You might remember a few weeks back I reviewed Juan Cabeza Hernandez’s course Piano Patterns in Harmony — here’s the link if you don’t!
Juan and I sat down for a chat a few weeks ago.
We discussed the course in detail, and I told him about some of the positive experiences I’ve had when using its curriculum with my students.
I’ll post the full interview on Saturday. In the meantime, this clip gives a great insight into what the curriculum can achieve!
If you’re at all curious about teaching improvisation, composition or harmony in a practical way, I highly recommend you check it out.
Here’s a link to the Piano Patterns in Harmony course.
Transcript
Garreth
I have a student, a teenage boy who's very resistant to learning classical music at the moment. We did one of the units with him, I think it might have been unit three. At the moment, he's studying some real classic New Age pieces, like River Flows in You, and the music from Amelie, which everybody knows, and you've included that in the course. I applied the Amelie left hand pattern to the River Flows in You chords, and he was so delighted.
It was really fun. It was great. And I think one of the things I appreciate is, I'm not unique as a piano teacher, in that a lot of my students are very interested in that kind of music and less interested in classical music. But because you're teaching classical harmony in a way that's, so pattern based and new age music is so pattern based that you then give those students a way into classical music that they can then understand it.
Much better than if they're just exposed to something they don't understand and sounds old fashioned to them. I think usually I'm quite good at getting kids excited about classical music, but not always and sometimes I fail. I found this is a useful tool. That kid, he's now curious about learning more classical music, because I've shown him the relationship.
I used the Bach Prelude No. 1, which is another part of your course. That's a crucial moment, that one is in Unit 2. That was a light bulb moment for him, when he realized these two things, are related that the new age is built from the same ingredients as the Bach, although it's using fewer ingredients than the Bach.
The Bach is, that Prelude just so complicated harmonically, isn't it? But actually there's a relationship between the two. And I think that was a real light bulb moment for him. Like I said, so it was very cool.
Juan
You can mix the piano pattern from Bach Prelude No. 1 with some progression in River Flows in You or in Amelie and create your own music and students start to see that all music is connected and you can introduce your student to classical music in a different way. Maybe you can create this curiosity in your students to know, ah, this pattern is interesting.
Maybe Bach is cool and I have other pieces I want to learn. Yes.
Garreth
And that's the thing because one of the challenges of teaching classical music is that it's a musical language that is very sophisticated you often see piano teachers complaining about the fact that their students don't like that music it's because they've not been exposed to enough of the language, I think.
They're hearing stuff that they don't have the context to understand. Then you get other students who've got a much more classical music orientated family and so they've grown up hearing that music. For them it's obvious that this music makes sense.
But your course enables students who've not had that exposure to classical music to get access to classical music. And that's, I think, that's really wonderful. It's a real, that's a real gift to younger people, because it is so enriching.
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