Piano
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Jason Yeager, Instructor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department |
Douglas Johnson, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"Whether it's in private piano lessons, labs, or keyboard classes, I want my students to come away with a solid technical foundation. Good technique is important, not just for fluency but also to avoid getting hurt. Good technique, by definition, is efficient motion. It comes not just from the fingers, but also the shoulders and all the way down to the feet. The old Russian saying, 'You play the piano from your feet,' is really true. It would be absurd to believe you can lift a 60-pound suitcase with just your fingers. It's equally absurd to think you play piano with just your fingers."
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Vadim Neselovskyi, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"This is not a music school for children. If you came to Berklee you obviously already have something that you want to do, and I'm curious about it. What I really enjoy about all my students is how different they are. I'm teaching the full day, and I get to teach Mozart, and then I get to talk about bebop, and then I get to talk about indie pop tunes. We cover the full body of music."
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Helen Sung, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department
"Here at Berklee I teach private lessons to piano majors. I'm very impressed with my students. They're all very gifted and from all over the world: Korea, Cuba, Sri Lanka, Canada, the U.S., etc. They each come from very different backgrounds and training, yet here they all are at Berklee wanting to learn more about jazz. This really speaks to the global impact of this great American art form."
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Alon Yavnai, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department- B.M., Academy of Music at the Hebrew University, Israel
- B.M., Berklee College of Music
- Studies at the Gyvataim Conservatory, Israel
- Performances and recordings credits with Yo-Yo Ma, Paquito D'Rivera, Joe Lovano, Freddie Hubbard, Louis Hayes, Nancy Wilson, Rosa Passos, Leni Andrade, New York Voices, and Regina Carter
- Winner of two Grammy Awards and two Latin Grammy Awards
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Tim Ray, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"One of the things I try to communicate to my students is the idea that when you're in school, you try to absorb as much as you can in terms of music and styles and just open yourself up to as broad a spectrum as you can. Because you never know when an opportunity will come along that's going to take your career in a different direction. That's what happened to me. When I was in college, I thought, 'I'll just be a jazz piano player,' and then all these other things came up. The next thing I know, I'm doing all these great things, traveling all over the world, playing with all these incredible musicians, but not necessarily playing jazz all the time. So I try to open myself up to all these different opportunities."
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Yoko Miwa, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"I strive to help develop the technique of my students, so they have the ability to play what they are hearing in their head, while at the same time helping to develop their vocabulary, hearing, and awareness. I try to encourage my students to be more than prepared, so they can be focused on communicating and interacting with the other musicians they are playing with. If you have to use all your concentration to be able to make all the chord changes, or play a specific rhythm, or play a unison line, then you're going to miss out on all of that communication and interaction that is essential for group playing."
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Ross Ramsay, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"Our students run the gamut from a 17-year-old right out of high school who's played in rock bands to someone who already has a master's degree in music and is a tremendous player in one style and comes here to learn another. It's the most extreme place I think that you can teach because of the variety of styles and the variety of students. I had a student who was 65 from Japan who just retired and decided that he wanted to come back to school and learn music."
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Kevin Harris, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"My own musical roots were watered in Lexington, Kentucky. The black gospel experience was my first and most important music education. I realize that each student at Berklee also brings a very special history of their own, and I have the opportunity to continue to mold, water, and inspire that talent. We teachers at Berklee have privilege to pass on the same joy and knowledge to our students that was passed on to us."
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Ed Bedner, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Piano Department"As a private piano instructor, my emphasis is teaching the classical repertoire of all periods; piano technique, including tone production; and how to overcome tension and other physical problems common to pianists. Some students come with nonmedical problems of strain and pain. These students can benefit from our work on tone production to develop more freedom and control of the playing mechanism, and from repertoire carefully selected to avoid strain while gradually developing more strength."
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