From You . . .
Theral had me playing the piano in five mintues. It was a miracle. I've always wanted to play, but I'm deathly afraid of the keyboard. Theral gave me a couple ideas and I was playing. It's incredible!
MG
****
Your music is absolutely beautiful!!! If I can figure out how, I'm going to put it on a cd so I can listen while I work. Unless you already have a cd I can buy . . . (I'm not very good at the downloading & technical stuff). It is really very calming for me & as you probably know, I really need it sometimes. ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!
Stay in touch . . . Make sure you stop in again if you are in the area.
Regards,
Joyce
****
Very relaxing . . . slowed me down a bit in a good way. It reminds me of music I listened to in college, William Ackerman, George Winston, Windham Hill artists (I love them all); Your music definitely takes you a way. AFternoon in the Park (I think that was the title . . . very nice . . . painted a picture)
Thanks for sharing! I plan to listen to more of your music.
Donna
****
Hi Theral,
Long time no talk. Hope you are doing well, Love the music, very relaxing and healing. I don't know you are into meditation and healing now!
cheers,
yh
****
When I am in the mood for the spiritual solace of soothing music, I will open my TT playlist on the Ipad, ruminate or read my books.
JT
****
Really lovely stuff!
Thanks for sharing with us. So happy that the creativity is flowing for you with such beautiful results for us to enjoy.
Keep it coming!
hugs,
Gita
|
|
Each student unique Every person is different. Every student approaches the piano and music differently. I recently sat down with a student who was very creative at improvising. Immediately. I don't think he'd improvised before. But he'd get stuck and start playing a song he'd heard before by ear. He would start on something new, then stop, then pick up the familiar tune. When he started something new I told him to keep it going--DON'T STOP. This freaked him out for a moment, then he did it. And he didn't go to the old familiar tune.
Music is constant motion. Does the planet stop rotating around the sun? When you improvise, imagine you're heading down a ski slope. You can cut wide or narrow, you learn to pace yourself so you don't crash and burn. But one keeps going. Let the "hill" of the rhythm keep pulling you. Fall and relax into gravity. If the "wrong" note comes out, keep going. There is no wrong note. Go with the 'mistake.' Let your music go where it wants. Let it guide you. And you will know when you've reached the bottom of the slope and the end of the song has arrived.
Above all else, enjoy. We call it 'play' the piano for a reason.
Teaching studio now open After refining a new teaching method and working with a few private students, I have now opened my piano teaching studio.
Everyone who wants can play music. I teach students to improvise at the piano whether they've had previous training or not. You'll notice when children walk into a room with a piano, they immediately start to play. I love all kinds of music. I play Beethoven, Chopin, Gershwin regularly. One must be trained like Shamu, 5 to 8 hours a day to be a concert pianist from a very young age. For the rest of us, music can still be a great enjoyable part of our lives. We can still unload our burdens, be curious at the smallest of nature's wonders, throb with ancient rhythms in group ritual through music. We can do this just as easily as we express ourselves through daily speech. If we'll just do it. With a few simple hints, a novice at the piano can be improvising in fifteen minutes and having a lot of fun!
I also help students build the technique they'll need to play any kind of music. First of all, improvising opens one up to the impulse that led to the creation of all the great pieces of music. Whey you improvise, you begin to think like a composer. You will understand music better and therefore find it much easier to play Mozart or Moscheles. I diagnose a student's approach to the piano in the first lesson. From there, an individualized method is developed for each student to build on what is good about the approach and change what is holding the student back from free expression.
"Natural," "healing," "meditational" are words others use to describe my music. I improvise after work, after a nice meal, or just to process an event. Playing the piano is very therapeutic. The great thing about improvising is being sensitive to the moment, to what I'm feeling or to those around me. There is an interaction there. Trained as a classical pianist and conductor, I "let go" one day when a friend asked me to play some of my own music. At first I was paralyzed. I'd never gone on my own without a score. Then it came.
The harmonies and rhythms are definitely of a more classical nature. One might hear some influences of the minimalist composers or of Chopin or Beethoven here or there, but not much. Two things are most responsible for my style: The church hymns of my youth. And a line keeps coming back to me from Music History about Prokofiev reminding us that the piano is a percussion instrument.
|
