Piano Club Musings – Part 1

Instead of full-out piano camps/workshops this year, I decided to run “clubs” that met four times throughout the summer. This was a big change for my studio, and while I was a bit nervous about doing this at first, overall I felt it went pretty well. 

This will be the first post in a series of musings about how these clubs worked. (Make sure to subscribe to the blog to get notifications about future posts!)

Why “piano clubs”?

Well, to be frank… I didn’t have the mental capacity to plan and run the standard week-long workshops that I normally do each summer. Life threw some really tough curve balls this past year, and I just didn’t have it in me to start planning way back in Jan/Feb. 

(Have you ever been there? Maybe you’ve offered something in your studio for YEARS… but then suddenly you just don’t have the time/energy to do it? Remember: there’s no rule that says you have to offer the same things every year. Change is okay!) 

Rather than cancelling the fun altogether, I looked for alternatives that would:

A) still provide amazing experiences

B) give me more time to plan, and

C) allow me to have a more relaxed pace this summer, which was really necessary for the sake of sanity. 

Our “Colors of Music” Club

During my search for something different, I kept coming across posts by various teachers about “piano clubs” that they were holding throughout the school year. Theory & Pizza Club, Performance Club, or a Composer’s Club…. the topic didn’t matter. It was the setup I was interested in exploring. 

So I found myself wondering… 

If you could run a club during the school year… why not during the summer? 

The answer was simple. Of COURSE you could run a piano club during the summer.  There were just a few kinks that I had to work out such as…

1) getting my students to sign up, and

2) figuring out how to schedule the meetings.

And of course, there was the issue of possible summer absences. Lots of things to consider! 

How I made it work:

First and foremost, I needed to get my students and parents on board. While group lessons and summer camps are the norm in my studio, “piano clubs” were new, and that meant I needed to figure out how to package and sell this new concept. 

Since clubs contained the same kind of activities as a piano camp/workshop, I started with that framework in mind. The complicated part was scheduling the actual meetings. 

I eventually decided to keep the days/times the same… but to spread out the clubs so that they met every 2-3 weeks during the summer. That gave us some consistency and allowed parents to plan their schedules. 

That’s all for now…

I’ll be writing more about these e piano clubs over the next couple of months. Make sure to subscribe to the blog for updates. 🙂 Thanks for reading!