About

WholeOctave.com is About Bringing Keyboard Enthusiasts Together

Keyboardists and piano teachers are a lonely group. While schoolteachers facilitate group learning in classrooms and have regular contact with colleagues, the social interactions of an independent piano teacher are often severely limited. Singers gather together in choirs. Instrumentalists play together in ensembles. But pianists are often cordoned off into little practice rooms. Many composers work best in isolation, but still require interaction with others for stimulation and inspiration. Yearly conferences help, but they're not nearly enough. Why not use technology to prevent us from suffering in seclusion?

That is why Susan Capestro founded WholeOctave.com, a central place online where keyboardists and their friends and families share ideas, learn, grow, teach, improvise, communicate, network and innovate. There is a blog at WholeOctave.com, where many different keyboard teachers and pianists contribute current news articles and comments. Many are familiar with Wikipedia, the large online encyclopedia. WholeOctave.com has a wiki too, but ours centers around information about all things piano and keyboard - everything from students' learning projects, curriculums, teaching approaches (including some of Susan's sessions given at national conferences on teaching jazz/pop and traditional music concurrently) and musicianship elements, to ways technology is used in piano studios. Members are constantly updating the wiki, and adding new topics and pages. The beauty of WholeOctave.com is that it is a collaboratively written knowledge base, always accessible.

Best of all, it's free. You can explore WholeOctave.com any time; even take a tour of our site. Here, you'll find examples of rich content; things to read as well as recordings to listen to (simple beginning level improvisations, pieces composed by students, an interview with the director of MusicLink Foundation) and videos to watch (an adult student who returned to piano after many years, a H.S. student who played for Les Mis, a teacher giving advice to parents on how to interest young children in music). As a visitor, you're automatically invited, even encouraged, to make comments or ask questions - just click on "comments," at the bottom of any page you see. When you join WholeOctave.com as a member (a bargain at $30 for a whole year), you're able to create your own pages, make your own news articles, and upload your own photos, recordings and videos. WholeOctave.com's monthly email newsletter is also free; you can sign up for it right here at the website.

"I've discovered that my keyboard students often learn just as much from each other as they do from me. When I set out to make my old static website more interactive, I discovered that the new web 2.0 blog and wiki tools were a perfect match. These cutting edge tools are still evolving! I hope Whole Octave's visitors will ask questions and provide suggestions so we can build a stronger site together."  -Susan Capestro

See Susan's materials about teaching contemporary improvisational styles concurrently with traditional repertoire...