Ask The Teacher
 Do you have a question about the piano,
piano lessons, or music generally? You can get it answered here by a real live piano
teacher! We'll pick some of the best questions and provide the answers here. We'll even
show your name and the city you live in so you can tell your friends! Just
send us your
first name only, age, city, state, and country (if you live outside the U.S.) and
we'll do the rest.
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A Note for Parents
 Because the Internet is in constant flux by nature and standards vary from
individual to individual, the content of the sites linked in the
Cool Places section cannot be guaranteed to be
appropriate for your children. We have examined all these sites and found them to be
generally wholesome and educational for most kids. We advise all parents to look at the
sites linked if they have any questions. Please
let
us know by e-mail if you find any of these links to be inappropriate and why you find
them so. |
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Tip of the Month - A
picture is worth a thousand words (or notes)!
Do you ever get a piece of music written by some
dead guy you’ve kind of heard about, but don’t really know anything about.
Does it matter? Do we have to know anything about the composer to play his
music? You could probably get away with not knowing anything. But you know
what—it’s so much more interesting practising his music if you know what he
looks like, when he lived, what sort of clothes he wore, what expression he
may have had on his face when playing a particular section of music. So what
can you do about it? Say you’ve been given a piece by Henry Purcell. Ask
Mum or Dad if you can go on the internet. Find a search engine, like
Google or
Yahoo, change the setting to ‘images’ and type in his name: Henry
Purcell (for example). You’ll probably get a selection of pictures to look
at. Download them if you like. Print them out even. Then, look really
closely at his face. What colour eyes do you think he had? Is he wearing a
wig, or is that his real hair? Do you think he looks happy? Do you think
he looks angry? Why do you think he looks that way? Do you think you would
have been scared of him, or do you think he would be someone you would have
liked to have met? Now that you know what he looks like, go back to your
search engine, change it back to ’web’ type in his name together with
history. Now you’ll have plenty to read about him. Just find simple
things, like, what country did he live in? When was he born? If he was
still alive today, how old would he be? Was he married? Did he have kids?
How old was he when he died? Was he rich, or poor? Of course, there were
female composers too. Look up Clara Schumann. She was a great composer.
Perhaps you could ask your teacher to learn one of her works.
 These
are places with neat pictures and sounds or they might be just plain weird! Check it out!
Got a report to write on the piano? Want to learn a little more about it? Need to find
out who Charles Tomlinson Griffes (or almost any other composer) was? We have a whole
shelf full of free articles that should help:
Lots of Piano Music and Cool Sounds
Like piano music? Want to hear some? Well,
The Audition Room has
hundreds and hundreds of files of famous (and not so famous)
composers' piano music. Jump over there and take a listen. You'll be
glad you did!
Take Your Own Trip with Dr. Who
If you like the sounds of the TARDIS and the Doctor in our
Meet the Composer interviews, you
can download your own sounds for free and play them on your own
computer. These come from the
BBC series, Doctor Who, and span many
of the Doctor's regenerations.
Go get 'em for free!
The Taz Speaks! (Sort of)
 From the Warner Bros. cartoon series
Taz-mania,
Taz grunts it like it is! If your browser doesn't let you play sound
directly, you can get the files by turning on your browser's Load to Disk or Save to Disk
function and then play them offline later in the Windows Media Player or similar player
program. These make fun Windows sounds, too. Just download 'em, go to
your Windows Control Panel, Click Sounds and then set these
to play. They're way cool!
Greetings from Taz (108K WAV)
Taz takes a piano lesson (37 K WAV)
Taz tells you what he thinks about piano lessons (41K WAV)
Taz does the classics (65K WAV)
Free collection of over 30 great Taz sounds, including all the ones above! (993K self-extracting archive - This file is BIG, so be patient!)
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Meet the Composer |
Tip | Ask the Teacher |
Cool
Places | Finding Stuff | Piano Music |
Italiano! | Outta Here!
The Piano Education Page, Op. 9, No. 1,
http://pianoeducation.org
or
below
