Summer Piano Listening List

This summer I’m sending my piano students home with the Summer 60: 60 Days of Piano Music! The goal is for them to listen to a piece most days over summer vacation and complete the entire list by the end of August.

It is SO immensely important for students to listen to music and it’s often one of the things that get lost in the shuffle of life. But the summer, the time of long car rides and barbeques, basically demands music! So why not add a little piano music into the mix?!

The Summer 60 is divided into six categories:

  • Top 20 Sizzlers: 20 pieces for solo piano that most people would recognize even if they don’t listen to classical music
  • Baroque Beach Bonanza: A selection of eight pieces from the Baroque period with pieces by J.S. Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Dietrich Buxtehude, and Domenico Scarlatti
  • Classical Campfire Concert: A selection of eight pieces from the Classical period with pieces by C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, Muzio Clementi, Luigi Boccherini, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Joseph Haydn, and Carl Czerny
  • Red-Hot Romantic Remix: A selection of eight pieces from the Romantic period with pieces by John Field, Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Edvard Grieg, Modest Mussorgsky, Antonin Dvorak, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Amy Beach
  • Modern Midsummer Melodies: A selection of eight pieces from the Modern period with pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bela Bartok, and Dmitri Shostakovich
  • Contemporary Summer Coda: A selection of eight pieces from the Contemporary period with pieces by Philip Glass, Gyorgy Ligeti, Unsuk Chin, Luciano Berio, Lera Auerbach, Errolyn Wallen, Ludovico Eunadi, and Takeshi Kokayashi.

You might be asking, where’s Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, and all the other heavy-hitters?! They are in the Top 20 Sizzlers!! I decided, in order to have a wide variety of composers and music, anyone who was in the Top 20 Sizzlers wouldn’t be added to the period selections (with the sole exception of J.S. Bach because we ALWAYS make an exception for Bach!).

A list of piano music lays on the grass in the sun next to a pair of toucan sunglasses and a colorful beach ball.

Each piece on the list is around 5 minutes (or less! Only a few are longer) so it should be easy to squeeze a quick listen in among all the fun summer activities! Some great times to listen are while driving around town, while winding down before bed, while setting the table, and before practicing (wink! wink! Summer is a fantastic time for practicing!!).

Students can listen to the pieces in any order (but listening to them in order does give them an idea of how piano music has changed over the centuries, which is really neat!). When they’ve listened to a piece, they can check the box next to the piece and rate the piece on the emoji scale on the right:

  • Frowny face: Ugh… I never want to hear that again
  • Straight face: That was good, but not my favorite
  • Smiley face: That was fantastic! Why did it have to end?!

The emoji scale can help students to figure out their musical taste!

Summer 60: 60 Days of Piano Music is available as a printable download in the Toucan Piano Store. Happy listening!!

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    Colorful friendship bracelets make great student gifts for your next recital or they could be a craft for your students to make at a group lesson or studio event! They are colorful, easy to make, and show off our piano pride!

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Classical Music Easter Eggs

I LOVE a good classical music pun and I feel it’s my responsibility as a piano teacher to share all of the awesome classical music puns with my students! Fortunately they humor me and get a kick out of it too (I mean who doesn’t love a good dad joke?!).

Each year I’ve been challenging myself to come up with different Easter egg crafts to hand out to my students before our Spring break. Last year I made music note eggs which were a big hit! This year our recital theme is Joseph Haydn so I decided to make a classical music pun egg for my students to 1) help them remember how to properly pronounce Haydn’s name and 2) get a chuckle out of them.

Four composer easter eggs with Haydn, Liszt and Handel sit in a pile of pink fake grass.

They are easy and cheap to make which is always a winning combo in my book! I even took it a step farther and made a couple of other designs just for fun. The possibilities are truly endless with this craft!

For this craft you will need:

Take a piece of copier paper and place it on top of a sheet of tissue paper. Using a pencil, gently trace the outline of the copier paper onto the tissue paper. Cut the tissue paper along the lines you traced. The tissue paper should now be the same size as the copier paper.

A person traces a the outline of a sheet of copier paper onto a sheet of white tissue paper using a green mechanical pencil.
A person cuts a sheet of white tissue paper using a pair of pink scissors.

Place the tissue paper on top of the copier paper and tape the top edge of the papers together (this will give the tissue paper stability when it runs through the printer). I used painter’s tape but any tape will do. Trim any excess tape off the edges of the papers.

A person tapes together a sheet of copier paper and a sheet of white tissue paper using blue painter's tape.
A person folds over a strip of blue painters tape to secure two sheets of paper together.

Feed the taped edge of the papers into your printer and print out your design onto the tissue paper.

Paper is feed into a laser printer.
A sheet with mutliple images of the classsical music composer Joseph Haydn exits a printer.

Cut out the designs carefully.

Multiple images of classical music composer Joseph Haydn lay on a wood desk.

Apply a coat of Mod Podge to the area of the plastic egg where you will be placing the design. Place the design onto the egg.

A person applies a layer of Mod Podge to a light blue plastic easter egg.
A person glues an image of Joseph Haydn to a blue plastic easter egg.

Gently tap the design into place and apply a layer of Mod Podge on top of it to seal it. Set the egg aside to dry.

A person taps the image of Joseph Haydn onto a blue plastic easter egg.
A person seals the image of Joseph Haydn onto a blue plastic easter egg using Mod Podge and a paintbrush.

Once the egg is dry, take a Sharpie and write your message on the egg. In my case I wrote: “What’s Haydn in the egg?”

A person writes a on a blue plasitc easter egg using a black Sharpie permanent marker.

Gently pop the egg and carefully cut the design where the seam of the egg has been glued shut using the X-acto knife (utility knife). Then fill the egg with goodies!!

A person cuts the image of Joseph Haydn along the seam of a blue plastic easter egg using an xacto utility knife.
A person fills a blue plastic easter egg with candy.

I loved my Haydn egg so much I decided to experiment with a few other designs for fun! One with sheet music and two with composer puns: “Grocery Liszt: Candy, Candy, Candy!” and “Handel with care!“

Classical music pun on plastic easter eggs sit in a pile of pink grass.

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Let’s stay in touch, join the list!

As a “toucan” of our appreciation download a free set of note flashcards (link in our Welcome email)!

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