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 1924 an audience packed out a house for a concert at the Aeolian Hall in New York City. And while the "Experiment In Modern Music" concert had been billed as an educational event, the concert, organised by Paul Whiteman, leader of the Palais Royal Orchestra, had been organised to show that the evolving form of music called jazz deserved recognition and equal billing as other forms of music.
The concert started with didactic segments with titles such as "Contrast: Legitimate Scoring vs. Jazzing", which progressively grated on the nerves of the audience as the event progressed. Then a man named George Gershwin, who up to that point had been known for his Broadway songs, sat down to perform what looked like a piano concerto - a piano accompanied by an orchestra. Except that Gershwin wasn't playing music by Beethoven, Haydn or other Classical greats. He was performing one of his own compositions.
The reaction to Rhapsody in Blue that evening set off a chain of events that would eventually establish the jazz piece as one of the iconic pieces in a world of Classical music that was gradually evolving to include new influences. Gershwin had applied traditional compositional techniques to jazz harmonies, thereby helping the piece, and the genre, gain equal footing to others. The music critics heralded it for how it developed; how the subsidiary phrases "grew logically" as developmental passages in Classical sonata form might have done. The use of contrast brought about by elements of music such as rhythm and instrumentation gave it acceptance from a traditional Classical world. Despite its harmonies, and the kind of reception that jazz music evoked at that time of being light entertainment, critics realised Rhapsody in Blue was not just a dance tune set for piano and other instruments.
It was a hybrid that not just bridged the world of jazz and Classical music, but mutually benefitted both genres. Rhapsody in Blue gave jazz authority by aligning it with traditional Classical music through the use of similar developmental devices. The Classical music world welcomed the piece, as a sign that the genre was growing to include more modern sounds and was evolving. Classical music had earned more street cred.
The piece that grew to be a landmark work took less than five weeks to compose. And had the New York Tribune not published a claim that Gershwin was "at work on a jazz concerto" for the event, the composer might have never left the comfortable world of Broadway songs to embark on a foray into a musical unknown. The music for orchestra was written out, but Gershwin's piano part was improvised during the world premiere!
Rhapsody would be acclaimed as one of the most important American musical works of the 20th century. It also spearheaded future attempts by composers such as Aaron Copland in drawing on jazz influences in their works for orchestra.