If you don’t identify with a specific genre but you know you want to play music that feels current and yours, these are lessons for you.
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“Contemporary” is a useful word for the broad space that isn’t classical and isn’t one specific style. Pop, R&B, jazz-adjacent, indie, singer-songwriter, ambient, film-score-flavored, whatever you’re listening to right now, if it’s music made in your lifetime and it speaks to you, that’s a starting point.
The first lesson is mostly listening. What are you putting on when you’re alone in your apartment? What artists do you keep coming back to? Which songs do you wish you could play? That conversation alone usually points to a clear path: the harmonic language to learn, the rhythmic feel to internalize, and a few songs that’ll be your first real repertoire.
From there, lessons combine three things: working on songs you actually want to play, building the technique and ear training that lets you keep going, and learning how to figure things out on your own, so when a new song catches your attention, you have the tools to start working on it without waiting for a lesson.
A lot of adults assume they need to do years of classical study before they’re “allowed” to play the music they actually want to play. That’s a holdover from how piano was traditionally taught, not a real prerequisite. Beginners are welcome, complete beginners included. If classical training would serve what you want to do, we’ll fold it in. If it wouldn’t, we’ll skip it. The structure of lessons follows what you’re trying to play, not the other way around.
Music written from roughly 1960 onward, singer-songwriter, indie, modern jazz, neoclassical, film music, ambient, modern worship, modern R&B. Anything that isn't traditional classical or standard jazz.
If you want to. Many contemporary piano students are songwriters or composers in the making. The curriculum can pivot toward harmony, voice leading, and arranging when that's where you want to go.
Pop piano is mostly chord-based, song-form, and skews toward what you hear on the radio. Contemporary piano includes pop plus more abstract / instrumental work, Yann Tiersen, Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Ludovico Einaudi, modern jazz piano, post-rock keyboard.
Helpful but not required. Much contemporary work is read from lead sheets or learned by ear. We work both literacy and ear in parallel.
In person at the studio, where the real piano, Rhodes and B3 are useful for tone exploration. Zoom covers the weeks you're traveling or under the weather.
The studio teaches teens (11+) and adults. The contemporary curriculum tends to land better with students old enough to have musical tastes of their own.