Music Moves for Piano is a new piano series for the 21st century that builds on Orff, Kodaly, Suzuki, and Dalcroze and applies Edwin E. Gordon's Music Learning Theory to the teaching of piano. Music Learning Theory is the same as Gordon's "theories of audiation" and is a sequential learning process that guides students to hear music with understanding. The music learning process is similar to the language learning model of: listen, speak/perform, think/improvise, read and write.

This piano series can be used for beginning and transfer students of all ages and levels. The purpose of Music Moves for Piano is to help students learn how to audiate and how to play the piano. The series provides a solid foundation for developing music literacy.

Supplemental solo repertoire, first learned by rote then from notation, is essential for learning with this piano series and for individualizing instruction. Supplemental repertoire is suggested and should be selected by the teacher.

In Music Moves for Piano students learn to:

• Improvise, play by ear, transpose, and harmonize
• Compose, arrange, read, and write music notation 
• Sing and play - accompany singers and instrumentalists
• Perform with comfort and fluency in a variety of social settings
• Play with technical ease and freedom from muscular tension 
• Listen to and perform music with understanding - students audiate
• Think about music in the context of a meter and a tonality 
• Become independent music thinkers

Music Moves for Piano:

• Is based on research
• Is versatile and adaptable - appropriate for all ages 
• Helps students to learn music as an aural art - 'sound before sight'
• Builds lifetime skills through movement, chanting, and singing
• Is creative - students make music from the beginning
• Develops the entire musician
• Internalizes improvisation and audiation skills

Praise for the Music Moves for Piano Series

"Marilyn Lowe has brilliantly applied the profound Music Learning Theory of Edwin E. Gordon to create a new approach to piano study that ensures joyfulness, musicality, and an authentic connection to music making. This approach avoids many of the significant pitfalls of standard instruction. Music Moves for Piano focuses on developing the entire musician - the student's ability to sing, to move gracefully, to audiate musical substance with understanding, to make a palpable physical connection to music. And it does this in conjunction with a wise, systematic presentation of purely pianistic skills: keyboard knowledge, technique and body awareness, notation, and, initially, attractive folk literature. The series of books represents a monumental and inspired contribution to piano pedagogy, which will surely become the benchmark by which other methods, before and after, will be measured." 

Seymour Fink, Professor Emeritus Binghampton University
Author of Mastering Piano Technique
Contributor to A Symposium for Pianists and Teachers

"In Music Moves for Piano, Marilyn Lowe has given us materials for a new generation of piano instruction, perfectly suited to the 21^st-century student. They usher the student into the "language" of music in a way that results in independent music making and musical thinking. The process of native language acquisition is more thoroughly applied here than in any previous piano method. Students learn music as an aural art and an oral art."

Garik Pedersen, DMA
Professor of Piano Pedagogy
Eastern Michigan University

"Marilyn Lowe manages to apply in Music Moves for Piano the essential pedagogical principles of Edwin E. Gordon's Music Learning Theory. Only a master teacher can guide teachers and students in a program created to let the audiation and keyboard skills constantly develop in an integrated way.

Andrea Apostoli
President AIGAM (Italian Gordon Association for Music Learning)
Rome, Italy

"I teach piano lessons along with Music Together, and just this year, after a summer symposium in Michigan, I began using Marilyn Lowe's Music Moves for Piano. Marilyn put this unique method together with the help of Dr. Edwin Gordon, and it dovetails beautifully with the Music Together philosophy.

The backbone of the method, and Music Together, too, is audiation. We in Music Together know what an important piece audiation is to real music learning--putting music into the child before he/she begins to read and write music notation.

When I teach now, it's a seamless transition from Music Together to piano instruction, and I love it. Teaching this way makes so much sense, and it's more flexible in today's society with children overcommitted with activities."

Janice Collett
Music Together Teacher in Nevada

Music Moves for Piano Preparatory Level. "....Students who closely follow this course should be able to make music independently and think musically. Most children will love the lessons because of all the activities."

Reviewer's Choice by D.P.
Clavier/January 2005