One of the most important basics a piano teacher can impart to a student is proper hand position. I've always thought that it would be really great if I could send a collection of good and bad picture examples to my students for their use at home. Well, now we are all in luck -- I've found a couple web pages with some good pictorial content of hand positions.
This is crucially important for every student, but beginners especially need to pay close attention to hand position for the development of good habits. Good hand postion not only fosters ease and comfort at the keyboard but also keeps your hands and muscles healthy and free of unnecessary injury. In other words, BAD hand position = difficulty and strain at the keyboard. GOOD hand position = making your music easier to play. It takes careful work to get there, but less strain and difficulty is much more fun.
Take a look at these two pages with good picture content of proper hand position:
Piano hand positions at bluesjazzpiano.com (this one also has a movie on hand position.)
Piano sitting and hand positions at Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Soft.com
I'll put this post into a new category called "Piano Technique".
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Hand position Web Pages
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Want to Comment?
Perhaps the most significantly unique feature of a blog is the comment capability. Users of this blog can sign in and leave comments for any individual post (as long as commenting is enabled for that post) and they will appear vertically below the post with the bottom comment being the most recent.
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My only request is that comments should be family-friendly and profanity-free. I encourage minors (most of my students) to use this site, so responsibility dictates this. While I enjoy a heated discussion as much as the next person, users are forewarned that any comment with profane or obscene content will be removed immediately.
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Now that you are all set with your first comment here, you can leave comments on any other Blogger Blog using your account. Pretty nifty!
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
New Evidence that Musical Training Increases Speech Sensitivity
This article summarizes some interesting findings of researchers at Northwestern University:
Research Finds Musical Training Can 'Tune' the Auditory System
It turns out that musical training not only affects one's ability to decipher "sound encoding" in music but also in language. In the study, musically trained subjects faired far better in recognizing tone-sounds in Mandarin than non-musicians. In certain languages such as Mandarin, "tones" (when pitch rises, falls, or stays the same during the utterance of a word) can render different meanings for the same word. The researchers agree that this new evidence has far-reaching implications for educators and brain researchers.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Joshua Nemith's Bio
Pianist JOSHUA S. NEMITH has performed throughout the U.S. and abroad as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral keyboardist. Dr. Nemith was recently awarded the Principal Keyboard position of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra in May of 2007. He is also the principal keyboardist with the IRIS chamber orchestra in Germantown, Tennessee, under the direction of conductor Michael Stern. He completed his doctorate in piano performance at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in June of 2004. Dr. Nemith has recorded new chamber and orchestral works with many groups, including the CCM Wind Symphony, New World Symphony, IRIS Chamber Orchestra, and the Dayton Philharmonic. Dr. Nemith performs regularly at professional venues in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas and has been the accompanist/organist at St. John’s Westminster Union Church in Cincinnati since 2002. He is an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin and the Eastman School of Music and has held fellowship positions with the New World Symphony and the Aspen Music Festival. His teachers include James Tocco, Nancy Garrett, Fernando Laires, and David Burge.
In addition to his performance activities, Dr. Nemith has made music education an important part of his career. He has held several teaching appointments at UC-CCM where he has been an adjunct instructor in the Composition, Theory, and Musicology Division and the Keyboard Studies Division in recent years. He also maintains a private teaching studio at the Slater Music Academy in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky. In February of 2007 he created the “Cincinnati Pianist” weblog (joshuanemith.blogspot.com), which is intended as an educational service for his students as well as a forum to foster online support and commentary for the musical arts. (Please see my resumé page for links to some of the institutions listed above.)
Dr. Nemith is an occasional composer who enjoys writing when he is not preparing performances. He has written for piano, piano and voice, four-hands piano, flute and organ, two piccolos, tuba and trombone, and brass quintet; he has also produced electronic works.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
New Blog Category: Benefits of Musical Training
These days there is more and more scientific research being devoted to the cognitive and intellectual development of humans. Not surprisingly, recent studies considering musical training and study (such as lessons and music classes) are revealing more and more substantial evidence for the benefits, direct and indirect, of participating in musical activities. A longer report from 2002 on the benefits of music education for various kinds of success at the National Association for Music Education: "Music Education Facts and Figures" As time goes on I am sure that more research will yield additional articles to include in this category. If anyone would like to suggest links to related articles they may have seen elsewhere on the web, please let me know via the comment function below or through email.
I've always wanted to know more about this topic than I currently do, so I think it would be perfect timing to try and compile some information on the subject here at the Cincinnati Pianist Blog.
Of course, there is an obvious "selfish" reason for me to do this here -- it could help to convince parents to begin and/or continue lessons for their child, with me as the teacher! But I also think that it is good for us to just be more aware of what we actually gain in the pursuit of musical study. I know that all parents want the best for their child's development as they grow, and I think that knowledge of the benefits reaped by musical training should help us better understand and appreciate the not-so-insignificant investment in private lessons.
To start, here are some links to brief articles on this subject from the recent past:
ScienceDaily report from 2004 on the "The First Solid Evidence That the Study of Music Promotes Intellectual Development" (this study involved keyboard students)
ScienceDaily report from 2006 on how music enhances "Intelligence, Mental Health, and the Immune System" (hmmm...could you practice more and not get sick? Well, maybe that's a stretch...but more practice wouldn't bother me!)
