Bill Giruzzi lived next door to me in the dorm when I started college. We were there next door to each for three years and have been friends ever since. He’s also the person who first told me about Simply Music, and then not long after I started teaching he became one of my students. Here’s a video of him presenting an original song that he created for an assignment. Lyrics available at the YouTube page in the video’s info box. Enjoy!

I hope other students of mine will let me know about any videos online of them performing anything from their lessons with me, so that I can share those videos here as well!

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Potluck Creative Arts proudly announces the offering of Simply Music beginner piano workshops through several area Continuing Education programs in Fall 2010 — now including not only the original beginner piano workshop but also a new improvisation-only class. A unique opportunity to experience the Simply Music method at a dramatically reduced cost!

No experience or instrument necessary! Simply Music is a revolutionary, Australian-developed piano learning method that offers a breakthrough in music education. This remarkable approach has students of all ages playing great-sounding contemporary, classical, gospel, blues and accompaniment pieces — immediately — from their very first lessons. Led by New York’s only Accredited Simply Music Teacher.

Learn more about Simply Music piano lessons and beginner piano workshops.

Choose from these offerings:

Red Hook Continuing Education

Beginner Piano Workshop — “Songs & More”
Day/Time: Mondays 7:10 p.m.-8:10 p.m.
Dates: 10/25/2010-11/29/2010 (6 lessons)

Piano Improvisation Workshop
Day/Time: Mondays 8:15 p.m.-9:15 p.m.
Dates: 10/25/2010-11/29/2010 (6 lessons)

Learn more and register through Continuing Education at the Red Hook Central School District.

Rhinebeck Continuing Education

Beginner Piano Workshop — “Songs & More”
Day/Time: Wednesdays 7:15 p.m.-8:15 p.m.
Dates: 9/15/2010-10/20/2010 (6 lessons)

Piano Improvisation Workshop
Day/Time: Wednesdays 8:30 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
Dates: 9/15/2010-10/20/2010 (6 lessons)

Learn more and register through Rhinebeck Central School District’s Continuing Education Program.

SUNY Ulster Continuing & Professional Education

Beginner Piano Workshop — “Songs & More”
Day/Time: Fridays 7:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m.
Dates: 9/17/2010-10/22/2010 (6 lessons)

Piano Improvisation Workshop
Day/Time: Fridays 8:05 p.m.-9:05 p.m.
Dates: 9/17/2010-10/22/2010 (6 lessons)

Learn more and register through Continuing & Professional Education at SUNY Ulster.

Here’s a great little video about encouragement.

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Last month, you saw how the Formula for Success could help you better understand yourself as a student and point the way toward improving your results. The 100 possible points came from ten different success factors.

But the success factors actually go to 11, and so we need a new formula!

A seat can’t be held up by two legs. It needs three. Just the same, Simply Music lessons succeed when three roles are played. The student learns, the teacher is the method coach, and someone must serve as the student’s life/practice coach. The importance of the coach has been discussed here before. The key points:

• Students who are children have an adult playing the role of practice coach for them, supporting their practice routine, helping them learn how to navigate the ups and down of a long-term relationship with music, because they haven’t yet learned how to maintain long-term relationships themselves.
• Adult students may play the role of practice coach for themselves, though adults who for whatever reason have trouble managing a successful practice routine on their own can benefit greatly from finding someone else to play that role for them.

Whatever the situation, the coach role cannot be underestimated. Indeed, Simply Music teachers all around the world generally require the involvement of a practice coach for all students under age 18 — even those who have been in the program for many years and may seem self-sufficient. The skills involved in coaching — including self-coaching — are very different from those involved in most of the rest of piano practice, so needing support is something that is truly okay for anyone of any age.

When looking at the Formula for Success, one may find a student having room for improvement in any number of areas. Low scores on those success factors, though, may not indicate a failure on the part of a student. The student may be doing his or her best with an insufficiently developed ability. A crucial question is whether or not that ability will develop further without assistance.

It’s always worthwhile to ask what more the student can do to improve with any success factors. When students are doing all they can on their own and not achieving the desired results, though, they may simply need someone else’s support to help them learn how to do better. The same holds true of a student achieving good results who could be attaining excellence. So while the Formula for Success is a valuable self-assessment tool for students, the practice coach should have a self-assessment tool as well, a coach-specific formula for success.

This much simpler formula has just one success factor, and it is coaching itself. As with the students’ success factors, coaches can score themselves from 1-10 on how well they fulfill the coaching role for the students in their charge. Here’s what a score of 10 out of 10 points looks like:

Coaching — All students must have someone fulfilling the practice coach role for them, whether they do it themselves or have an adult do it for them. Coaches understand that the simple fact of students being unable to do something on their own is itself evidence that those students require someone else’s support in order to eventually learn how to do it themselves. Therefore, practice coaches take full responsibility for — and understand that teachers will hold them responsible for — students’ engagement in all the factors involved in the student Formula for Success. By attending lessons and understanding the method content as well as possible, the coach can help the student with the details of practice, participating hands-on as needed to help the student achieve excellent results. Most importantly, by supporting the management of a student’s practice routine through peaks and valley’s alike, the practice coach ensures that the student achieves ongoing success with music, gains all the benefits that musical success has to offer, and also continually improves in the ability to effectively navigate long-term relationships in general.

Because of the unique position a coach holds in the program, the quality of the students’ 10 success factors is in a very real sense determined by the support provided by factor number 11, the coach. Each improvement of just one point for a coach can lead to improvements of any number of points in any number of success factors for a student.

Given the value available in student’s Formula for Success and this new supplementary formula for coaches, the Lesson Line newsletter is now going to grow into a new phase. More in-depth writings of the kind you’ve seen so far will become less frequent. At the same time, other more brief references and points of interest may arrive more frequently. Enjoy!

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RHINEBECK, NY, July 11, 2010 – This summer, campers at Ramapo for Children will have the chance to work and learn in harmony with other campers while developing their musical skills in a revolutionary piano instruction workshop. Children with special needs attending Camp Ramapo’s summer programs will be able to experience the innovative and dynamic Simply Music piano method, while building and learning the universal life skills that Ramapo’s programs promote.

Musical education has many benefits for children with special needs. The Simply Music method actively engages campers in piano instruction, using an interactive and hands-on approach that fosters positive group dynamics. By breaking down each song into easy to grasp patterns, music becomes an accessible language. As they build upon these patterns to master songs, children gain self-confidence and learn problem solving skills. As in all of Ramapo’s activities, this workshop stresses the importance of listening and learning from others, a commitment to do one’s best, and gives campers a unique experience from which they can further pursue musical instruction and expression.

Founded in 1922, Ramapo for Children is a nationally recognized, not-for-profit organization serving children with special needs and those at-risk. Each summer, Ramapo serves more than 550 children with special needs, providing adventure-based, residential camp programs that inspire children from early childhood through adolescence to experience success, develop healthy relationships, and learn necessary life skills.

This workshop was made possible with funding from the UJA – Federation of New York Music for Youth Program. The program’s instructor is Mark S. Meritt, New York State’s only Accredited Simply Music Teacher. Mark extends the creative approach that drives his Red Hook-based company, Potluck Creative Arts, by offering Simply Music piano lessons. At Ramapo, he is teaching songs from Simply Music’s core program as well as an improvisation curriculum of his own creation.

For more information about Ramapo for Children and the programs we offer, please visit www.ramapoforchildren.org or call (845) 876-8409. For more information about Mark and the Simply Music method of piano instruction, please visit potluckcreativearts.com.

However long you’ve been taking Simply Music piano lessons, it’s probably safe to say that you’ve achieved far more than what you could have in the same amount of time with other methods. Maybe you’ve even achieved far more than you imagined you could.

In your best moments in the program, you’ve seen the possibilities. You’ve seen how a fantastic result can come together fairly quickly and easily. You’ve had that feeling of mastery that comes from playing an older song that’s become second nature, maybe even the amazement of playing it with your eyes closed. You’ve recognized that true musical creativity isn’t just for the Mozarts and Beatles of the world, that even you, just months or even weeks into lessons, can be creating your own original music and even improvising something brand new in the spur of the moment.

You can connect the dots between these experiences and the profound benefits that are yours to have in your relationship with music. You can sense that that’s where the path leads. By following the Simply Music method, you can get there. The method works.

If you follow it.

You’re aware that the closer you get to the fully following the method, the more success you’ll achieve, that there is still room for success even if you can’t reach that ideal — and that there is some point where putting in not enough effort can only lead to an end to your relationship with music. As long as you’re in the success zone, you’ll be fine. At the same time, the farther into that zone you can be, the more you can find even greater success in the program — and live up to your own potential.

Neil Moore, the founder of Simply Music, says that the difference between a student who does 99% of what is asked and 100% of what is asked is astonishing. So you can imagine how valuable it is for you to do as much as you can to follow the program, especially during times when you aren’t able to do it all.

To get there, it helps to know where you are already, so that you can see what else there may be for you to do to keep improving. A great way to do this is to use the Formula for Success, which you can also access through its page under Resources for Students — http://potluckcreativearts.com/lessons/students/formula-for-success/.

As you’ll see, there are ten success factors. For each, you can rate yourself from 1-10, 10 being best. When you achieve all 100 possible points, you’ll experience the greatest success and the quickest, easiest progress. The first page provides a simple form that you can print and fill in, while the second provides a description of what a 10 would look like for each of the success factors.

Since we are always changing, it would be great to check in with the formula periodically. Monthly might be ideal, but you could do it less often — or even more often. Even if you do hit 100 at one point, it’s still worth continuing to check in with yourself regularly, because the one thing we can say about a long-term relationship is that it’s always changing.

When you rate yourself, be as honest as possible. The numbers have meaning only as a guide to help you keep becoming a better learner, and they can’t do that job for you if you fudge them. If at any time you fill in the numbers you feel sad or frustrated because you wish they were higher, let yourself experience those feelings, and then remind yourself that all the success you’ve achieved so far goes hand in hand with those very numbers. Celebrate that past success, and see the gap between your current score and 100 as what it really is — a fantastic opportunity for you to achieve even more success!

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Every Simply Music teacher is also a Simply Music student, whether they study with another teacher or by themselves, since we all must learn all the pieces and projects in order to teach them. In addition to being a Simply Music teacher and student, my daughter takes lessons, and I serve as her practice coach. So from all possible angles, I know how much of a challenge it can be to manage a Simply Music repertoire and, in particular, the Playlist itself.

Over time, we’ve tried a number of different things to make life easier and stay effective and efficient at keeping both current projects and repertoire pieces in good shape, including all the things I described in Simplifying Playlist Management as well as Keeping the Repertoire Alive. There are lots of good ideas here. Recently, I came up with another idea that has made a big difference in managing my daughter’s Playlist and, consequently, her whole practice routine. I call it the “Play it Forward” method Playlist management, and it’s really very easy to do in practice.

When you practice a song, take a look at how many days it’s been since you last practiced it. If you practiced it perfectly or near perfectly, then you can stand to wait longer until the next time you practice it, so take that number of days and add one. If you practiced it really well but not perfectly and it feels like the song will still be fine if you want the same amount of time again, just keep the same number of days in mind. If you practiced it less than really well, then make a judgment about how much smaller to make the number so that you’ll be practicing that song again as soon as may be needed to get it back in shape. Now, look ahead past your current practice day in your Playlist, counting out that new number of days. In the box, write the number.

Once you’ve done this for all your songs, you’ll not only know that you’re practicing each song as often as it needs to be practiced. You’ll also know you’re practicing each song as little as it needs to be practiced, helping you cut down your overall practice time, just like I talked about last month in With Piano Practice, Less Can Be More.

There’s another tremendous benefit, though. You’ll never again need to wonder what repertoire pieces to practice. All you have to do is look in the current day’s column. Whatever projects have a number written there, those are the pieces you need to practice that day. When you practice a piece, just put your check, X or whatever other mark over the number so that you’ll know it’s been done — just like you always did — and then go write the new number however far ahead you pick for that same piece. With all your songs moved into this system, you won’t ever even need to look back to count how many days it’s been since you last practiced a song — you’ll have that answer right there in the number written down for the current day, making it even easier to figure out what the next number should be for each song.

Now I’ll respond to all the questions I imagine people will have, because at some point along the way I had them myself.

Why can’t I choose what to practice? On one hand, it’s understandable that you may not like the idea of not getting to choose. On the other hand, remember, you can always play whatever pieces you want, as often as you want, outside of practice time. That’s when you can always have all the choice you want. And also remember, you don’t get to choose your current projects, since they’re assigned to you. Practice time should be about doing not what you want to do but what you need to do in order to keep everything going as well as possible. With the “Play it Forward” system, you’ll no longer need to figure out what needs to be done and wonder if you’re making good choices for keeping your repertoire alive. In effect, each song “tells” you what needs to be done, how much practice it needs, when it needs it.

Can’t I increase more than one day if I want to? Sure, you can. Nobody’s stopping you. Just be careful. The faster you “play it forward,” the more likely you are to find that you’ve lost ground by the next time you practice a piece — just like you may already know from waiting too many days before practicing a piece again. This creates more work for yourself. I think it’s better to take an incremental approach. If you really have a song down, after just four weeks you can move a song from being played daily (every 1 day) to being played weekly (every 7 days), just by increasing by a single day each time. After a little more than year after that, you’ll be playing that song monthly (every 28 days) — and you’ll have maintained complete confidence and perfection in that song at every step of the way.

How do I decide how many days to decrease a piece if it’s not in solid shape? Use your best judgment, and take into consideration the current number. The smaller the number, the fewer choices you have — a 4 can only go to a number 1-5, while a 20 can go to a number 1-21. The easiest approach seems to be to get to know what perfection feels like for increasing by one, to get to know what not-quite-perfection feels like so you can feel confident at least keeping the number the same, and to just use your best judgment with any decrease. The more diligent you are with playing songs forward, the less often you’ll ever need to decrease a number anyway!

What about current projects? Keep following the advice in Managing Current Projects, giving each an appropriate amount of time each day you practice. If you’d like to play them forward with the numbers, you can — and they’ll always be 1, because current projects are always supposed to be practiced daily! If the pencil dots in the margin are enough for you, then you can just play your repertoire pieces forward and not worry about numbers at all for your current projects.

Won’t some days end up with only a few songs to practice, while others end up with a lot more? Yes — and everything in between is possible, too. If your schedule can handle this variation in daily practice time, then you’ll know that you’re giving everything just the right amount of practice, all the time, like Goldilocks’ just-right porridge and bed. If you have a need to even things out more, you can always move certain songs to different days to make that happen. See below.

What happens if I can’t (or won’t) play a song on the day it’s been “played forward”? Sometimes you may need to skip a day of practice. Sometimes may just want to skip a day of practice. Sometimes, there may be a particular song you want to put off for some reason, whether it’s making your practice time more even from day to day or otherwise. With however many or few songs you want or need, you can always just play them further forward. If a song was a 5 for today, write a 6 for tomorrow, and don’t put a mark over the 5. You don’t have to be a slave to the numbers, but you should listen to what they’re telling you. Every time you play a song further forward, you’ve stretched beyond what that song wanted. Do it as often as you need, but try not to do it anymore often than necessary. The Playlist will get cluttered and confusing, and your pieces are likely to suffer. Also, try to practice “further forward” pieces first, as a way of catching up and keeping everything as close to “on track” as possible. Of course, also remember, you can also always plays pieces “backward,” or, rather, less forward — if you’ve got a light day today, you can always get ahead by practicing pieces marked down for tomorrow.

How do I transition to this approach if I haven’t been doing it from the start? It’s true that the easiest way to do this is to do it from the start for each song — the moment a piece stops being a current project and enters your repertoire, you can start playing it forward, deciding whether to keep the number at 1 for a bit for daily practice or whether it’s ready to bump up to 2, and then just keep going from there. For any other song not yet playing it forward, you can just start with however many days it’s been since the last practice and go from there, or if you think there’s a better number to use, whether bigger or smaller, go ahead and just be sensitive to adjusting it later as needed. The biggest thing you need to know about making the transition is that, until all your songs are playing it forward, you’re going to need to look in two places to figure out what songs to play on any given day — the played-forward numbers, and the rest of your repertoire that hasn’t been played forward yet. Use your best judgment about how many not-yet-transitioned songs to transition in each day, chipping away until they’re all playing forward. Do your best to also practice all the songs that have already been played forward for each day, so that you don’t get behind. The switch may be a little tricky, but once you’ve transitioned everything, it gets much easier.

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While success with piano comes from practice, more practice is not always better. With busy lives, we all want to know that we are using our time wisely and getting the most out of it. Efficient practice habits can help you get more done in less time — and sometimes less practice time itself can be more efficient than more practice time.

Incremental Progress for Current Projects

Practice a new current project for 35 minutes on one day and don’t touch it again for a week, and see what happens the next time you practice it — the results aren’t likely to be very good. Take that same amount of time and spread it out to five minutes daily on that same piece over the course of a week, and compare. You’ll get much, much better results with the latter approach.

When we sleep, our brains consolidate a great deal of what we experienced that day. Learning gets “sealed in” when we sleep. Practice a piece too much on a given day, you start to get drained, becoming less effective as time passes. There ends up being less real learning than you’d have hoped by the time your brain gets around to sealing it in that night. Consistent daily practice, in small amounts per day, gives your brain a chance for deeper learning because meaningful progress is sealed in every day, ready to be built up further each next day.

Decreasing Frequency for Repertoire Pieces

As your repertoire grows, managing your playlist can become more and more complicated. Repertoire pieces are supposed to be kept alive, since they serve as the foundation for many kinds of more advanced learning. Letting their quality slide will mean that much more work getting them back into shape. But keeping them in shape still requires at least some effort.

The key to minimizing that effort is realizing that with any given piece, once it’s alive, the longer you keep it alive, the less attention it needs to continue being kept there. When a current project first comes alive and turns into part of your repertoire, you may still practice it daily for a little while, since it is still fairly new to you, but a single daily runthrough should be sufficient. If it needs more than that, then it should still be considered a current project. Soon enough, you’ll be able to skip a day. Then two. Then three. Soon enough, a week. Soon enough, two weeks. Soon enough, even longer.

Consider your repertoire an experiment at all times. Take each piece on its own terms, seeing how infrequently you can practice it while still keeping it alive. Work incrementally. Push off one extra day compared to what you’d most recently done. If the piece then proves a bit tricky to play, back off again and plan to play it after a shorter time off. The one thing you don’t want is to get too eager about reducing frequency, only to find that you waited too long and now the piece needs a fair amount of work to get back up to speed. That work will be more frustrating and take more time than if you’d just practiced the piece a little more frequently while keeping it in good shape, and the soon enough you would be able to practice that piece less often anyway.

If you work gradually at this, you’ll always find that more and more of your repertoire pieces will require less and less attention. Then, instead of spending extra practice time playing repertoire songs more often than needed, you’ll have freed up lots of time. With this approach, you’ll be making room for your ever growing repertoire without needing much work to do so.

How to Practice More

It’s probably nice to know that you’ll actually improve your learning by paying attention to practicing for less time in the particular ways mentioned above. Working smart is always better than working hard. But don’t take these suggestions to mean that you should never practice more. If you ever lose ground on a piece, it will need extra time and effort. Other times, you may simply want to practice some songs more often — you may not even think of that as practicing, just playing for enjoyment. With songs that are in good shape, you can always feel free to play them as often as you like. The best recommendation is to first follow the above time-saving approaches, and then account for extra practice you want or need to put in.

If you want to practice a song more in a given day, once you’ve already given it a few minutes, your best bet would be to do some other things first before putting more time in on that song. Work on other pieces, or even take a break from the instrument altogether. Consider a break especially if you’ve already put in your regular full block of daily practice time — 15-20 minutes while in Levels 1-3, 30-35 minutes after that point. Instead of getting drained on any one project, you’ll be more likely to keep your focus through everything you work on.

For favorite repertoire songs you want to play more often than you’d need to simply keep them alive, just go ahead and play them on as many different days as you like. Whether or not you mark the playlist each day for those songs may not matter so much, if the song is definitely in staying in good shape. Just be sure to be rigorous about the playlist markings if you are ever purposely trying to practice a repertoire song less often or if you notice any particular repertoire song starting to lose any of its quality.

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Three Great Resources for Simply Music Piano Students


Rather than write a new article for you this month, I’m sharing with you something really valuable that someone else wrote, along with two other worthwhile resources for Simply Music piano students and anyone else interested in music.

Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to Parents

Dr. Karl Paulnack, the director of the Music Division of The Boston Conservatory, gave an incredibly inspiring speech to welcome the parents of incoming students in Fall 2004. Anyone who values music would do well to read this excerpt of Karl Paulnack’s welcome address. I’ll say no more, instead letting it speak for itself. Trust me, read it!

Simply Music Newsletter

The Simply Music head office recently informed teachers that the much anticipated Simply Music Newsletter will be launched the first week of April. Though students are not required to stay subscribed to this email newsletter, head office expects it to be “an informative, fun and vital tool for the entire Simply Music community,” and they asked that we let our students know of its impending arrival. Consider yourself informed!

ToneMatrix

No reading needed for this one — it’s time to make some music. The ToneMatrix is a web-based program that lets you create interesting, changing musical patterns, all by just clicking on the screen. The program loops at a steady tempo, so whatever pattern you make will get into a nice, repeating groove. It’s great even for those with no musical knowledge.

In the grid full of squares, click a square to trigger a tone. Click it again to turn it off. Click and drag in any direction or shape to select multiple squares at once. Higher rows give higher pitched notes. Columns determine when during the cycle each tone will play. The possibilities are as good as endless.

If you get inspired to try to make similar patterns on the piano, guess what? You can use all the black notes on the piano, and you’ll be using a set of notes equivalent to what ToneMatrix uses. So enjoy, online and off.

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Free and Open to the Public — All Ages Welcome — Tell Everyone You Know!

Sing along to your favorite songs — pop, rock, standards, show tunes, TV themes and more — with a live musician!

A musician/songwriter with credits in NYC and on national TV and honors from national songwriting competitions, Mark S. Meritt brings his vast repertoire of songs in styles from Ragtime to Rock and everything in between, along with his improvisational skills. With you or even the whole audience singing along, all the songs will come to life — like a piano bar without the bar, or karaoke but with a real, live musician taking your requests.

There are few better ways for a lot of people to have a whole lot of fun together. And with a potluck going on at the same time, you can enjoy dinner and a show!

Everyone is welcome to attend this special, free event. Just bring a dish to share for the potluck, and come enjoy — and hopefully participate in! — the singing. Even bring your own favorite sheet music if you like — Mark will do his best with it!

Saturday, March 20, 2010
5:00 p.m.-8:00 p.m.
Multipurpose Room, Bertelsmann Campus Center, Bard College

Bard College Campus Map: http://www.bard.edu/campus/maps/pdfs/campusmap.pdf
Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=&daddr=42.019713,-73.909793&hl=en&geocode=&mra=mi&mrsp=0&sz=15&sll=42.017836,-73.908277&sspn=0.023689,0.031543&g=42.020127,-73.909922&ie=UTF8&z=15
Bertelsmann Campus Center Contact Information: http://www.bard.edu/campus/facilities/bcc/contact/

We’d love to know if you’re coming. Let us know by email, or call 845.481.0479 — though no reservations are required.

Mark’s 40th birthday is three days before this event, and this is how he feels like celebrating, because singalongs and potlucks are his idea of a good time. He hopes you’ll agree.

Pass this onto anyone who you think might enjoy attending.

Learn more about Mark, his Piano/Keyboard Performance and Singalong offerings, and all the unique music, arts and creativity services he offers through Potluck Creative Arts.