Last night I watched my former piano teacher, Detlev Bender, give a wonderful recital featuring pieces by Scarlatti, Brahms and Glass. An Etude by Glass stood out particularly, and as I was getting to know it this morning, it struck me that it might be combinable with a Minuet by Petzold. To my delight, it works much better than I was expecting! (See video above)
This kind of mashup is a wonderful way to get your students inspired. Take a pattern from one of their pieces and combine it with another. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but sometimes it works really well, and you can really see their eyes light up!
Have you ever done a mashup? Let me know in the comments!
Mentoring sessions
A few weeks ago I started offering Creativity Mentoring Sessions to readers. I’ve had such a lovely time doing them: thanks to Janet, Grace, Sian, Rose, Katherine and Alison! We’ve talked about improvisation activities and how to use variations to teach theory and inspire creativity.
There are just two sessions left. Book now if you want one!
More info here:
Piano Creativity: Mentoring for Teachers
I love helping my students get creative, but I particularly love helping teachers to get more creative in their lessons—especially if they’re nervous about it!
Creativity Digest
It’s high time I sent out a digest of the best articles I’ve read — the last one was in mid April!
There are two articles about creativity, four about finding inspiration/motivation, and two challenging reads.
Creativity Reads
Psychology researcher Nick Kabrél’s article is outstanding — I totally identify with all the steps in his list of “10 steps for achieving a creative breakthrough”. It’s published on the Psyche mailing list, which is always an interesting read.
Composer Danny Mulhern’s MicroMuse Substack offers up regular creativity prompts. I really enjoy it. Besides being a popular composer for TV and film, Danny is a real deep thinker, and he wrote some very astute liner notes for the vinyl edition of my 2019 album Healing.
Inspiring Reads
Teacher Amie Webster’s excellent new mailing list Thrive In Three appears about once a month, and has concise and profound ideas. I’m a big fan of Amie, who is a creativity-focused piano teacher based in BC, Canada. I particularly liked this one from a couple of months ago:
David Barton’s post “Those Who Shaped My Creative Soul” on his Substack A Life More Creative is a beautiful tribute to the kind, patient, generous teachers who helped him become the kind, patient, generous teacher he is today. If you’re feeling a bit jaded or run down, this might be just the encouragement you need.
Andrew Eales’ excellent post “Contradiction and Connection” makes an important related point:
Learning an instrument with a teacher in the real world, necessarily having to regularly and honestly communicate with somebody who is otherwise a stranger, offers relief from the declining opportunity in today’s world to develop emotional maturity.
Composer Simeon Walker just published a lovely, wryly humorous post about that wonderful feeling when you fully enter into a performance, and you feel the audience go with you.
Challenging Reads
Rhonda Rizzo’s excellent post “Pianists and the self improvement trap” reminds us that what’s important is not always what we think it is.
The Curious Piano Teachers recently ran a symposium about the thorny issue of how much to charge for lessons. I was part of the panel, alongside Dr Sally Cathcart, Sharon Mark-Teggert and Angie Tse.
The symposium proved so popular with CPT members that we ended up doing a second, which you can find here.
That’s it!
If you made it this far, congratulations — you’ve earned yourself a reward sticker! Have a wonderful weekend.
Yours,
Garreth
Share this post