Creativity digest — 16th June 2024
Piano teachers creativity retreat with Joy Morin, new Forrest Kinney group, composing dance music with Nicola Cantan, and two podcasts from Tim Topham — plus, does pop belong in ABRSM exams?
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Every now and then I share a Creativity Digest to flag up a few interesting articles and useful posts for you. This one features creativity residentials for piano teachers, podcasts on using composition in piano lessons, teacher’s groups and a discussion of the new ABRSM syllabus. Enjoy!
Good to know:
This summer Joy Morin is hosting a piano teacher’s retreat in Michigan focusing on exploring composition and improvisation in piano lessons. It looks lovely, I really wish I could be there!
There’s a promising new creative teachers group on Facebook called Four Arts Forum: Forrest Kinney’s approach to creative music and teaching. Run by the team behind Forrest Kinney publications, it promises to be “a forum for creative pianists and music educators to share and exchange their thoughts, experiences, and questions as they explore and teach Forrest Kinney's approach through his books and PDFs”. See you there!
If, like me, you’re a Vibrant Music Teacher member, the latest batch of teaching materials includes a guide to teaching elementary dance composition with the puntastic title “ConfiDANCE with Composing”
What I’ve enjoyed:
Tim Topham sent me an encouraging email last week—thanks Tim!—and since then I’ve been spending my free moments taking a closer look at some of the vast range of TopMusic.co resources. Tim really believes that creativity is an integral part of the modern approach to teaching. Here are a couple of his podcasts that really got me thinking:
In the latest episode of The TopCast, he shares the keynote speech “Dare to Dream” that he gave at the MTNA conference this year. I particularly liked the concept of “student-teacher alignment”, a nice turn of phrase that encapsulates precisely something I’ve been pondering for quite a while
Over on the TopMusic Piano Podcast I listened to a fascinating interview with successful pedagogical composer Jennifer Eklund about how and why to integrate composition into piano lessons
What I’ve written:
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful Sunday. I’m off to run my student recital!
Garreth