For the last few days I have been playing very intensively with GarageBand, Apple’s recording software. It’s been great fun manipulating myself and playing piano and keyboard strings and singing songs that I love. But something really bad happened. It kept freezing up and I had to force quit it. I didn’t know what had [...]
On Monday afternoon I do a good deed for the week. It’s so much more than that. If you want a term for it it is music therapy but I am not a music therapist, I am just a folksinger/pianist. At Fraser McDonald on Monday afternoons I sit at there really old, honky-tonk sounding piano [...]
Perhaps I am a little too young to be writing like this. But… [whose cool website you’ll get to if you click on the link] says I should write my autobiography. I have had many requests from friends over the years to write it. But I don’t think I have much to say in that [...]
This method is a natural extension of being a folk music buff as the learning material is drawn, in the early years at least, from folksong. When I was about 15, my singing teacher at the time introduced me to a method of writing called tonic solfa (explained in this video . I had only [...]
one of my many inspirations, Judy Collins singing her own song in the late 80’s.
In this final posting on music education I will be talking about the way I teach music. Techniques I have seen inspire young people and that sometimes can work. My philosophy has pieces of all the methods and a bit of Rudolpf Steiner. But it has worked for me. As Suzuki said we must create [...]
Emile Jacques Dalcroze was a swiss music teacher in the early 20th century. He discovered that his University students had some skills lacking when it came to feeling a beat and counting. I first came across him when I was very young and went to music classes where we met So-Mi and his brother La-Mi [...]
The Suzuki Method has always been of special significance to me as it is the way I began my piano studies. However my teachers though they had the best intensions were not trained Suzuki teachers. [That’s another story, my musical development]. Shinichi Suzuki taught himself to play the violins in is father’s factory in Japan. [...]
Music has always been a part of my life since early childhood. Being blind, it is a stereotype that I would be musical [that’s another story]. I was one of the lucky people in this world to be musical and blind. Originally I planned to do an audio series with interviews of pedagogues from the [...]
The anthem of the Suzuki movement sung by voice students in Melbourne earlier this year.