Philosophy - Green Bird Studio: Music for the Heart

Why choose us?

I want people to learn to read music. Period. If you can read music, you can learn to play most anything with hard work and practice. While I have had ear training and sight singing training, this is not my forte. Nor is playing by ear or improvisation. Students coming to this studio will be taught to read music, technique, music theory, and basic music history.

While most piano teachers can provide all of these things, I believe my area of strength is teaching students to value and recognize musicality and what it does for ourselves as musicians, and as well as what it does for others. The "how we play" is important, of course, but the "why we play" is also of equal or greater value. When we tap into the why of music, it gets us out of our heads and into our hearts. This present moment peace gives us freedom to let go of the inner critics that can keep us bound and thinking about performance based evaluation, from ourselves and others. When we, as musicians, are trying to meet imagined expectations external to ourselves, we lose the beauty that music offers us. Music can be a great healer of the spirit, and connects us to universal truths bigger than ourselves.

Please know that as a student at Green Bird Studio, we do work towards playing with precision and following all the "guide posts" that the music directs us to follow. This knowledge is essential, and growth in this area will be an ongoing journey of learning. However, it is the "why we play" that moves a student from a goal of perfection and evaluation to a goal of experiencing the power of the music in the present. This can improve motivation to practice and play. Playing and performing is then changed from an individual act of attempting perfection with the audience as judges/observers to a communal experience where the beauty of music is being experienced by the student, interpreted, and is being offered up as a shared experience, inviting the audience to come in to the beauty and healing that music provides as participants.

Home piano. We had to get a new leg put on our piano, so I painted the unfinished wood.