Welcome!

Welcome to the Piano Panorama blog!

Do you want to find fulfillment as a pianist, or help the budding piano student in your household grow musically?

Do you have a creative flair, interested in improvising and composing?

Whether you are or have been (or want to be) a player, musical creator, or encourager, or you simply enjoy music in any capacity, I invite you to join the conversation as we discuss a broad panorama of ideas to enhance joyful music-making, especially at the piano.

Let's begin!

My name is Carol, and I'd love to hear about your musical background -- and what music means to you -- if you'd like to share in the comments section. But first, so you know a bit about whom you're talking to, here's the start of my musical story. :-)

I've been playing piano for, oh, somewhere close to half a century. My musical background is unique in that, in all the years I studied piano before college, I never had a piano to practice on in my childhood home.

My grandmother next door, however, had bought a piano during my early school years. So . . . every day, I would walk to her house and down the steps into the basement to practice on that old but rich-sounding Beckwith upright.

If you had seen the music that sat on the intricately-carved music rack, you would have observed a parade of books changing in size and thickness over the years I studied piano. From the little primer Teaching Little Fingers to Play to the likes of Burgmuller's Twenty-Five Easy and Progressive Studies . . . J.S. Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias . . . Chopin's Preludes . . . Beethoven's Complete Piano Sonatas in two volumes, hundreds of pages each . . . and many more.

And there were the hymns.

Oh, the hymns.

Grandma would occasionally come downstairs while I practiced, sit next to me on the bench, and sing as I played her favorite hymns. Her tears would flow and her voice falter, choked with emotion on her favorite, Onward Christian Soldiers.

She'd remind me that Grandpa's favorite hymn was Be Still My Soul ("Finlandia"), and would I please also play that -- loudly enough for Grandpa to hear it upstairs.

Those were the years that I began to realize that music is far more than black ink on a white page.

Music touches the human soul. It brings depth of emotion. Joy; beauty; peace.

Music is meant to be shared.

And now, gentle blog readers, let me ask you: What are your fondest musical memories?

What does music mean to you?