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.
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