This Halloween I decided to try something different in my studio – hold an online recital! I love finding ways to use technology in my studio, and I think it’s important to use the technological world our students are growing up in to our advantage. I also wanted to do something fun for Halloween but with a recital coming up in December I didn’t feel like we needed two recitals in close succession.

Advantages of Online Recitals

An online recital has many advantages. First, students are able to “invite” ALL of their grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and friends, no matter where they live! What a fun way to share with family members near and far what your students are learning in piano and what progress they are making. With more “attendees” at this type of recital the students can get more support and more positive feedback. This in turn motivates them to continue to practice and progress.

Second, you don’t need to rent out space for your recital or clean your house and get it all set up for a recital. You simply sit at home in your pajamas and upload all of your students’ videos and format it how you want it, then send it off in an email! You also don’t need to stress about recital refreshments or anything else you usually stress about for recitals.

Another advantage that I discovered is that you are able to see each of your students in their home environment, playing on their own pianos. This can be eye-opening, as you can see the quality, the set-up, and the location of the pianos your students are doing their daily practice on.

A recital of this type also encourages some fun parental involvement (if you have the students record their videos at home, as I did) – parents get to help record the performance, optionally edit the video, and sometimes (if they play the piano) they may have the opportunity to play a duet with their child for the recital video.

Now obviously you would not want to hold every recital in this format, but it is a fun way to change things up once a year or so.

I would like to share how I hosted my online recital and all of the steps leading up to it.

Before the Recital: Making Performance Videos

Before the online recital was posted on Halloween, my students did have an opportunity to perform their pieces for each other in a group class. I think performance practice is an essential part of recital prep no matter what type of performance they are involved in. We practiced announcing pieces and bowing, and I had the students write little notes to each other, including what they liked about each performance.

I sent a note home to parents after the group class explaining how the online recital would work (the note also had a little chart for students to mark off after they had completed 5 practice performances, which they had to do before recording their video). Students were each responsible, with their parents’ help, for recording a performance of their recital piece at home. I told them that they could have fun with it and dress up in costume if they would like. We had a ninja, a princess, Mary Poppins, a witch, Darth Vader, and even Napoleon Dynamite performing in our recital! A few students opted to not dress up. There were also a couple of students who strung some spooky Halloween lights across their piano or used fun video effects to make their performance extra spooky.

Many of the students’ pieces had a teacher duet part. A couple of the parents who play the piano accompanied their child at home in their video performance; others I played with them and we recorded a second video during their lesson the week before the recital.

I gave students a deadline for sending me their videos. I found that it was easiest for them to just text me the videos – with smartphones that most people have these days it couldn’t get easier! You can have students record using a smartphone, if they want to edit the video they can use iMovie or similar video editing apps on their phone or computer, then attach the video to a text message.

Uploading the Videos to YouTube

Once I had all of the videos, I uploaded them to YouTube. YouTube has 3 options for privacy – I made sure to mark each of the videos as “Unlisted” and explained to the parents in advance that the videos would be unlisted and not available to view unless you have the link. Once I had all of the videos uploaded, I created a Playlist on my YouTube channel and also marked that as Unlisted.

With all of the videos in the playlist, I moved them around in the order that I chose. It’s very easy to click and drag the videos into whatever order you want once they are in the playlist. The advantage of using a YouTube playlist is that it will play all of the videos in a row automatically; so even if someone starts in the middle of the playlist it will continue through the whole recital.

Creating a Digital Recital Program

Next, I used Word to create a recital program. I changed the page background to orange (because, Halloween!), found a fun font and entered in all of the students’ names with the names of their pieces. I decided to just use first names and last initials, as this was going to be emailed around to friends and family. I ended up using a table to enter in all of the students and their pieces, then made the table border and lines transparent. Once the program was all typed up, here came the fun part!

I went to my YouTube playlist in my internet browser and, one by one, clicked on each student’s video (*be sure that you have the actual playlist opened, not just the individual videos you uploaded to your YouTube channel; if you use the video in the playlist it will continue to play each of the other performances after the selected one). After clicking on a video, I selected the URL address at the top of the browser and copied it. Then I went back to Word, selected that specific student’s name, then right-clicked on their name. From the menu that pops up I selected “Hyperlink.” I then created a hyperlink by pasting in the copied URL address. I also changed the font style of the hyperlink so that it would not make the words blue and underlined (which is the default hyperlink setting). I wanted an orange program with all black words. See the following images for help in adding a hyperlink of a YouTube video to a Word document:

I went through each video and changed each student’s name AND the name of their piece to a hyperlink linking directly to their performance video in my playlist. I also put a link at the top of the program that linked to the full playlist, so you could simply click on that and watch the whole thing. In addition, I created a Google form where viewers could leave comments and feedback for each of the students; there is also a link to that at the top of the recital program.

One important thing that I did when making the recital program was I did NOT click on the hyperlinks until AFTER I had saved the recital program as a PDF. This was because once a hyperlink was clicked on, it changed the color of the font. I am sure there is a way around this, such as customizing the font color and style once the link is clicked on, but I couldn’t figure it out. So I entered in all of the hyperlinks, made sure it all looked good, saved it as a PDF, and then opened the PDF and tested ALL of the links. I made sure they all worked and linked to the correct video.

Click the following link to see what my digital recital program looked like. For the privacy of my students, I have removed all of the hyperlinks except for the one of my performance at the bottom of the program.

online-halloween-recital-program-without-hyperlinks

Creating a Comments Form Using Google Docs

I created a simple form using Google Docs where recital viewers could leave nice comments to the students after watching the recital. I thought this would be a positive way to receive feedback, since they wouldn’t get instant feedback like a traditional recital where viewers are clapping for the student immediately after their performance and congratulating them afterwards. I wrote a little explanation at the top of the form, then made a “question” for each student; I simply entered in each student’s name for each “question” and then changed the answer to a paragraph response.

Emailing the Recital

Once the recital program was complete, I made a simple recital “invite” and saved it as a jpg file. I then sent an email to all of my piano students’ parents (I always use BCC in the “to” field when emailing all parents – this makes it so each person cannot see all of the other email addresses I sent the email to, and when they respond to me it does not send an email to EVERYONE on the list). To this email I attached the recital invite image so it would show up in the email when it was opened, and the digital recital program PDF. Students could then forward on the email to whoever they wanted to view the recital – grandparents, friends, cousins, whoever!

This was a lot of fun and a positive experience for my studio. I hope it helped give you some fun ideas for your next recital!

Happy teaching!

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One mistake we sometimes make as piano teachers is waiting too long to teach certain concepts to students because they haven’t yet reached those concepts in their method books.

Students need opportunities to be challenged, to be inspired and to also use their own creativity to create music. As we do these things, their excitement and love for piano grows, they progress in leaps and bounds and they realize they are capable of so much.

I had a student recently who was not super consistent with piano practice and was not progressing very quickly. She was still a beginner, playing pre-staff notation pieces, and just hadn’t really caught that spark of enthusiasm for the piano. One week she forgot her books, so I used the opportunity to get out some completely different materials and teach her some sight reading skills on the staff. She caught right on, and – voila! – was able to sight read 4 or 5 simple pieces on the staff. She was so ecstatic and proud of herself, and that spark just came alive! Great things can happen when we take a step away from the method books, use our own intuition as teachers and teach that challenge piece, or allow our students to experiment with some harder concepts that we don’t realize they are capable of at that moment.

Read my list of 25 things to do when Students Forget Their Books!

Halloween pieces are a fun way to accomplish this – to get students out of the mundane routine of the method books and to really dip our toes into the world of fun articulations, super musical expression and fun in music. Halloween pieces are sneaky, they’re creepy and quirky and students have so much fun playing these sometimes challenging pieces where they get to learn new concepts such as accents, staccatos, very contrasting dynamics, playing one or two octaves higher, and more.

I have a new Halloween activity that I’ve added to the Shop that is a wonderful way to introduce a lot of these fun techniques and articulations to your elementary students and higher. It’s called the Spooky Halloween Piece Generator, and students get to change one of their simple five-finger position pieces into a spooky, musical Halloween masterpiece! This activity combines music theory, technique, composition, creativity and expression into one super fun activity that can be used with individual students or adapted for a group.

I just added a fun Halloween game to the Shop called Piano Trick or Treat! It’s a fun activity to teach students some super cool piano “tricks,” or techniques, and to show them some fun and funny piano “treats,” or performances, via YouTube. I plan to use this at a Halloween group class, but you could easily adapt it for individual students at private lessons, or even just send it home for a student to play with a parent.

Simply print the cards back to back so that the pumpkins and ghosts are on the back of each card. Put into two piles (Tricks and Treats), and have students take turns choosing Trick or Treat. Each trick card has a cool piano trick to try out (for example, playing “ghost notes” using a cool overtone trick) and each treat has an awesome video to watch (like a funny Marx Brothers piano duet!).

I’ve created a YouTube playlist that contains the videos I used in this activity plus a few extras.

Happy Halloween!

With Halloween right around the corner, I’ve been searching high and low for some fun classical Halloween pieces for my students. The fun thing about Halloween music is that it gives students an opportunity to really work on their musical expression. Halloween music is sneaky and spooky, has lots of accents and staccatos and surprising sforzandos, and playing in a minor key is always kind of exciting. Many teachers do fun Halloween recitals where students dress up in costume to perform their pieces. There is a plethora of Halloween-themed teaching pieces available these days, but I wanted to find some classics that could fit well with this theme – and I found so many!

A few of these I discovered by scouring through my well-used copy of Jane Magrath’s The Pianist’s Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature. Her book is amazing for discovering new teaching pieces from beginning levels to early advanced. She ranks each piece in the book by level, Level 1 being Bartok’s Mikrokosmos, Vol. 1 and Level 10 being Bach’s Three-Part Inventions and easiest Chopin Nocturnes. For the pieces I list here that are in her book, I have included her difficulty level.

So enjoy this fun list of Halloween piano pieces! Please comment with other great pieces you would add to this list. Happy Halloween!

Monsterpieces (and Others) by William Bolcom

A set of contemporary pieces for children. Magrath puts this set at a Level 2. Includes titles such as “The Mad Monster” and “The Sad Monster.” Each page has a fun drawing to go with the score.

3 Ghost Rags by William Bolcom

Three advanced piano solos in a fun ragtime style. Includes “Graceful Ghost Rag,” “Dream Shadows” and “The Poltergeist.”

A Terrible Tale, Op. 98 No. 11 by Alexander Gretchaninoff

This piece is part of his Opus 98 “Children’s Book.” Magrath rates this piece at a Level 4.

Deserted House, Deep Forest, and Clowns from For the First Time (Twelve Impressions in a Child’s Day) by Howard Hanson

This is a neat set of imaginative and contemporary pieces for the advancing pianist (Magrath puts them at a level 8). Deserted House is spooky-sounding with some beautiful tonalities. Deep Forest is a chord-based piece with sonorous, contemporary tonalities. Clowns begins with playful, one-note motives and grows to include big chords and an impressive-sounding ending.

Moonlight Night, Op. 52a by Alan Hovhaness

A rhythmic and wistful contemporary solo that includes mixed modes and near-Eastern scales. (Magrath, Level 4)

A Witch’s Story, Op. 33 No. 14 and Stormy Stream, Op. 33 No. 18 from Miniatures by Samuel Maykapar

Fine teaching pieces in a Romantic style. Magrath puts these at a Level 7.

Bruxa (The Witch Doll) from Prole do Bebe No. 1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos

Each piece of this set is about a different type of child’s doll, but the pieces themselves are difficult. Magrath puts Bruxa at a level 10.

Grandmother Tells a Ghost Story, Op. 81 No. 3 from Kinderleben by Theodor Kullak

A lovely, spooky Romantic piece perfect for the intermediate pianist. It is included in this collection of Miniatures edited by Maurice Hinson.

The Ghost in the Chimney, Op. 81 No. 10 from Kinderleben by Theodor Kullak

Another great teaching piece from Kullak. It’s included in this great collection by the Fabers – Piano Literature for a Dark and Stormy Night.

The Lame Witch Lurking in the Forest Op. 31 No. 9 by Vladimir Rebikov

A great little spooky piece for Halloween!

L’Orage (The Storm) Etude Op. 109 No. 13 by Friedrich Burgmuller

Burgmuller has several wonderful teaching pieces that would be excellent for a Halloween-themed recital. They contain a lot of fun articulations and mysterious, minor tonalities, and they are a lot of fun to play!

Arabesque, Op. 100, No. 2 by Freidrich Burgmuller

Ballade, Op. 100 No. 15 by Freidrich Burgmuller

The Wild Horseman by Robert Schumann

A great little piece for intermediate students just venturing into the realm of classical music. It is not too difficult but can be played at a quick speed for a nice showy recital piece.

Prelude in C-sharp minor Op. 3 No. 2 by Sergei Rachmaninoff

Whenever I play this piece I can hear my high school piano teacher’s voice narrating the piece as I played with the story of a fire. She said that the fire slowly started to burn and to grow; as the flames got out of control there was chaos! Panic! Finally it burned down to a few glowing embers that slowly burned out. A wonderful recital piece and motivational piece for a high school student, this is a fabulous example of Rachmaninoff’s trademark big, huge chords and is a blast to play.

Prelude Op. 28 No. 2 in A minor by Frederic Chopin

A lesser-known prelude from Chopin’s famous set, this has a sad, spooky sound that would be great for a Halloween recital.

Clairs de Lune, No. 3: Le Cimetiere by Abel Decaux

This little-known set of pieces by French composer and organist Decaux is wonderfully contemporary with beautiful yet spooky sonorities. This movement depicts a cemetery in the moonlight. I love the huge, rich chords that surround the simple, plodding melody; the sound grows and grows and then dies down near the end. I played this piece in college for my senior recital, so it’s one of my faves.

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