Piano Logic offers new music instruction program

American Music Teacher, April-May, 2004

Piano Logic; www.pianologic.com. $99.99, DVD; $89.95, two-volume VHS set directly from www.pianologic.com.

Piano Logic is a new video developed by pianist Patty Carlson that enables anyone to play the piano--without reading music--by reducing the instrument's eighty-eight keys and infinite melodies to a series of visual patterns based on the numbers one through seven.

Carlson is a self-taught pianist who composed the music for the PBS series Wild America and has taught celebrities such as Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, Alex Karras, Ted Kennedy Jr. and the late John Denver to play piano.

In Piano Logic, Carlson teaches students to play before they learn musical notation, just as children learn to speak before they learn to read. Her approach enables beginners to play intricate melodies almost from the first lesson, simultaneously planting the seeds for easily interpreting sheet music.

The video offers 153 minutes of simple visual demonstrations that present a bird's-eye of the entire keyboard and superimpose numerical notations above Carlson's fingering. Piano Logic illustrates a "numeric language of music" in which the numbers one through seven are used to define chords, arpeggios and melodic sequences in any key.

Carlson uses the same numeric terminology to demonstrate the structure behind such evergreen tunes as "Silent Night," "Amazing Grace" and Beethoven's "Fur Elise," as well as to describe how composers create different emotions and genres.

For more information contact Piano Logic.