When choosing the right teacher for lessons in NYC, it’s important to choose right the first time. You don’t want to waste time building a relationship you’ll outgrow, or worse, find yourself dissatisfied with your teachers’ methods. But if you follow these three tips you’ll be able to know that you’re getting a piano teacher worth your time and money.
Classical piano training
First of all, make sure that your piano teacher has been classically trained. Many of the teachers at this piano instruction company, have studied at elite institutions such as Juilliard, Columbia University, and the Manhattan School of Music. Some of our piano teachers have played around the world and performed with internationally recognized musical groups. The bottom line is that they’ve spent decades refining their craft, so that teaching it comes naturally to them.
Teachers with musical passion
It makes a big difference when you have a piano teacher who loves music as their passion, who has spent their entire life cultivating an understanding and love for piano. Other piano teachers who have a side gig teaching English or doing something else, and continue teaching piano just to make an extra buck are definitely worth avoiding, since they won’t be able to take your progress seriously.
Musical fluency
It goes without saying that when your piano teachers are classically trained and love what they do, they can also read music fluently. This is crucial for helping you to play more advanced pieces, for teaching you how music works and helping you gain greater proficiency during your piano lessons overall. Being able to sight read allows you to understand musical theory, which is crucial to becoming an advanced musician. If you don’t know how to read music, or if you eventually stop piano lessons and forget how to read music, it’s easy to plateau as a musician, so that all of the hard work and practice you put in over the years falls away, taking you to the point of where you were a few months after you first started piano lessons.
A piano teacher who meets the above three criteria is the kind of piano teacher to keep working with for years. You won’t outgrow your relationship despite how good you become. When you choose piano lessons with Music to Your Home, you can expect some of the best teachers in NYC.
In the history of the world’s music, perhaps no era was as instrumental and sublime as the baroque. If you’re taking at home violin or piano lessons you probably recognize this based on the difficulty of playing baroque music; it’s a kind of holy grail attainable only through years of practice and a full understanding of how your instrument and music work.
What the baroque has wrought
The baroque saw the creation of tonality, the return to a tonic, or stable note, after playing a variety of notes. It was also when opera, cantata and sonata became major art forms. It started in Florence, the center of the Renaissance, in the late 16th century. Under Count Giovanni de Bardi, a group of intellectuals chose to return to Classical forms of music, namely, Ancient Greek, especially in the monody of a singer accompanied by a single melody. This was the beginning of opera. Harmony became important, too, thanks to counterpoint; and dissonance was employed through tritones, a note three tones higher than the key note of that tone.
While Monteverdi, Purcell, and Handel are all regarded as influential and important figures by those who have ever taken a piano lesson, one man above all is especially revered: Johann Sebastian Bach. Not only does the complexity of Bach’s music far surpass his contemporaries’, but the working passion which Bach made use of during his career, the fact that each of his cantatas is a dedication to the glory of god, and also a lamentation for being unable to reach that heavenly realm, well, it is easy to see why his name is so frequently bandied about whenever we talk about piano lessons or classical music of any kind, really.
The legacy of the baroque
Yes, the baroque, that era of history from 1630 to 1750, ending with the death of Bach, was the greatest era of music the world has ever known. My uncle once pointed out that the 1940s through 80s were a similar era, what with the emergence of blues and rock n’ roll and hip-hop, Elvis and the Beatles, Madonna and Michael Jackson, but it will be difficult to know in our lifetimes, because not enough time will have passed for us to put into perspective just how great it was; after all it took another seventy-five years before Bach went from esteemed composer to the greatest of all time, his work was that far ahead of his era, that while he was respected and famous while alive, he was not as renowned as he is today, and part of this is due to just how sublime his music is; in truly great pieces of music, such as the St. Matthew’s Passion, or any of his cantatas, or his Magnificat, it is hard to understand the import of a work until well after that musician is dead, after the public has forgotten about him and everyone alive during the time he was alive is dead too; only then can we listen to a piece of music as Mendelssohn did Bach and understand that here was one of the world’s greatest geniuses ever to live, and that everyone else should understand the joys and longing he has attempted to define.