Based on my blog post originally published on April 30, 2011. For my 10-year blogiversary I am re-sharing 10 favorite blog posts!

Fugues can be some of the most beautiful and rewarding pieces to learn as a pianist, but are also some of the most challenging to learn and to perform well. A pianist who is able to learn a fugue well is a pianist who is a careful and efficient practicer and a musician who has trained their ears well to listen to the sounds and dynamics coming out of the piano. One must possess good independence of hands and fingers to play a fugue well. All of these more advanced skills are difficult to learn, but are so important to the development of a fine pianist. A piano student who is able to learn a fugue is well on their way to becoming a great musician, and the proper learning of fugues can help refine their ear and their practicing skills if they are willing to put in some effort!

I’d like to share a few tips on how to teach (and to learn!) fugues; hopefully some of them will come in handy, and hopefully others will have tips of their own to share!

First of all, what are some good, easier fugues to start out with? Although not necessarily fugues, the Bach Two-Part Inventions and Three-Part Inventions are excellent to start with! Because many fugues have four or five parts, it is great to begin with only two parts to keep track of. I started learning inventions in junior high – I’d say they are probably late-intermediate (depending on the invention!). 

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is an excellent collection of preludes and fugues that every pianist should be familiar with. I would say that a good one to begin with would be either Fugue No. 2 in C minor (Book 1) or Fugue No. 21 in B-flat Major (Book 1). Of course there are many other fugues out there by Bach and other composers.

Tips for Learning a Fugue

• Analyze – find the theme and mark it whenever it appears in any voice with a colored pencil or highlighter. You may also want to mark any thematic material that is similar to the theme, but not the theme exactly. Since there are so many different voices going on at once, it is imperative that you know which voice to bring out at any time. You want to be able to hear the theme whenever it appears, not just the top voice in the right hand.
• Listen to recordings – I always find this helpful when just starting out learning a fugue. I like to listen to a good recording while following along in the music and marking different voices and statements of the theme.
• Write in the fingerings! – I like to go through the piece and decide from the very beginning which fingerings to use. There will be so much going on during the piece that you want to have solid fingerings right from the beginning. This will help you to learn the fugue so much faster and more efficiently. Always use the same fingerings, each time you practice!
• Start learning the fugue! – Oh yes, did I mention that it is good to have all of these things done and written in before you actually start to practice the piece? With a fugue especially, it’s good to have a solid plan before getting started.
• Learn in very small sections – this will help you to learn correct notes, fingerings, rhythms, and phrasing as you go. A fugue can be a little daunting to learn, but if you take it in very small bites it is very doable!

Analyzing a Fugue

So, for the purpose of this post, I made a copy of Bach’s Fugue No. 2 in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) and pretended like I was about to learn it (I actually learned it years ago…). Here is what I might do if I were to start learning this today. Here are the first two pages for your enjoyment  Oh and my analysis is, of course, very technical (not!) – but I basically just wanted to give you some ideas.

First, I have highlighted the theme, every time it occurs in its full form, in yellow. I want to bring that out so you can hear it in each voice.

Next, I bracketed or highlighted other thematic material in blue. Sorry it’s a little hard to see – there is some on the last line of page 1, some on line 2 of page 2, and other random bits of it scattered throughout. These are sections that are very close to the theme, but that vary a bit.

Then I discovered this little secondary theme made up of eighth notes in a pattern of three notes slurred and one note staccato (know that this articulation will vary a LOT depending on your edition or on the pianist who made the recording you listen to!), and marked it with a purple star whenever that occurred. Although secondary to the main theme, this stuff is also important and should come out a bit, especially if there is no theme going on as well.

And lastly, there is a bunch of other stuff going on, such as long sections of sixteenth note material, which I marked with a brown bracket. At a lot of these sections, I would probably bring these sixteenth note phrases out with some graded dynamics and nice phrasing of some sort.

Anyway, you get the general idea! I would listen to several recordings of this to hear different interpretations, because they will vary so much depending on the pianist.

What fugue-learning-tips-o-awesomeness do you have to add to the list? 

Inspire your students with the amazing composers that history forgot – women composers!

Throughout music history women have had the odds stacked against them and have been overshadowed by their famous male counterparts. Despite these difficulties, there are many extraordinary musical works written by women, if only you do a little digging.

Introducing an amazing new resource all about women composers throughout history – Shades of Sound: Women Composers – a new listening and coloring book for pianists! 

Containing over 150 pages, this book tells the stories of nineteen women composers from the Middle Ages to the present day. Read about their lives, learn about their works for solo piano, orchestra and more, and listen to over fifty pieces by these remarkable women while coloring the beautiful accompanying coloring pages.

Available in two formats: a digital, studio-licensed PDF download, or a beautiful paperback edition.

This amazing resource would make a fabulous semester- or year-long music appreciation curriculum for piano students, a wonderful group listening activity for group piano lessons and classes, or a beautiful gift for any piano teacher or music-lover in your life.

Visit the Shop to purchase.

Just in time for Valentines Day is my newest release in the Shades of Sound: Listening & Coloring Books series! I had so much fun creating this resource and choosing a selection of romance and love-themed piano and orchestral literature.

If you are not familiar with my other listening & coloring books, let me tell you a little bit about this series! I created this series because I have found that many piano students are not listening to classical music, and they don’t “like” classical music – at least that’s what they think! There is this disconnect and lack of excitement that often comes when students are assigned classical repertoire, simply because they are not familiar with it, and they have not had the chance to gain an appreciation of it. That is my goal with this series – to help our students grow to love and appreciate the great classical music that is out there!

Aspiring pianists need to know the literature, hear the greats perform, and be inspired and excited by the great music that is available! Just as writers need to read, read, read, pianists need to listen! With my listening and coloring books, students are given some background information on the piece and the composer. Then they get to color the beautiful illustrations as they LISTEN to the music! It’s that simple. The great thing about this curriculum is that it takes hardly any time out of the students’ lesson time to help your students start to learn about the great music. My hope is that students can add just 5-10 minutes of listening per day to their normal practicing. Think of all of the great music they will be exposed to with just 5 minutes per day!

You can also use this book as a great activity for a group class – print out the selected pieces you would like to teach your students about, read through the background information together and then they get to color as they listen! Students of all ages and levels will LOVE to listen and color as they learn about the great music out there.

Listening to great music will change their understanding of music and will vastly increase their music history knowledge. It will excite and inspire them, encourage further study and listening, give them new pieces to add to their own repertoire wish list, infuse more great music into their lives, homes and families, and will boost their musicianship and expression to the next level.

Purchase the Shades of Sound: Valentines Day Listening & Coloring Book in the Playful Piano Shop, and print out as many copies as needed for your studio.

I am so excited today to release my new Shades of Sound Listening & Coloring Book! This one is all about music of the Christmas season. It includes 20 pieces of music from the solo piano and orchestral literature, from the Baroque through the Modern period. Students can use The Playful Piano – Christmas Listening YouTube playlist to listen right along with their book as they color the beautiful coloring pages!

This Christmas Shades of Sound book has a couple of fun and unique features to it. First, it includes a Christmas countdown calendar that students can fill in as they listen to the pieces. There is one piece for each day of the month of December (including the “Further Listening” examples included on some pages) leading up to Christmas. What a fun way to get excited for Christmas!

The second fun feature is the familiar Christmas melodies that are hidden throughout the book. There are twelve Christmas carols and tunes notated in the front of the book for students to play through, and then listen for as they listen and color their way through the book. When they find them they get to color the little picture next to the melody. Do you think you could find them all?

I hope you and your students enjoy this coloring book as much as I enjoyed making it! Purchase includes a Studio License to print out copies for all of your students in your studio forever. This would make a fun Christmas gift for students or be a great enhancement to their piano study for the month of December!

For more information and sample pages, and to purchase this book, visit The Playful Piano Shop.

One of the biggest challenges we as piano teachers face is how to teach and encourage really good practicing skills at home. Without the know-how and a way to motivate students to use good strategies, many practice hours are wasted every week. Without giving our students the tools they need to learn to be self-motivated and efficient practicers, students and parents go through a lot of unneeded frustration.

How to Teach Good Practicing Skills?

I held a group class for my piano studio recently and I really wanted to find a way to teach them some better practicing strategies – a way that could be easily implemented at home so that the concepts and strategies would start to stick. I read through a lot of my pedagogy books and notes and started writing down my ideas from my own experience as a teacher and as a pianist, and I came up with 33 practice “tricks” I wanted to teach my students. From that the Practice Tricks Pack came about, and I am super excited about it! This thing just came together so quickly, it was so fun to make and exciting to see it take shape!

My Practice Tricks Pack and How I Used It

I turned each of the 33 tricks into adorable cards, each with a memorable picture to remind students what the strategy is. I printed, laminated and cut out a set for each student so they have a complete set to help in their at-home practice. I made larger signs of each strategy to use as visuals as we learned together how each strategy works. (These 5″x7″ signs would also be SO cute on a studio bulletin board, or framed one at a time to teach a “Piano Practice Trick of the Week!”) Each student brought their music to the class and I instructed them to each get out a piece that they are currently starting on, and one that they are just finishing up. Students took turns coming up to the piano to try out the different strategies for the class using their pieces-in-progress. We had a lot of fun and were able to discuss effective ways to practice at home!

I sent each student home with a colorful pencil pouch containing their deck of Practice Tricks Cards as well as a pencil and five pennies (to use in the 5 Pennies Game – one of the practice strategies we discussed). If I had had more time I am sure I could have added more fun items to their practice kit, but the cards themselves give them plenty to do!

A cute addition to a piano practice kit!

How Students Use the Practice Tricks at Home

There are many ways you could use the Practice Tricks Cards. One really effective way is to shuffle the deck, and for each piece a student practices they draw the card on top of the deck and read it. Then they use that strategy in their practicing of that piece. I am already super encouraged with the results! My 9-year-old son had the best and most effective practice session of his life yesterday using his fun Practice Tricks Cards, without any grumbling about counting out loud or anything. When students use these 33 cards and shuffle through them, they will practice each of their pieces so many different ways and will begin to see some great results. I have included a detailed explanation of each practice trick, so parents can help at home and you can ensure that students understand each of the strategies.

My Practice Tricks Pack also includes some fun Piano Practice Bingo cards, where students can try to fill in their practicing cards during the week. Each trick they use is a space on their card; they can try to clear a row or column each day and an entire card in a week.

Also included are some adorable Practice Trick Stickers that you can place on your students’ music to assign specific practice strategies for specific sections. The PDF is included in the pack and you just need some Avery #4221 round labels to print them on.

I hope that this adorable and fun resource can help your students become AWESOME practicers and make some really exciting progress!

Visit The Playful Piano Shop to learn more about and purchase the Practice Tricks Pack!

New in the Shop today is a great resource for your youngest beginners!

The Doggie D & Friends Piano Pack is an adorable pack of resources to help teach students the names of the white keys on the piano. I am really excited about this adorable resource! I took the concepts I often use with my beginners on the very first lesson and turned it into almost 50 pages of adorable printable resources that you can print again and again for your own studio and students.

Students will learn the story of Doggie D and his friends, which will get them naming all of the keys on the piano in no time! The pack includes two different sets of flashcards, some great printables to send home with students, a cute and colorful poster to hang in your studio, an adorable 16-page coloring book and some giant Doggie D and Friends pictures to use with your Giant Floor Keyboard to get students off of the bench and learning in a fun and hands-on way!

Learn more and purchase this fun resource in The Playful Piano Shop!