I don’t teach standard piano lessons.
Why?
They’re the wrong way to learn music. Most people get stuck robotically reading sheet music—never grasping how or why the music works. I suspect that’s why so many beginners quit within a handful of months. And even those who stick with it often end up unable to play a single song from memory years later.
How are my lessons different?
I focus on the language of music—how it’s built from the ground up. You’ll learn the chord progressions, melodies, and musical forms that shape the music you’ve loved your whole life. This methodology is the most effective (I haven’t had a single student quit lessons out of boredom or lack of motivation with this approach), the most fun, and it gives you a strong foundation to:
• Listen to songs and play them back by ear instantly
• Read and interpret sheet music more beautifully
• Sight-read sheet music much faster
• Improvise and jam with your friends
• Memorize pieces not for a few weeks, but for a lifetime
• After mastering the building blocks, learn any genre you want with ease—jazz, classical, pop, soul, you name it
And by the way, I’m not reinventing the wheel here. The way I teach is how great musicians of Western music history have learned for centuries. It was standard practice in the European classical tradition (not to mention many pianists in jazz and popular music) to be able to improvise, play by ear, and beautifully interpret a piece of written music. The reason this somehow stopped being the standard methodology for learning the piano is a longer conversation for another time.
Here’s my bio with some information on my career:
Pianist Harrison Batten Jarvis experienced his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of sixteen and was subsequently named to CBC Music’s “30 Hot Canadian Classical Musicians Under 30.” He has soloed with orchestras at Lincoln Center in New York City, at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and with the Etobicoke Philharmonic in Toronto. He holds degrees from the Royal Conservatory of Music (A.R.C.T.) and Bard College Conservatory (B.Mus in piano performance and B.A. in written arts).
Outside of classical piano, Harrison is a writer, songwriter, composer, and multi-disciplinary artist. He has collaborated on numerous headline art exhibitions at major galleries, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, UK, and Kunsthalle Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland. His former teachers have been named to the Order of Canada (André Laplante), been a finalist for the National Book Award (Jenny Xie), won a Pulitzer Prize (Elizabeth Frank), and had a composition played in honour of the 2020 Presidential inauguration (Joan Tower). Their pedagogical lineages trace back to many great artists and musicians, such as Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven.See more
