How do I teach & what kind of students learn with me?

I teach piano with a focus on musical fluency, which is the ability to play music instantly, as you imagine it, in a direct, effortless way, like speaking. This fosters skills like improvising, playing by ear and fluent sight-reading – looking at an unfamiliar score and hearing it instantly in your head. So, my approach is different from the conventional passive way of learning.

I love teaching people who have a strong desire to express themselves authentically, using the language of music fluently on the piano keys. My ideal student is ready to challenge their inhibitions, face their musical demons and bare their soul, in order to entertain, move and transform themselves and others with the power of fluently expressed music.

Many people believe that they lack the talent to be a fluent musician. In our culture, rare musical “super-powers” like perfect pitch are often touted as being necessary. The truth is, if you love music, if it makes sense to you when you listen to it, if you intuitively feel the meanings that rhythm, harmony and melody impart, then you are naturally equipped to develop real musical fluency.

Start simple!

Music that has the power to communicate deeply does not need to be complicated or clever. It just needs to be true or ‘meant’. Even using just a few elements of musical ‘vocabulary’, we can generate real music that speaks volumes and lifts the spirits. Then it is completely convincing and most people would have no idea that it was simple anyway. No matter how much prior experience a student may have in conventional passive learning, I require everyone to start very simply and discover the joy and power of real musical fluency from the ground up. Much of the learning involved is at preschool level. So, you’ll need to be prepared to find the humility and enthusiasm to play like a small child.

Focus and let go: keep the ego out!

There are 2 aspects to the work we do. The greater part is letting go, tuning into the inner musician, feeling the meaning of the music authentically etc. But letting go is impossible for most people without developing a powerful ability to focus and direct the mind away from self-conscious performance. All too often, piano teachers expect students to play with more feeling, without tackling the issue of where the mind is focused. If our focus is on the quality of our performance, the execution of an impressive result, we just become more self-conscious.

Interestingly, a tiny minority of people can let go and play with abandon whilst still maintaining their self-conscious focus. Musicians with this rare knack make formidable opponents in competitive environments and are therefore over-represented within the music profession today. This rare knack for self-conscious confidence is not the same thing as musical talent at all. Many of the most genuinely talented musicians are, by definition, sensitive beings, whose music suffers the more ego they bring to it. Keeping clear focus on a simple model of how music works busies the mind in each moment, so that there is no bandwidth left for the perfectionist or results-based thinking that generates the common paranoia of so many nervous performers.

I teach this way from personal experience. As a naturally cautious, even anxious person, I would be a very nervous performer indeed, if I hadn’t trained myself to be fluent by focusing on the components of musical language as they go by. That clear focus on the rhythmic and tonal elements enables me to stay calm so that I can let go and communicate musically with confidence and ease.

Logical steps towards complete keyboard musicianship fluency

The model of music that I teach is a set of clearly presented common sense principles and elements. There are no strange gimmicks or convoluted ideas. Everything I teach sits comfortably with normal theories of rhythm and tonality. But the emphasis is very much to work from a place of deep simplicity and build up new practical skills based on our natural, intuitive grasp of tonality and rhythm. Constantly working on awareness of the deep structure of music is a very radical shift away from the current conventional top-down approach to performance, practical musicianship and aural training.

Whilst music is undeniably complex at the surface, endless analysis and reduction usually confuses and intimidates students. With my model, we can dispense with books of chords, scales, technical exercises, intervals-training, harmony and counterpoint, voicing and all the other dense methods of instruction. Instead, using improvisation, practice patterns and games, students build their skills in a logical incremental way, and as long as they can maintain excellent focus and the courage to let go, progress can be relatively rapid.

Play from a pure place, even in the most pressurised conditions

I prefer to lay firm foundations in musical fluency before working towards external musical goals, although to some degree, they can be worked on in tandem. My own approach to music is essentially non-competitive – personally, I encourage myself not to be ambitious or competitive, as this only clouds my musical truth and purpose. That said, musical fluency provides a very solid ground of genuine competence and confidence that makes performing well under pressure so much easier. So, if you do wish to work towards examinations, participate in competitions etc., my teaching can help tremendously, not only by providing solid musical skills but also by offering ways to overcome nerves and perform with natural ease, no matter how pressurised the situation may be.

Freeing your inner musician

Perhaps my main specialism is to help people unlock or tap into their inner musical force. This fascinating process of removing the blockages to gain access to our natural, internal source of musical expression is highly therapeutic. The nuts and bolts of musical fluency are actually easy to understand, especially now that I have formulated such clear, carefully designed learning materials. Using this musical vocabulary and syntax to express our innermost feelings, to ‘speak’ our musical truth moment by moment… this is what constitutes the real work of fluency training.

Everyone has some blockage in this area and each student is unique, of course, with different past experiences and perhaps sometimes even traumas around music. Therefore, my job as a coach is to guide every individual with compassion and care, following an approach that is tailored to address their particular needs.

Rediscover your original love of playing piano

The current system of musical education, whether in classical- or jazz-based music, can generate serious problems for many or even most people who have gone through it. This is true even at the highest levels. In conservatoires and university music departments, students are often “processed” by very competitive and potentially homogenising methods of musical instruction. As a result, many emerge feeling as if their original source of musical passion is almost extinguished.

The job of rekindling people’s inner musical fire, thawing out all the habits and strictures that conventional training places on music students, is one that I truly relish. I love seeing people recover their sense of joy in making music once they have removed the straitjacket of conventional musical teaching, with its emphasis on mechanical technique, theory, interpretation and performance practice.

Music is one of those skills that develops better when practised with a high degree of intrinsic motivation. Of course, rewards, accolades, goals and outcomes are nice to have, but if your practice is extrinsically motivated, it can create problems and it may be impossible to become fluent working in this way. So, even if you have a very effective, driven ego that works very well under pressure in other areas of endeavour, you may well find that music simply does not respond to your usual approach. Practice that is joyless simply does not develop musical fluency. The true end goal of music is the joy, solace and catharsis that it communicates. The best motivation is the experience of these feelings when we practise.

Learn to play, improvise and compose with physical and emotional power and ease

Learning to be musically fluent, especially rhythmically, brings a release from pressure. In many cases, this pressure is experienced as psychological or physical difficulty – anxiety, tension or even pain. Fluent skills ease away these problems and restore natural grace and flow when playing the piano.

Developing a fluent grasp of rhythmic and tonal patterns and relationships is therefore a road to musical freedom in the broadest sense. And this is especially true for the piano, as it is such an incredibly versatile musical tool, ideal for composing and improvising, as well as performing music. To play the keys as an extension of the body and to express rhythm, melody and harmony with the effortlessness of speaking, is entirely possible when we practise lots with the kind of powerful unbroken focus that allows us to fully let go.

Lose your fear and shame to express real, deep, direct feelings

This connection to authentic feeling is an absolutely essential part of the training, as music is the language of feeling. Words describe concepts; rhythm and tonality describe feelings. If you are not expressing real feelings from the body and soul when you are playing music, then you are engaged merely in the act of passive reciting rather than communicating directly and fluently.

Playing passively can feel like a comfort zone – or hiding place – that many people don’t feel safe to step out of without the reassurance and guidance of compassionate coaching. This is because some of the inner feelings that music touches can actually be quite scary. Fear and shame around expressing ourselves freely stems from when we were children, and didn’t always feel safe to be fully expressive around the adults in our lives.

Many people hide their deep fear of being expressive behind a perceived fear of failure. But a little reflection reveals that we all make mistakes – errors are an essential part of learning any practical skill. Not accepting this reality is stupid. But it is not stupidity that makes so many people behave like results-driven perfectionists who expect to get it right the first time without needing to practise. The truth is that by always being perfect or impressive, people avoid the enormity of being free, expressive, loose and playful.

Our natural state as children is to be wildly expressive and playful – and were it not for the effect of civilisation, we would carry some of this into adulthood. But the reprimands that we received for our over-exuberance, whether trivial or perhaps sometimes even traumatic, served only to make us repress our free expression of deep, body-and-soul feelings. Rediscovering this childlike expressive freedom and authenticity is a prerequisite for the development of true fluent musicianship. Without doing this work properly, we easily fall into the trap of using the model of music as a crutch for our wounded perfectionist ego, as it tries to get safe, impressive results. This completely blocks musical fluency. Fluency comes when we tell our story with audacious authenticity using musical language.

Fluent musicianship training brings transformation and healing

The deep feeling of genuine awe and wonder is the first port of call in my coaching of students in this area of feeling consciousness. Wonder is like a blank canvas on which we can paint all the other feelings, many of which we might not have felt since we were small children. Developing our ability to connect to feelings from the body and soul is a powerful and transformative process.

Authentically felt music is both the healthy outcome and the medicine which heals the wounds which underpin our expressive blockages. Fluent music-making allows us to reconnect with our childlike, feeling selves. Rhythm work is particularly important and helpful for reconnecting with our inner musician. Resistance to letting go can be very powerful sometimes but by simply allowing ourselves to feel the groove naturally and tell musical stories with fresh spontaneity, like a child saying a rhyme, can unleash so much magic from deep inside us.

Feeling is “seeing”

One vital aspect of this feeling-energy that sometimes surprises people, is how it enables us to perceive musical structure and patterns much more clearly. This is because feeling is a kind of perception or consciousness – a more powerful alternative to thinking. Overthinking is a common blockage. Feeling is a light we must switch on in order to make all the rhythmic and tonal shapes clearly perceptible. Only when this light is on, can we really “see” how music works.

Fluent music-making is meditation

Meanwhile, almost paradoxically, calming and centring the mind, through moment-by-moment focus on the simple model of music that I teach, is a huge part of the training and practice. The skill of focusing is very simple. It requires no cognitive effort. But it is not easy and requires lots of practice to master.

So, another important part of my job is to be like a teacher of meditation, helping people go inwards, still the mind and maintain single-pointed awareness of musical components as they pass by. To think in terms of merely understanding the model clearly is very dangerous. People often conflate the concept of focus with knowing. But just knowing something is not the same as experiencing it right now, in this moment. Being fully present in the “here and now” is a vital part of fluent musicianship. Mastery of mind is achieved by practising the simple, compassionate act of noticing when our focus wanders and redirecting it back. This simple, powerful practice is also excitingly transformative.

If you think you may be interested in trying my radical approach to training musical fluency on the keys, then please drop me a line, telling me a little about yourself, and I will get back to you as soon as I can.