Music Pathways

Music Pathways offers a highly intelligent, thorough, and well-coordinated approach to beginning keyboard study. While experiencing a wide range of keyboard sounds, students develop reading skills, rhythmic response, and keyboard technique, insuring a smooth and easy progression to more difficult levels and laying the groundwork for practical musicianship. Much emphasis is placed on secure reading. Students apply a knowledge of intervals to reading based on landmark notes, and in a short time they establish a very wide reading range. The child-oriented tunes are predominantly originals by the late, great Lynn Freeman Olson. Level A starts the beginning piano student by playing clusters of five white keys, to gain an orientation to the keyboard and to start to develop a natural hand position and technique. Next, students play simple tunes with simple rhythms in open fifths in both hands. Students are introduced to skips and steps on the keyboard and on the staff. It is not until this point that the musical alphabet and white key letter names are presented in Chapter 5. Next, students begin reading from two and three-line staves and shortly thereafter play from the five line staff. Keyboard charts are provided to show the appropriate hand position until Chapter 6 when clefs and the grand staff are introduced. By the last chapter, Chapter 14, students have been exposed to playing over a wide range of the staff and keyboard with an intervallic approach and no fixed hand positions.