kowalchyk, Christopher Fisher, Katherine Fisher, Gail Berenson, Julie Knerr, Deborah Price and Stephanie Price. For brief biographies, please scroll down to the end of the article.

I am grateful to the panel for the advice they gave and for consenting to be recorded and immortalized in print! Many of the questions spoke to the topic of duos and duets, which was the general theme of the weekend seminar. (In case you are wondering, only the last question was asked by me).

The Panel offers Pedagogy Advice on memorization

Question #1 : I noticed that your concert (speaking to Anderson and Roe) was done mostly by memory. What are your thoughts on memorizing?

Elizabeth: Two piano or duet playing is ultimately chamber music. I play a lot with string players and other configurations and I always use the score. We, on the other hand, know the music so well at this point that we don’t rely on it. But we don’t see any shame in using music if that’s going to make you play better and enjoy the experience.

Greg: For myself, when it’s from memory, I get so much more nervous! I spend all my practice time reviewing memory so that I am ultimately prepared on the stage, but that ends up being a distraction from enjoying myself or practising the musical elements during the limited practice time that we have. The two of us aren’t real sticklers for or against memory, really whatever works for the individual person.

E. L.: In our studio in Oklahoma, we had four performance classes every year. The February performance class was always a duet performance class. The parents were invited to one performance class a year, and over the years, the parents were always vying to get into the duet performance class. We never required the students to memorize in those classes, but they were given only a month or two to get these pieces to a tremendous performance level.

Deborah: With the chamber music that we do, we often take the music away, and we did this with one of our piano trios. We took away their music because they were always staring at it! They were doing scales and were staring at their stands! We take the music away. We let them just experience it. It’s amazing how much they already have memorized.

There are groups now that use it as a showy thing to go by memory, but it’s definitely not something that we require. It’s something that just happens with a lot of our students. I had one guest artist that came in to work with a group that was playing by memory. The guest said, “This is not a good idea. They should not be doing this.” He was very negative about it. I said, “Why don’t you just go in and work with them and see how they do?” He came out, extremely positive about it: “That was amazing! They wrote things down! They could assimilate things very quickly.”

It depends on the student. I am all for being comfortable. If you are going to go in there and be worried about memorization, you are not going to connect with the members of your group or your audience. Be comfortable.

Pedagogy Advice on Playing Melodies that Sing

Question #2 : This one is directed at Anderson and Roe: what’s your secret to playing ‘singing’ melodies?

Elizabeth: Literally ‘singing’ the line. Both of us were lucky to have teachers that encouraged that kind of tone. It’s something that was cultivated in our musicianship. There’s something about singing that forces you to pay attention to what’s really natural. Your voice dictates the phrase without even having to analyze or think about it.

Question #2 continued : I meant what do you do with your hands to produce the tone of ‘singing’ melodies?

Greg: That’s something that I don’t even think about anymore. I had one teacher that was very much into  the rounded hands and imagining playing with clay and scooping it out of the key. But then this other teacher wanted it to go the other way and push into the key! <laughter> We talk about listening a lot. If we hear it before we play, hear the sound and quality of sound that we want, at this point, we’ve played so much, our bodies almost just know what to do. But it takes a very active approach to the creation of your tone. You have to just be thinking in advance of what sounds you want the piano to be making.

Elizabeth: Generally, I feel that sometimes young people play a little too much on the surface. Don’t force the note but use your arm weight and get into the keys and coax that sound out. It’s something visceral, I can’t even analyze how I’m moving my arm!

Gail Berenson: That underscores how important the listening and the experimenting is to one’s learning. When we encourage our students to practice, part of the practising process is that experimentation. Ask yourself: “If I try this, what kind of sound do I get, and if I try that, how does that change it?” You develop a palette, when you’ve played long enough, when your brain thinks of this creative idea, your body knows how to respond to create it.

Pedagogy Advice on Copyright Issues

Question #3 : Does it take a long time to obtain copyright permissions to do a radio cover?

Greg: There are four umbrellas of copyright: publishing, performance, recording, and video. You can give a lecture on each one of these categories and still not cover all the bases! When it comes to publishing, we publish with Gayle and E. L. We kind of hand it to them and they work their magic (which can be extremely challenging even for their professional team of lawyers).

Question #3 continued : What about YouTube?

Greg: YouTube takes care of it for you. Now the licensing companies are watching what’s going up, and it’s done electronically. It recognizes melodies or sees key words and finds stuff. For example, we didn’t have to do anything for our Taylor Swift video. The moment it went up, it notified us that Taylor Swift’s organization would be receiving ad royalties for the video. In a few cases, they’ll take things down, but YouTube is kind of taking care of a lot of that.

E.L.: The publishing industry is very different with pop music, though. There are certain pieces where you have rights to pieces only for a certain amount of time, and any time you do a new pop album, you have to send it to your business affairs department, and the piece that you used last week might not be available for you to use this week.

Greg: We just find the big picture extremely frustrating because the two of us are so inspired by the past and history. Classical music was really relevant 200 years ago because pianists could take the pop tunes of the day and create all these Fantasy pieces that would lure audiences to their concerts. Now, we face a lot of challenges when trying to do something similar. It is very hard for the musicians to stay relevant in the same sort of way.

Pedagogy Advice on Composing

Question #4 : Who does the majority of the composition and when do you actually have time to practice and compose?

Greg: The two of us don’t sleep.

Elizabeth: We sleep on planes.

Greg: For the general composing, we always have a brainstorm session. I do the composition while I’m walking, running, or in the shower, in my head. Then I write it, either by hand or Sibelius. I take it to her, and we kind of work from there. There are a lot of revisions, sometimes technical, sometimes musical. Often, we’re changing arrangements as we’re performing.

Pedagogy Advice on Relationships

Question #5 : You mentioned in your clinic that a lot of the duo teams especially the husband and wife often have arguments. It made me wonder what was your biggest fight?

Elizabeth: It’s yet to come… <laughter> I feel like we are diplomatic naturally, and because we don’t have the same emotional attachment as a married couple, there’s less weird boundary issues. I can’t even think of one big moment where we blew up. We don’t agree on everything! I don’t want to pretend that we are perfect all the time and have the same mind. We obviously are independent people and have differences of opinion, but we also go back to what’s the essential priority that will make the music come alive and try to honour and respect our friendship. I’m kind of curious about the marriages here…

Greg: There’s at least two couples here…

Christopher: We’ve been blessed. We rarely have disagreements

Katherine: It’s not like we agree on every single interpretation, but usually we talk about the reasons, and we can compromise in a happy way.

Deborah: The same goes for working with siblings. My sister and I played together, and we were in a two set of sisters quartet. It was an interesting dynamic because there were things that they couldn’t even teach us because we already knew instinctively so much about each other and the way we play. We would just battle it out with each other, sister to sister. But then between families–we were the kindest people ever! I learned a lot from that process, and now it’s the mother/daughter dynamic. We perform together quite a bit, and we realize that you can treat each other as a colleague as opposed to the blood relationship.

Stephanie: Remind your students about the number one goal of a musician: to entertain the audience, or whatever their group goal is for that one performance. Good communication is achieved by accepting someone’s idea and trying their idea and having them do the same for you. Then owning that idea together is something to always remind the students especially the ones that are siblings or married.

Deborah: We have a contract for our students that they sign. It’s an interesting constitution that says to leave out the verbal artillery (not my words, but the lawyer who wrote it). We also talked in our session about the four agreements (see below). With one quartet, I group texted them: “Everybody give me the four agreements, and now you are going to say it before every rehearsal and say it after every rehearsal to remind each other.” It’s tough because with social media, the students can say some pretty nasty things to each other. We have 100 students and want to be inclusive. Be kind to each other. Be thoughtful. Build these important relationships. Years from now you are going to play together.

The four agreements were: 

1. Don’t take things personally
2. No assumptions
3. Be true to your word
4. Always do your best

E. L.: It’s much easier if I do what she (Gayle) tells me. Actually, that’s not really true. We don’t argue.

Gayle: We don’t argue. Maybe we just don’t play together enough.

Katherine: I’m thinking about what happens when we are creating a product in partnership. Julie and I met each other in 2002. It’s just been really great because I feel like together, we bring our ideas to the table. With all our discussions, we settle on one course, and it ends up to be a better end product, no matter who won that particular discussion. There’s not one single decision in our books that I feel like that was the wrong decision. It came together in a better way.

Julie: It used to be that if we had a disagreement we’d say, ‘well…let’s think about it… ” and it would work itself out.

E. L.: We’ve done projects with lots of people in our editorial world at Alfred. Usually whenever you do a joint project, everybody thinks they did the most work. The reality is, if you have the right pairing, everyone has his or her own strengths, and you quickly learn who can do what and who can’t do what and who does certain things well and you have to have a leader who pulls it all together and keeps everyone happy.

Gayle: With Alfred’s Premier Piano Course, since there were five authors, we all signed something to this effect that E. L. would have the final word if we all couldn’t agree on something, he would be the one who would decide: this is how we’ll do it.

E. L.: I don’t even think there were things where I had to make a final decision, but everybody agreed to that, no problem.

Gayle: For you…!!

Pedagogy Advice on Writing Arrangements

QUESTION #6: (to Anderson and Roe) What are your thoughts on writing arrangements?

Elizabeth: With certain pieces, we’re just happy to play the existing version. But when we decide to take on a piece and arrange it, it’s because we find a reason to re-imagine it or to present it in a new light. We listen to the orchestral score, spend more time with it and think about it, or think what is it within the piece in terms of its spirit or emotional content that we can bring out more. Is there a really cool orchestral element that is missing in the existing version, and how can we add it? We don’t have a set formula for arrangement.

Pedagogy Advice on Keeping Students Motivated

QUESTION #7 : Teenagers! How do you motivate these hormonal young people to stick with piano?

Stephanie: Surround them with other students of their age! When you are surrounded with those other students that think as you do, they get to talk to each other together and have that social time. As much as we are always yelling at our students, “OK! It’s time to practice”, it’s good to actually have them come a few minutes early to rehearsal and socialize. When you take away the social media and have them in front of each other and playing together, the chemistry that happens! Getting them around other students is so important. Especially in college, there’s a tendency to get stuck in the practice room.

We have sight-reading parties that the kids are begging for. For pianists it can be scary, but you can be creative–one reads RH, one reads LH, they just have a good time.

Even when we have residencies with some of the famous groups. Professional adults remember they had the same thing when they grew up. They also communicate that they had fun and they do have fun. They can have a career! Nowadays in the 21st century, you can have many different versions of a music career. Just reminding them that they have different options: not just concert halls, but YouTube,  doing lesson via Skype, etc. There are so many options nowadays.

Deborah: If you really want to play chamber music, you also have to build your solo playing. That helps motivate the students. We get notes, e-mails, have conversations with people who said they were going to quit until they discovered chamber music. Others that didn’t want private lessons are now taking private lessons. Any kind of chamber music to me is the key to getting motivation.

E. L.: The answer to your question about teenagers: use anything that you can beg, borrow and steal! I think it requires us to be flexible. It requires us to incorporate the parents. It requires us to be willing to say they are at the end of where they are going to study. Gayle talked about her student who came back: as long as you get them excited about music then they get to that point. I stopped for a couple of years. I went back to it. Dropouts happen. But there are worse things in life as long as it’s still in them to like music. They’ll go to Anderson and Roe concerts.

Elizabeth: What kept me connected was finding some sort of emotional connection to the music. If you are dealing with hormonal teenagers, you’ve got to find a way to channel that angst, anger, and frustration. Find a piece that they can relate to where they can express those feelings. What a wonderful catharsis for them. It motivates them to practice. I was kind of a loner. I did my lessons, and I had my friends at school and my family, but that was a way for me to stay motivated, and that’s something that is applicable no matter what age you are.

Greg: I remember when I was a teenager feeling like music was not cool. Sports: cool. Music: not at all. To myself, I thought it was awesome and exciting. Often when we are making our music videos, we are trying to give our past selves something to show their friends, like look: music, piano playing can be badass! We want to give them something so that they can stand in front of their friends confidently and say: “Look at what I’m doing and look at how exciting this is!” Sometimes they may actually feel that way but they are just so afraid of public opinion. So, if you as teachers can just authentically communicate your personal love for it, they might just hear from another source beyond their inner selves that it actually can be cool, and people do like and enjoy it.

Gayle: I think it’s the mindset of parents now where they want their kids to try everything: dance, soccer, diving. So let’s try music! Then there’s the thing that you have to have ‘fun’ with whatever you’re doing, too. Sure, we want our students to have fun, but there’s gotta be a little bit of growing pains as you go along. You’ve got to have discipline, structure, and we all know the benefits of studying music. I can say just with our own son, music gave him a lot of self-esteem, especially in high school.

If we can find out ways for our students to stand out on their own by either going to a lesson or feeling so good about their lessons. Teenagers are probably there because they like you. You’re spending undivided attention on them which they maybe don’t get at home. If we can build them up and make them feel good about their music, then that will help them stick with it.

Julie: One easy thing I do before the first person of the day: I’m making sure that I’m practising. My piano faces opposite from the door and so the kids that come first for their lessons have started sneaking in to see how long they can sit there before I notice they’re there. “Oh! You scared me to death!” I say, and they laugh. One little girl said, “We just try to be as quiet as possible so we can keep hearing the music.” The kids get to hear that I love music, that I practice and they like listening to it. That’s an easy thing to do right before the lessons start.

Pedagogy Advice Panel

The Pedagogy Advice Panel was given at the end of a wonderful weekend packed with great teaching, music making, and ideas. The members of the pedagogy advice panel were:

The Anderson and Roe Piano Duo Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Roe are two dynamic individuals that formed their musical partnership in 2002 while they were students at Julliard School. Tours around the world, new albums, concerto performances, The Rite of Spring music film, and their YouTube videos have pushed this piano duo to the forefront.

E.L. Lancaster is Senior Vice President and Keyboard Editor-in-Chief at Alfred Music. Dr. Lancaster received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He is a highly-valued contributor to teacher workshops throughout the world and spent many years as a teacher at the University of Oklahoma, and at his independent piano studio with his wife, Dr. Gayle Kowalchyk.

Gayle Kowalchyk is the Senior Keyboard Editor for Supplementary Piano Publications for Alfred Music Publishing. She holds various degrees in piano performance and pedagogy and teaches class piano and piano pedagogy at California State University, Northridge. She is also the co-author of many educational piano books, along with her husband, Dr. E.L. Lancaster.

Deborah Barrett Price serves on the faculty of Denison University teaching viola, violin, and chamber music. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of CMC (Chamber Music Connection). She has directed many projects in Ohio, such as the CMC Jazz and Improv workshop, the New American Music Project, and CMC Conservatory Series and Residencies with CMC students and guest artists.

Stephanie Price is currently the Assistant Artistic Director and Fellowship Program Director of the Chamber Music Connection. She is also the current visiting artist at Ohio University, teaching Viola and chamber music. She received her Masters in Viola Performance and Literature from Eastman School of Music.

Christopher Fisher is Associate Professor of Piano at Ohio University and is also the Chair of the Keyboard Division.  He teaches applied piano, group piano, and piano pedagogy. Dr. Fisher is an author and composer. Most recently, he co-authored the revised and expanded edition of Piano Duet Repertoire. Dr. Fisher frequently plays both solo and collaborative recitals and performs as part of the Fisher Piano Duo with his wife, Katherine Fisher. He received his Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the University of Oklahoma.

Katherine Fisher serves on the faculty of the Athens Community Music School at Ohio University. She is the co-author of Piano Safari, a widely used piano method book. She and her husband, Dr. Christopher Fisher, form the Fisher Piano Duo and have together authored and edited Piano Duet Repertoire. She received her Master of Music in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the University of Oklahoma.

Julie Knerr teaches piano in her home studio in Windsor, Connecticut and was also a previous faculty member of University of Missouri, Oklahoma City University, and Ohio University. She holds her Ph.D. in Music Education with an Emphasis in Piano Pedagogy from the University of Oklahoma. She is the co-author of Piano Safari. Her current research includes elementary level piano technique, lesser known pre-college piano repertoire, and group piano pedagogy.

Gail Berenson is Professor Emerita of Piano at Ohio University. She is an active performer and chamber musician and performs in the Ohio University Lyric Duo with flutist, Alison Brown Sincoff. Gail is in demand as a performer, clinician, master class artist, adjudicator, author, reviewer and pedagogy consultant.

Return to the top of this page.

Return to home page of the-piano-studio.com.