OLE! Multi-cultural Piano Music

I just got home from teaching feeling pretty good about my last student’s lesson. He’s a senior in high school, just counting down the days until he’s free for the summer and then off to college on the opposite corner of the country. We’ve been working on pop music, reading from fake books for the last year or two. In the beginning this was a way to make the lessons more interesting, but now our weekly half hour is just plain fun. Each week I throw in a little sight reading because, hey, it’s April of senior year. Practicing? What’s that?

One of the books I got in my last music book order was a volume of original Latin American Dance music, !Ole! by Lee Evans. We read through a Rhumba today as well as a Conga and a Merengue. We also talked about the documentary, Mad Hot Ballroom, and to top it off, what do I see on TV tonight? Sugar Ray Leonard dancing the Pasa Doble on DWTS.  So yes, piano lessons are more than Hanon and Clementi.

Today, over at ComposeCreate, Wendy had a terrific guest post by Kristin Yost, Executive Director of the Centre for Musical Minds in Frisco, TX. She talks about what it means to be a “modern” piano teacher. One criteria she uses is “Multi-culturalism. She says:

The teacher embraces many backgrounds and musical tastes in lessons. Teaching music from other countries in order to develop an appreciation for good music in ALL forms. Recently I had the privilege of writing pedagogical commentary for a new series, Piano Accents, and am thoroughly convinced it is our responsibility as piano teachers, to make music from all over the globe come alive, not just music from western Europe.

!Ole!

Please read the entire post – Modern Piano Teacher as Entrepreneur.