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!
Beethoven's piano sonatas are sometimes referred to as the summit of piano repertoire. During his lifetime he wrote thirty-two of them, a relatively small number compared to his contemporary Joseph Haydn, but Beethoven's piano sonatas, especially the later ones, go deeper into expressing the inner voice of the composer. It is perhaps important to remember that Beethoven wrote the piano sonatas with himself in mind, to extend the boundaries not only technically but also expressively.
The Pathetique Sonata (no 8) was one of Beethoven's earlier ones, written during what might be called the "C minor" period of his life. The latter refers to the only minor key he seemed to use for his important works such as the third piano concerto and the fourth string quartet. The key of C minor is usually associated with pathos. Why is that so? Music written in minor keys sound sad anyway, but C minor is direct; its stark contrast to the commonly-heard C major scale is almost an unashamed bluntness at negative tinges of regret. Beethoven gave this sonata the title "Grand Sonata Pathetique". This sonata conveys Beethoven's awareness, characterised by the isolation expressively conveyed in the central movement, that his sense of hearing is deteriorating.
The most well-known of Beethoven's piano sonatas is arguably the Moonlight Sonata. The title was not actually Beethoven's but that of a critic who described the slow opening, a change from the norm, as giving the impression of moonlight shimmering over a lake. Its second movement was described as "a flower between two abysses" by the composer Franz Liszt, a brief moment of respite before the fast third movement.
Beethoven holds a special place in classical music history as a composer bridging the formal classical period with the expressive romantic period (in fact, the beginning of the Romantic era is marked by the year of his death, 1827) and his works show the transition from one to the another. The early period of classical music, around 1750, was characterised by form and the adhesion to it. Piano sonatas typically followed a three-movement pattern: a fast first movement, a slower second movement in a related key, and a fast third movement again. Beethoven's early piano sonatas follow this pattern, but his later ones show the experimentation with form; they show him altering the structure in a bid to convey more emotional depth. Hence a look at Beethoven's piano sonatas is unavoidably going to include some discussions about what he does with the form. His Waldstein Sonata (no 21), dedicated to Count Ferdinand von Waldstein from whom he had received support, started life as a typical three-movement sonata but was later rewritten so that the middle section, which would have been a slow calm influence, was only a briefer respite to the Rondo finale, so that it retains the drive and momentum overall. But his greatest experiments with balancing form and emotion can be seen in his last five piano sonatas. Some of them are written in variation form and show the piano continually exploring thematic material, seeking more intimate expression. Others show almost a percussive treatment of the piano, and hammered chords alternating with periods of solitude, almost as if Beethoven the composer was playing out his inner torments on the piano.
After his piano sonatas, Beethoven almost seemed to dispense with the piano altogether, choosing instead the string quartet as the medium for conveying the emotional aspects of music he still felt he had to communicate. Why is this so? The bowed string instruments allowed him to convey even deeper depth. He could play one continuous note, but depending on the bowing, adjust the volume to be loud, soft, to swell or to fade. Yet in that one note he could convey more feeling than he could on the piano, which lacked this ability to change dynamics on the same note. The last movement of the Op. 109 piano sonata, for example, has long trills in the right hand while the running notes abound in the lower parts, almost as if Beethoven was aiming for this same effect but realising he could never achieve it in this medium. Beethoven might have stopped composing for the piano had it not been for the publisher Anton Diabelli. Sensing an opportunity to make a quick buck, Diabelli wrote a theme and asked fifty composers to each submit a variation on it, intending to publish the submissions as a volume. He received one fron Schubert, one from Liszt, and thirty-three from Beethoven. But instead of merely quoting the original theme in various guises, each of Beethoven's variations reinterprets the previous, so that the developments are more far reaching at the end. As with his piano sonatas, the Diabelli Variations show Beethoven the expressive composer alongside Beethoven the experimentalist, ever tinkling with form.