Cassa Piano Pedagogy

Cassa Piano Pedagogy (In-person Includes lunch)

In-Person: July 14, 2025, 9am-4pm (Brentview Baptist Church)
Teachers (includes lunch): Early Bird $99, after June 1 $119. Students: Early Bird $49, after June 1 $89.

Online: July 21-22, 2025, 9am-12pm
$89 both sessions, $49 per individual session

The topics for Piano Pedagogy are as follows:

• The Secret Life of the Left Hand

• Do You Hear What I Hear? Teaching Students to Listen

• Proactive or Reactive: What Type of Teacher are You?

• It’s a Numbers Game: Developing Artistic Counting

The Secret Life of the Left Hand

In teaching and playing the left hand is sometimes treated as the “ugly step-sister.” In our efforts to ensure that the right hand projects and sings the left hand is often ignored. In truth, the left hand is an essential contributor to the overall musical integrity of a piece. Among other things, it provides the bass line, the harmonic structure, harmonic fill, and rhythmic propulsion. Using typical intermediate teaching repertoire as examples, various types of left-hand figurations are examined from the perspective of how to increase the vitality of students’ playing.

Do You Hear What I Hear? Teaching Students to Listen

One of the major tasks facing a teacher is getting students to listen to themselves . The main difficulty is in teaching WHAT to listen for – the HOW to listen comes later. Eight strategies will be offered for helping students to become better listeners. Some of these include:

Provide a teaching environment that emphasizes the aural aspect of musicAvoid treating the piano bench as a “Mistake-free Zone”Experiment with teaching methods that Show rather than TellTreat technique as a means rather than an end

Proactive or Reactive – What Type of Teacher are You?

Too often our daily routine of teaching bounces from crisis to crisis and it seems as though our best intentions are often thwarted by the tyranny of the unexpected. Since piano teaching is a complex subject it is helpful to subdivide the field into five main areas: head, heart, eyes, ears, hands. Having global strategies for each of these areas is beneficial in preparing a teacher for any and all eventualities in the studio. While we cannot always control what our students bring to the lesson in terms of preparedness and mental engagement there are two critical areas over which we CAN exercise control — our Attitudes and our Actions. Exploring and understanding the significant elements that encompass the global scope of teaching is essential to becoming an intentional, proactive teacher.

It’s a Numbers Game:  Developing Artistic Counting

As students advance we tend to focus on the higher-level concepts of phrasing, fingering, pedaling, etc. but do we teach them artistic counting beyond simply “naming beats?” Topics examined in this presentation include:  Avoiding the Tyranny of the Downbeat, When to Ignore the Barline, Musical Time vs. Clock Time, Counting Like a Dancer, Naming vs. Numbering Beats, The Pros and Cons of Counting Aloud.  Score excerpts and musical examples, both live and recorded, drawn from the standard repertoire will be used to illustrate the various points.

Guest Artist: Dr. Dale Wheeler