Whole Music Lessons by Susan Capestro

Welcome to Whole Music Lessons!

Let's consider: should keyboard students have to choose between having a teacher for learning music such as that by Mozart and Debussy, and/or a different teacher for chords and jazz/pop arranging? I believe that students shouldn't need to have two separate keyboard teachers, and a great deal of my colleagues agree. During sessions I've given at conferences, many teachers have expressed a large amount of interest and enthusiasm for teaching their students a complete set of musicianship skills.

What is a complete, well-rounded set of skills? For pianists, this includes not only a solid foundation in music reading, but plenty of structural knowledge, so we can learn music from the inside out. Familiarity with chords, chord voicings, reading from a lead sheet, arranging and improvising is so much more than the "fun stuff." When we know how music is constructed, and become accustomed to always understanding what pieces are made of, everything else is easier, including sight reading and memorizing traditional repertoire pieces.

Many piano teachers would like to teach skills associated with pop and jazz, so that they complement and enhance what their students are learning with the classics. I started this site, to begin to release my materials, and to give readers the opportunity to comment. As I upload them, please tell me what you do and don't like, what's truly useful, and what you'd still like to know. Unit One onwards assumes the student knows all the major 5-finger patterns and has typical 1st-2nd year skills.

My traditional piano pedagogy degree is from Northwestern University, but I've also studied jazz extensively. I've been a professional composer and performer in many different styles of music (Read my resume...) I've enjoyed teaching both traditional piano repertoire and contemporary improvisational styles of music together in my student's curriculum for many years, and now it's time to share how this works. The name I've given to this approach is integral keyboard teaching.

Integral keyboard teaching can best be described as a creativity-based approach that centers around having the student find his or her own musical voice. It synergistically combines the best of current and proven piano pedagogy approaches to music reading with the most successful learning techniques used by jazz and popular keyboardists. It emphasizes structural understanding, and makes use of music from various traditions from around the globe.

I hope you'll enjoy the pieces and learning sequences! Get started by clicking on the tabs, above, or by visiting my blog.