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 £40.32 per hour for the academic year 2025-26.
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!
Music is a part of our everyday lives. Step into a cafe, and what do you have? Background music. Call a company like one of your utility companies, and what do you get while you are being transferred? Perhaps the sound of Coldplay singing Paradise, or a specially recorded jingle in the background. And you could say the same for any supermarket or shop, especially in the run up to Christmas. It is as if someone has read a sales psychology textbook which stated, "Playing favourable music in the background creates a comfortable ambience, which encourages people in shops to stay, linger and purchase; over the phone, it puts them in a more congenial mood."
The idea of using music to fill in a otherwise silent background would later result in the birth of music in film, where pianists at the side of a screen would play hits of the day, or improvise to the silent film; partly to mask that continuous whirring of the projector flicking through hundreds of stills to create movement, and partly to ease the tension and discomfort of otherwise prolonged periods of silence between individuals in a confined space. Silence causes tension. Listen to how Beethoven, in his symphonies, whips up the orchestra in a chorus of sound, through various motifs of music interchanged between groups of instruments, at increasingly smaller intervals, instruments piled on top of layers of sound, at a frenetic pace, then leaves the music hanging for a few seconds.
Heightened tension.
Imagine you were at a quiet restaurant where there was no background music playing. The clink of cutlery from the neighbouring table would instantly draw your attention, and you would be cautious and nervous about making unnecessary noise yourself. Or when you get in a lift with strangers, none of whom know each other. The silence as the lift moves upwards is slightly oppressive. That is why we have background music.
But if you are of the converse opinion that city life is full of background buzz, where your daily existence is so amplified, on such a heightened level, that you think daily activity could do without the further addition of noise, you can leave the blame equally at the foot of the same person: Erik Satie.
Satie, an eccentric who wrote pieces with titles such as Three Flabby Preludes for A Cat, believed that music had become such a specialised art form over the previous century, transitioning to only being performed and heard in concert halls, that it had lost sight of its initial purposes, one of which was as background music during dining, in the days of Emperors and courts.
To that effect, he composed a series of pieces to be played during the intermission of a Parisian play, while the audience mingled over displays of children's artwork. The idea was that the music would lightly wash over the audience as they admired the children's work. Much to Satie's annoyance, however, the audience - unprepared for this change in social behaviour - paused and listened to the music, making it the focal point and giving it their whole attention as they would have done in a concert, instead of just acknowledging it and what must have seemed like politely ignoring it.
It took decades before Satie's idea of background music would become firmly entrenched in modern thinking. It may take even longer for the ideas of the composer John Cage to become accepted. Cage theorised that the sounds around us form the fabric of music, and to that effect composed his piano piece 4'33", which consists of little more than a pianist opening and shutting the piano lid to signify different stages of the piece, while the internal structure, the "music", is made up of whatever background noise there is at that point in time. Usually the audience ends up sitting in awkward, tense, silence, and the piece is made to of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence.
It may seem a long shot to consider that background sounds can be considered music, but who knows? We have television ads where a choir produces sounds or sings to mimic the noises made by a car in the course of its daily movement. If that forms part of what we recognise and acknowledge to be music, then perhaps with time it will be readily accepted that music can be background sounds, and background sounds can be music.