Pianodao

Welcome to Pianodao!

Welcome to the piano education website and online blog of teacher, published composer and author ANDREW EALES.

Pianodao Music Library

Categorised for your specific playing level, and with top Studio Choice recommendations of the best material, the Pianodao Music Library is the place to discover your repertoire!

Pianodao Articles

Explore Pianodao’s many FREE and informative articles, all carefully researched and written to inform piano players and teachers about issues relating to practice, play, performing, and education.

Many of the problems we grapple with at the piano have to do with our physical limitations, tension, mental state and internal beliefs. Pianodao Wellbeing address these broader issues, offering advice, support and free Qigong exercises.

Art of Piano Education Awards

17 JUNE 2024 • Royal Albert Hall, LONDON

Here is the full list of 2024 Finalists, and announcing the recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Thinking Pianist 2024

13-20 JULY 2024 • Cheltenham Ladies College

After enjoying The Thinking Pianist course in 2022 and 2023, it is a genuine pleasure to be returning as a member of the 2024 faculty..

Chetham’s Summer Piano Teacher Course

13-18 AUGUST 2024 • Chetham’s School, MANCHESTER

I am delighted to be leading the Piano Teachers’ Course at this year’s Chetham’s International Piano Summer School.

‘How to Practise’ at Finchcocks

24-26 JANUARY 2025 • Finchcocks, Kent

Join me at the Manor House described as “Paradise for Pianists” for a weekend refreshing your practice for the new year!

Putting the PLAY back into Playing the Piano

THE PATHWAYS SERIES

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by ANDREW EALES

A Radical Manifesto for Piano Education

According to Plato, “life must be lived as play”.
How might this attitude to life benefit piano education?
We teach others to play the piano, but what do we really mean by play?

Embracing our limits

THE FERMATA SERIES

Pianodao’s weekly series of reflective blog posts
Written by ANDREW EALES

“Every river has its banks, every ocean has its shores. Constant expansion is not possible. Everything reaches its limits, and the wise always try to identify these limits.”

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao Daily Meditations

I love this metaphor of the river: it is the banks which give it direction, focus its energetic flow, and encourage it towards its destination. It doesn’t want to burst its banks, and quickly dissipates when flooding causes it to. How much better to flow where its banks lead.

The shores of the ocean, meanwhile, are ultimately the boundaries which define it. The shoreline is a point of safety, security, a haven from the deep. And while I often remind students that piano playing is the journey of a lifetime, without destination, we all need to spend time in port, resupplying our vessels and finding refreshment.

The desire to push beyond our natural limits may have become an endemic demand in every field of human endeavour, but there is surely little doubt this attitude is responsible for many of the problems we face. So how can we come to terms with our limitations and leverage them to our advantage?

Intermediate French Favourites

PIANODAO MUSIC LIBRARY

Selected and reviewed by ANDREW EALES
Find out more: ABOUT PIANODAO REVIEWS

In my earlier review of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic titles in Hal Leonard’s Classical Piano Sheet Music Series, I concluded,

“Those in the market for a solid collection of established pieces from each of these eras will find these books offer excellent value. For around £12 a throw, they include a wealth of well-established musical material, sympathetically edited and nicely put together.”

Since then, further titles have been added to the budget-friendly series, the most recent of which has particularly piqued my interest…

Beethoven • The Complete Bagatelles

PIANODAO MUSIC LIBRARY

Selected and reviewed by ANDREW EALES
Find out more: ABOUT PIANODAO REVIEWS

Music publishers Bärenreiter have rightly received loud applause for their recent scholarly performing urtext editions of Beethoven’s music.

Of particular interest to Pianodao readers, Jonathan Del Mar’s edition of the complete Piano Sonatas (reviewed here) was a milestone that was soon joined in the catalogue by Mario Aschauer’s landmark Diabelli Variations edition (reviewed here).

Aschauer has now brought as an exhaustively Complete Bagatelles edition that further consolidates the publisher’s lead in this repertoire.

A Bagatelle (French, “trifle”) is by definition a “short piece in a lighter style”, and Beethoven’s, which include the evergreen Für Elise, are surely among the most famous of all. Indeed, it is probably not overstating their importance to say that they set the musical scene for the character pieces which became such a popular staple of the domestic piano repertoire in the Romantic Era.

For the developing pianist, meanwhile, these pieces offer an important bridge between Beethoven’s easy dances and his monumental Sonata cycle. No wonder that they have long been recognised as an indispensable part of the early advanced repertoire, essential for players at around UK Grades 6-7.

The Landscape of Play

THE FERMATA SERIES

Pianodao’s weekly series of reflective blog posts
Written by ANDREW EALES

In my article Putting the PLAY back into playing the piano, I set out what I described as a “radical manifesto for piano education”.

That article was a watershed moment that brought together many of the ideas previously proposed on Pianodao, and outlined a fresh, positive future for piano education. Concluding the article, I wrote,

“There will long be those who value a piano journey which ventures beyond a prescribed series of sequenced tasks, levels and achievements, who long to depart from the digital learning super-highway to explore lesser-travelled, but astonishingly beautiful and fascinating byways.”

Naturally, as readers have considered Dr. Stuart Brown’s seven properties of play and their application in piano education, many have asked what this looks like in practice.

‘How to Practise’ at Finchcocks

Finchcocks has been described by the BBC Music Magazine as “Paradise for Pianists”, and with good reason…

The Grade 1 listed Manor House, built in 1725 and set in the beauty of the Kent countryside, is home to an enviable collection of superb instruments including a Steinway Model B, Bosendorfer Model 200, Bechstein Model A, Bluthner Model 10, grands from Yamaha, Kohler and Campbell, Grotrian Steinweg, Kawai, a new silent baby Yamaha and an 1893 Broadwood.

These superb instruments wait to be discovered by those who attend the various weekend residential courses which run at Finchcocks throughout the year, led by a starry list of great teachers, and with a reputation for offering a relaxed but focussed atmosphere in a luxury setting.

I am thrilled to have been asked, for the first time, to lead one of these courses, running from 24-26 January 2025, and with a theme of renewing our practice for the start of the coming year.

Read on for full details, and a beautiful video that explores Finchcocks itself…

A Lifelong Love of Music

THE FERMATA SERIES

Pianodao’s weekly series of reflective blog posts
Written by ANDREW EALES

I have previously quoted Andor Földes’ eminently humane views about talented children (he himself achieved fame at a prodigiously young age) from his book Keys to the Keyboard (1950).

Here is another equally thought-provoking snippet from the same passage of the book, and for continuing reflection:

“I heartily agree with the words of the great Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, who, in an interview some years ago, stated bluntly that nothing a musical child produces before the age of eighteen really counts. What matters is a person’s work between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five.”

When children take up piano lessons, have we yet sufficiently understood that this is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a lifelong love of playing the piano, or do we take too short-term a view?

The Naoko Ikeda Duet Collection

PIANODAO MUSIC LIBRARY

Selected and reviewed by ANDREW EALES
Find out more: ABOUT PIANODAO REVIEWS

Naoko Ikeda: The Graded Collection, for which I had the honour of selecting and editing 24 solo piano pieces by the contemporary Japanese educational composer last year, is already proving a hit with players and other teachers.

Working on that collection involved a deep dive into Ikeda’s work, and the solo pieces in my selection are truly the tip of a tremendous iceberg. But alongside her wonderful solo music, I also discovered that Ikeda has composed a significant body of very enjoyable music for one piano, four hands.

How wonderful that Ikeda has now, with publisher Willis Music Company, curated a selection of 15 of her favourite duet compositions.

The Naoko Ikeda Duet Collection can be seen as a natural companion to The Graded Collection; it will be welcomed by all who enjoy playing together at intermediate level, and who appreciate and want to explore more of Ikeda’s music.

Masterpieces for the Modern Pianist

PIANODAO MUSIC LIBRARY

Selected and reviewed by ANDREW EALES
Find out more: ABOUT PIANODAO REVIEWS

Bumper books of piano repertoire have long been a popular feature of the music publishing landscape. They can also prove hugely useful, as illustrated by a student I currently teach who is putting together a complete Grade 7 programme using only the free music compendium that arrived (in a polythene bag, alongside the instruction manual) with his Yamaha piano.

One of the enjoyable quirks of such anthologies is that they often include some unexpected rarities alongside the usual chestnuts, and this is a strength that The Willis Music Company have particularly played to with their latest venture into this market. Masterpieces for the Modern Pianist claims, and succeeds, in offering:

“a unique classical piano solo collection of over 70 timeless favourites and featuring undiscovered gems!”

Read on for the complete list and review of this remarkable fresh arrival…

A Child Prodigy Speaks

THE FERMATA SERIES

Pianodao’s weekly series of reflective blog posts
Written by ANDREW EALES

The pianist Andor Földes (1913-1992) was one of the great child ‘prodigies’ of the early twentieth century, making his public debut performing a Mozart concerto with the Budapest Philharmonic in 1921 when he was just 8 years old. Földes went on to enjoy a successful concert and recording career, as well as writing several books, including the seminal Keys to the Keyboard (1950), in which he comments,

“Everybody knows about prodigies; the writer of this book happened to be one. But the great majority of people are inclined to forget that for every prodigy who has made good, there are a thousand others who for one reason or another have not fulfilled the promise shown in their early youth.

They are the less fortunate ones, whose careers may have been ruined by a premature start in public playing, or because of the inevitable conflict between the growing pains of adolescence and the growing responsibilities of the budding artiste; the ones who have never made the grade, to the everlasting chagrin of their parents.”

That Földes was himself a prodigy adds resonance to his viewpoint, and though he proved to be that one in a thousand who found continuing success, he undoubtedly witnessed those he describes as “less fortunate”.

The Thinking Pianist 2024

After enjoying my days at The Thinking Pianist summer school in 2022 and again in 2023, I am delighted to be joining the full-time faculty for the 2024 course.

Read on to find out more about this exclusive and exceptional event.