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Episode Summary
Amy takes time to look back at some of the big events and happenings in the world of independent piano teachers in 2022 and 2023.
Items Mentioned
Share your thoughts with Amy! – Take the Year-End Podcast Survey
Review the podcast
Piano Teacher World – A Year in Recap: News, Happenings, and Impact (2017)
Piano Teacher World: A Year in Recap, 2018
Friday Finds #227: New Things in Piano Teacher World (2021)
Episode 002 – How to Manage Your Podcast Consumption
The Piano Sensei Way Podcast
The Dynamic Piano Teaching Podcast
Key Ideas Podcast
Integrated Music Teaching Podcast
Top Music Piano Podcast
2022 Celebration Series (6th Edition)
Episode 020 – Teacher Talk: Jonathan Roberts on the RCM Program & Music Lights the Way Campaign
Piano Pantry Digital Organization Retreat
Pizza, Pinot & Pedagogy hosted by Samantha Coates
Episode 066 – Samantha Coates on How to Not Give Makeup Lessons
Creative Teaching Conference
PianoTeacherRetreat.com
MTNA Conference
Dr. Gary Ingle to retire as Executive Director and CEO of MTNA
NCKP: The Piano Conference
Piano Inspires Kids Magazine
Episode 085 – Tonara Transitions: A Special Teacher Talk
Episode 086 – On Assignments and Lesson Planning
Hal Leonard acquires Sheet Music Plus (2017)
Muse Group acquires Hal Leonard (2023)
Episode 051 – Thing Again: Your Year in Review
Transcript
I’m Amy Chaplin, and you’re listening to episode 100 of The Piano Pantry Podcast! The day this episode drops is Tuesday, December 26th, 2023 – the day after Christmas. I’ll admit, I was a little torn on whether I should take the week off and wait to publish #100 in the new year, but the OCD side of me loved the idea of having exactly 50 episodes in 2022 and 50 in 2023 to round out the first 100.
Plus, hitting 100 is a nice way to round out a great month of episodes with a 2-part series on utilizing the forScore app and last week’s holiday wishes AI-style. I had a lot of fun playing with Chat GPT for that one. If you’ve missed any of these, hit the back button on your podcast app and download episodes 97, 98, and 99.
Today, I thought it would be fun to look back at some of the big things that happened in piano teacher world over the past 12 months. I decided, though, since we were in episode 100, to expand that a bit and reach back a little further into 2022 since it was the year this podcast launched.
I’ve had fun with this whole “piano teacher world recap” topic on the Piano Pantry blog several times in the past – recapping happenings in 2017, 2018, and 2021. If you’re keen to look, I linked to those articles in the show notes for you.
Today’s goal wasn’t an exhaustive list but more of a brain dump of the items that first came to my mind. So, please accept my deepest apologies if you were part of something big I missed it in this round-up.
Don’t forget, friends, it’s YOUR turn! Now that this podcast is at 100 episodes and you know ME a little more – I would love to hear from YOU. What has been resonating with you the most over the past two years? Is there anything you would love to hear more from me in 2024? My ears are ready to hear. Visit PianoPantry.com/survey to take just 2 minutes to share with me. That’s PianoPantry.com/survey.
Lastly, I want to give a big hearty and extra-grateful shout-out to all of my Patreon supporters who were so quick to jump in when I launched Patreon in the final quarter of this year. While content creation is fun and rewarding, there comes a point when creators have to assess the bottom dollar.
Thanks to my supporters who are helping fuel and support the work happening now and into the next season. Specifically, I want to thank one of my Insiders, Florence Phillips, a multi-teacher studio owner from Pennsylvania, for joining in and partnering with me.
I would be so grateful if you, like Florence, would consider supporting this podcast in the upcoming year. Visit Patreon.com/pianopantry for more details.
Here are some of the events that stick out in my mind over the past two years that are part of the world of independent piano teachers. I’ve tried to put them in roughly the order they happened, but it won’t be exact.
First, it may be kind of obvious, but The Piano Pantry podcast was launched in January of 2022. Wahoo! LOL. For the longest time, Tim Topham and Nicola Cantan’s podcasts were one of few, if not THE only, podcasts for piano teachers, but as of 2021-ish, that quickly changed.
In episode 2 of my podcast, I actually addressed the fact that I was just one in a little line of inspiring podcasters by sharing tips on how to manage your podcast consumption. Besides myself, in the past two years, other new podcasts that popped up were Rachel Ehring’s Dynamic Piano Teaching Podcast in March of 2023 and Clinton Pratt’s The Piano Sensei Way, which started in July. Sadly, at the same time, this year, we said goodbye to Leila Viss’s Key Ideas Podcast as she understandably moved on to focus on stronger passions and means of support for teachers.
2022 was the year the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music – known as RCM – published the 2022 Celebration Series, the 6th Edition of this repertoire series. The previous edition was in 2015. As part of the launch, they put on a really big event called the “Music Lights the Way Project,” which gifted over 400,000 new 6th edition books to 20,000 teachers in the US and Canada. I talked to Jonathan Roberts – piano teacher and director of South Shore Piano School in Boston – about this event in episode 20.
The summer of 2022 was the first time I offered an in-person digital organization retreat for piano teachers in my home in Indiana. This year, not only did I host the in-person event, but I now have an online version as well. Besides my retreat, several wonderful opportunities have popped up in the past two years for teachers to gather in small groups to grow.
Samantha Coates, one of our Australian piano teacher friends and creator of Blitzbooks, started hosting a fun and small-scale event called Pizza, Pinot, and Pedagogy. Samantha was also one of our guest hosts on the podcast in episode 66 where she shared great insight on how to not give makeup lessons.
Another small-scale event is a new mini-conference called the Creative Teaching Conference hosted by Clinton Pratt, Christopher Oill, and Tony Parlapiano. This 3-day workshop is hosted at Clinton’s Piano Sensei studio in Cincinnati, Ohio.
While there are now several small-scale events, one of the first people I know of to ever do something in their home for teachers was Joy Morin. After a few years of hiatus, Joy brought back her Piano Teacher Retreat this past summer. Topics have varied from Alexander Technique to Teaching Rote Repertoire and more.
I feel like 2022 was still a little quiet as we worked our way out of the pandemic, but 2023 has definitely housed some big news, beginning with the reintroduction to in-person conferences. The Music Teachers National Conference was held in Reno, and The Piano Conference – known as NCKP, was held in Chicago as it is every two years.
Besides returning to their in-person conference, both MTNA – Music Teachers National Association and The Francis Clark Center, which puts on NCKP, had more big news. MTNA received the retirement notice of long-time CEO Gary Ingle, who will finish with the organization as of June 30, 2024, and The Francis Clark Center launched Piano Inspires Kids, a quarterly magazine for piano students and their teachers.
While there has been a lot going on, the most shocking news from the past two years, as many of you may have predicted, was the closure of one of the first practice apps on the market that supported many teachers through the pandemic – Tonara. The announcement happened in September of 2023, causing quite a ruckus. Luckily, there were several other wonderful programs that had been in the market for a while, like Practice Space, Meta Practice, and Better Practice, that teachers could easily move to, as well as a new app that had just launched by Nicola Cantan – Vivid Practice. You can find more on this in episodes 85 and 86. Everything I’m mentioning today, by the way, is listed on the show notes page.
While the closure of Tonara probably wins the award for the biggest news in independent piano teacher world, there were a couple of other final notable happenings here in the final months of 2023.
First, the website Sheet Music Plus, which was acquired by Hal Leonard – the largest publisher of sheet music and educational books – in 2017, finally went through a really big update in early October. The interface looks so much sleeker and modern, which I was relieved to see, but like any big update, they still have a little ironing out to do by way of search functions and other little things.
Not long after this October update, though, it was announced that MuseGroup, the company that owns MuseScore.com, Audacity, Ultimate Guitar, and others, acquired the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Hal Leonard corporation – and thus Sheet Music Plus.
Finally, while I touched on piano teacher podcast news in the intro, I saved perhaps the most interesting and recent development for last. Sometime in the past 24 months, I believe, the TopMusic Podcast rebranded to the Integrated Music Teaching Podcast. Just this past week, though, Tim announced that after 7 years and 360 episodes, he is putting that podcast feed on pause and launching the Top Music Piano Podcast. In mid-2022, Tim launched the Top Music Guitar Podcast, so now both podcasts will align with Top Music.
Rachel Ehring will be the new host of the Top Music Piano Podcast. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Rachel launched the Dynamic Piano Teaching Podcast in March of this year but will now be putting that one on pause to focus on and host this new venture.
So many big things, you guys! I think it’s so important for us as professionals to keep up as much as we can on what is going on in our profession – even those things that don’t affect us directly – so we can stay connected, informed, and just aware of the world in which we’re working.
I hope you enjoyed this little recap of all the news in the world of independent piano teachers over the past two years!
Would you do me a favor? It’s the week between Christmas and New Year, so we all have a little downtime. Would you take a minute to rate and review this podcast? It would be such a great gift to me – at 100 episodes – to launch into the new year with even more reviews to help make this podcast known to teachers around the world. Thank you so much for being here, but wait – it’s not over yet – remember to hang around until the end to hear the final tiny tip of 2023!
Well, that’s a wrap on episode 100, you guys! Over the past year, I have given you 50 tiny tips – one at the end of every episode. In the first year of the podcast, since it was new, I shared one fun fact about myself as your host at the end of every episode.
If you’ve been around me for any time at all, you know I can’t stand doing things the same way forever and ever. I need to change things up. So, this will be my final tip in this series. As for what 2024 has in store for you…well, you’ll have to wait and catch episode 101 for that!
Today’s tiny tip is related to the upcoming turn of the new year. This is actually something I talked about in episode 51, titled Take Notice: Your Year in Review. I feel like I always see everyone so gung-ho about making all these goals for the year that we forget to take time to look back first.
So, before you look ahead, take some time to reflect on the past year. This could take on many forms, some of which I talk about in episode 51 – whether that’s just scrolling through the past year of photos, journaling, or taking inventory of your written goals and accomplishments.
One way I’m looking back this year is by sharing with you on social media a peek into all the happenings and backend work that went on in 2023 to produce support work for all my teacher friends. I love hearing these details from others and thought you might like to as well!
Be sure to follow me on social media to catch these highlights on Wednesday, December 27, as well as see some of the top episodes from the past year, which I’ve already been sharing and will continue to share through the end of the week. I’m on Instagram at PianoPantryAmy and on Facebook at PianoPantry.
That’s a wrap on episode 100 – Happy New Year, everyone!
