Home Piano Lessons in the Crouch End, Muswell Hill and Finsbury Park vicinity
Hello there, I'm Alvin.
I am a piano teacher offering lessons at your home. You can also have remote lessons via Zoom, Skype or Google Meet.
I travel to Crouch End, Hornsey, Muswell Hill, Islington, Finsbury Park, Highgate and Wood Green. The range of postcodes I cover includes N4, N5, N6, N8, N10, N17, N19 and N22.
You'll learn to play adaptations of well-known music, across genres such as classical, pop, rock, anime, metal and jazz. The music you'll play in lessons is familiar, current, and at a suitable level of difficulty.
You'll also learn how to improvise your own version of existing songs.
If you like, you can prepare for
Why Learn the Piano With Me?
You'll learn positively, with music tailored to your abilities.
We'll work from music that you can play and move on to more difficult repertoire as your skills and concentration improve. The focus is positive, on what you can do and what you can aim for.
You'll develop your current piano skills so you can continually play harder, impressive-sounding music. I'll also show you how you can improvise your own versions of your favourite songs.
You'll get to play music you like.
Piano playing requires co-ordination of six or seven independent tasks, and it is always reassuring and satisfying to know you are playing the correct notes.
Playing songs you are familiar with also helps with improve the reading of musical notation, because you'll have already have an idea of what the music should sound like, and hence know what the written notes, rhythmic symbols and expression marks are trying to convey.
In my own time, I write out and arrange your favourite songs at a suitable level of difficulty for you to play, at no extra charge to you.
Do you know any other piano teacher who does that on a regular basis?
I charge reasonable rates and am flexible.
My rates vary depending on your location, but they are comparable to rates charged by local music services for children's piano lessons in schools. The current rate charged by Haringey Music Service is £33.00 per hour for the academic year 2020-21.
In some cases - such as when siblings have lessons, and if I'm already in your area - I charge the school lesson rate, or less !
I teach in areas such as Crouch End, Hornsey, Finsbury Park, Muswell Hill and Wood Green, and my travel costs are shared among students. Please contact me to ask - my rates are frequently lower than most teachers who do home visits.
I have no cancellation fees.
I am particularly understanding if you need to cancel at short notice (e.g. due to child illness). Or maybe you've suddenly remembered about another appointment - as long as I've not appeared at your doorstep, that's fine!
Other music schools or tutors may require you to give 24 hours' notice for cancelling a lesson. I don't - no one plans an illness in advance! - and I understand that life sometimes just gets a little bit complicated for our liking!
Need a recap?
Music you like
A positive learning process
Very reasonable rates
No cancellation fees, no contract, no notice period!
Today's blog snippet - see more in the Posts section!
In the mid 1800s as a wave of patriotic fervour and revolutionary sentiment swept across Europe, a nationalist spirit started to influence European politics and this wave continued to spread into culture and the arts. Composers sought inspiration from their own roots, their native folk music, rather than merely copy the popular style that had dominated the previous decades. In Poland, the composer Frederic Chopin showed his revolutionary sympathies by using Polish traditional forms such as the polonaise and mazurka. In Russia, where Italian music and Italian composers had reigned supreme, the native melodic patterns and rhythms of Russian folk songs as promoted by composers such as Glinka and Balakirev rose to the fore.
In Spain, the Catalan composers Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Grandos exploited the characteristics of traditional dance forms such as the flamenco in their works. Albeniz's most important works are for solo piano, and all of them are underpinned by the rhythms and tones of Spanish folk music. His four books of piano pieces, collectively called Iberia, showcase musical portraits of Spain and have been orchestrated by later composers. His compatriot Granados divided his time between composing, teaching and performing - both solo works and as an accompanist - and his works for solo piano included a set of twelve Spanish dances and the famous piano suite Goyescas. Unfortunately it was ironic that the huge success of the latter would lead to his early death. The piano suite had been turned into an opera to be premiered in the Metropolitan Opera in New York; unfortunately as Granados crossed the Atlantic in 1916 on the return journey, having attended the premiere, the ocean liner Sussex was sunk by a German torpedo in the English Channel.
Nineteeth century Vienna was dominated by Johann Strauss the elder and his son Johann; the latter was known as the Waltz King. Under their influence Vienna was taken by storm by light music such as polkas, galops and quadrilles. But the waltz, a sophisticated form of the Austrian Landler, a peasant dance, rose from its humbled beginnings to become the favoured dance music of aristocratic and working class dance halls.
The waltz was characterised by its three-beat "um-cha-cha" pattern. On the piano this is created by playing a single note on the first beat of the bar, while playing the chord - either in its root form or in an inversion - on the other two beats. Many of the waltzes of the time, such as the younger Strauss' Blue Danube, were transcribed for piano, and as the instrument became more commonplace, and not merely the preserve of the upper classes, the musical sounds of waltzes were soon ringing from Viennese homes.