How to Teach Piano Successfully

This book contains a myriad of helpful information and suggestions for piano teachers. Part One contains helpful hints on setting up your studio and making it more professional, an overview of different methods of teaching and lists of piano methods and publishers of piano music. I find Part Two to be especially helpful, as it includes pedagogical techniques and suggested repertoire and techniques for first, second, and third year students as well as intermediate students. There are also some very helpful preparatory exercises included. Part Three includes special subjects such as pre-college training for the piano performance major, memorization techniques, piano fingering, ornaments and embellishments, and a wonderful section on the best editions of keyboard literature. There is also a list of piano composers and a basic theory overview, which is a great review for any teacher. The one bad thing about this book is that it is quite outdated, especially when it comes to discussing technology in the studio. Another wonderful book that complements this one very well is The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher.

If you can only own one pedagogy text, this is the one to buy. Dr. Bastien gives one of the best explanations of the four basic approaches to piano teaching (middle C, landmark/interval, gradual multikey, intensive multikey) I've seen. He then reviews a number of piano courses using the criteria he develops in the text. Most of the courses are older, and a few are even out of print. That is an advantage if this is used as the basal text for a pedagogy course, as the instructor can have the students write reviews of the courses in current use. Dr. Bastien's bias towards the gradual multikey approach is evident throughout the book, and the multikey approach forms the basis for the year-by-year descriptions in the center chapters of the text. I personally believe in an approach that blends the landmark/interval approach with the multikey approach, and hence found the year-by-year material to be of tremendous value. If every teacher in America taught piano the way Bastien recommends, we would greatly improve the quality of teaching of the average teacher. The lists of recomeended supplemental materials alone justify the purchase of this book. There is also a wonderful chapter explaining which editions of classical masterworks are the best to purchase. That chapter has become my personal shopping list. The only weakness of this book (and also a weakness in the Bastien courses) is the fact that the author doesn't offer a useful strategy for learning the notes or for decoding an unknown note. Bastien simply states that drill is often needed into the second and even third year of lessons. In my experience, if an effective strategy (such as landmarks) is used, the extensive drill is not needed. If a teacher wants to develop a library of pedagogy texts, this is the one I would recommend buying and reading first.