Musical Mind Piano is an approach to teaching piano designed especially for young children. It aims to lay a solid and sound foundation on which a lifetime of music making and piano playing can be built, and it seeks to do this by taking seriously the way children naturally learn. Below is a discussion of these aims and examples from Musical Mind Piano. 

Musical Mind Piano grew from the ideas that 

• music is a language in which one can become fluent — as great musicians of past and present show
• any improvement to piano methods has to improve how students begin 
• the key to such an improvement is in how kids learn language. 

When children are learning to speak, they use their eyes, ears, body and mind. They observe sounds they hear, try to imitate them, and explore until they discover how. They build a repertoire of sounds, and eventually words, and play with them. They have fun, and their parents have fun also as they interact with their child in play, encouragement and guidance. It’s all a whole lot of fun! Left to their own devices, children learn through observation, imitation, exploration, discovery, play and interaction. The best musicians have often grown up in a musical environment that enabled these things. They may have had extraordinary natural abilities, but they usually had extraordinary musical environments, as well. Mozart is a great example. By the time he could crawl, an orchestra rehearsal was his daily play ground!

I believe that learning music, as learning language, is not merely a matter of acquiring knowledge and skill. For as children learn to speak, they develop a mind for their language; an English Mind, a Spanish Mind, a Chinese Mind, and so on. Similarly, if they are to speak the language of music, they must develop a Musical Mind. I don’t think about grammar much when I speak English, because I know all of its grammatical patterns so well and have a broad vocabulary. It’s the same with music for a great musician. They know all the chords, scales, structures and other patterns so well, they don’t think about them when they use them to make themselves understandable. They also have been speaking and hearing—communicating—in music for a long time, so they are very familiar with it. 

I believe the fundamental challenges we face with teaching music, and particularly piano, is that the right way for kids to learn is to be in a music rich environment and to have a lot of immersion time where they can use their own devices of observation, imitation, exploration, discovery, play and interaction. Outside a family of musicians, though, it’s hard to get such 

With Musical Mind Piano, I am trying to take the above things into account, such that children’s natural learning tools are allowed more room for use, and that new things are well-prepared, presented and subsequently made ample use of, so they become immersive for the child.