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!
Mention the name Scott Joplin, and you instantly think of ragtime - the free spirited music that distinguishes itself with its syncopation and upbeat rhythms. Ragtime was a style that swept America in the late-19th century and influenced other genres like jazz in the early 20th. Yet Joplin, arguably the pivotal figure in its history was largely unknown right to to the late 1960s. How is that possible, considering The Entertainer is one of the piano classics of today? Virtually anyone who takes up the piano comes across it at some point.
Just as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach lay undiscovered for nearly two hundred years until it was revived by Felix Mendelssohn, Joplin's music might have faded into obscurity had it not been revived within a growing community of dedicated enthusiasts.
However, it took the power of a Hollywood film to catapult Joplin into a household name. Think of what Titanic did for Leonardo di Caprio, or Terminator for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The springboard for Joplin's music was the film The Sting, which earned him a share of an Oscar five decades after his death in 1917.
The Sting starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Ragtime music had since fallen out of fashion after its brief genesis, just as other styles fade into obscurity after their peak success. However, the director of the film, George Roy Hill, had chanced upon Joplin's music after hearing his son play from an album by classical musicologist and ragtime revivalist Joshua Rifkin, and was instantly hooked. But Joplin's trademark piano sounds didn't make it into the score just like that. They were orchestrated by a young Hollywood composer named Marvin Hamlisch, including traditional Joplin favourites such as "Solace" and "The Entertainer".
The Sting won Best Picture among seven total Oscars in 1974, and composer Hamlisch himself nabbed three Oscars.
The win for the score of The Sting brought the ragtime revival national publicity and allowed the genre to come to the fore. Within two weeks of the win, "The Entertainer" was released as an instrumental single, and attained the dizzy heights of #3 on the Billboard pop charts in mid-May. The soundtrack album from The Sting went slightly further, garnering the #1 spot on the album charts alongside the singles success.
"The Entertainer" helped propel Marvin Hamlisch to another success in the Best New Artist category at the Grammy awards the following year. Hamlisch, recognising the ragtime genius he owed much of his success to, called Scott Joplin "the real new artist of the year" in his acceptance speech.
Perhaps without Scott Joplin, there might not have been The Sting. And perhaps without The Sting, there might not have been the acclaim for Joplin's ragtime that it deserves.