About me
Welcome to Piano with Anastasia!
Over the years, I have written many articles for parents explaining my approach to teaching piano and the concepts behind the way I do things. I felt it was now time to put some of this together in a blog, as much as anything to give my newer parents a chance to dip into some of my earlier articles!
I have a home-based piano studio in the Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire border area of the UK. My teaching is firmly based in a Kodály approach. When I first came across this approach more than 15 years ago, lightbulbs went off in my head - everything made so much more sense and my own musicianship skills started to improve immeasurably. I trained and became a Kodály music teacher in a specialist school, and a few years later started my own piano practise, incorporating all I'd learnt (& continue to learn).
Over time, my piano practise took off, and eventually I reached the decision to concentrate solely on my piano teaching. I'm passionate about this way of teaching, where musicianship and pianistic skills go hand in hand, resulting in well rounded musicians rather than just people who can play the notes on the piano.
Zoltan Kodály believed that there are four requirements for a well rounded musician; a well-trained ear, a well-trained mind, a well-trained heart and finally well-trained fingers. All too often, piano teaching focuses on the last of these, being the technique, to the detriment of the others. They are all of equal importance, but the well-trained ear comes first - after all who as a child learns to read and write before years of first listening to speech in the native language, then learning to speak through copying. It is only several years later that they start to learn to read and write. Learning to play an instrument should follow a similar pattern & this is at the crux of the Kodály method.
As the primary area that needs to be developed is the well-trained ear (like the small child listening then learning to speak), the approach uses lots of singing, as the voice is our first instrument, being the one we're all born with. Singing enables us to focus on the notes we are hearing and producing without having to worry about the technique involved in playing an instrument.
For more information about the methodology, please see my blog posts on the topic.
