Teacher

David Sudnow

David Sudnow earned his PhD at Berkeley. In 1978, Harvard University published his classic study of keyboard learning, Ways of the Hand (a new edition was published by MIT in 2001). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is the author of four books.

On a 1981 flight from NY to SF, he sat next to an architect from Stanford. The guy spoke of a lifelong frustration with learning music. In the time it took to fly from over the the Mississippi to San Francisco, on a few paper napkins Sudnow laid out a full method the guy could use, starting from scratch, to learn to play songs well.

Three months later Sudnow got a letter that changed his life. The architect bought a new piano, was now playing some songs well, and was drawing up plans to convert his garage into a music studio.

Knowing a short course was needed, Sudnow started meeting groups at his home. In several years he had a large studio in NY. The course went through changes: a big teaching workshop in Texas, over 100 weekend seminars taught in most major US cities, and lots of feedback from many students of the recorded seminar who came from three NBC Today Show appearances.

To this day, the program contains the same basic insight that led to its first success: a very complete, short recorded seminar, with good illustrations, very clear talk, and a jump straight into the deep water approach especially suited to the adult amateur. Over 25,000 students later, Sudnow would do it no other way.