Building Confident, Independent Students Through Musicianship with Nicola Cantan (Part 1) | 177

Today on the podcast, I welcome Nicola Cantan — piano teacher, educator, author, and founder of Vibrant Music Teaching.

Nicola challenges traditional, note-by-note piano instruction. She helps piano teachers design lessons that feel playful, musical, and deeply engaging. Her approach combines strong piano pedagogy with practical, studio-ready strategies teachers can use immediately.

Many educators know Nicola for her clear application of Kodály-inspired teaching in the piano studio. She breaks complex musicianship concepts into manageable steps. No overwhelm. Just purposeful progress.

Through Nicola Cantan’s blog, podcast, and professional development, Nicola equips thousands of piano teachers worldwide. Her “toe-dipping, paddling, and swimming” analogy gives teachers a simple pathway for applying Kodály philosophy with confidence.

In this episode, we explore creative piano teaching, musicianship-based lessons, and practical ways to build independent, confident piano students.

Nicola, welcome. I’m thrilled to have you here.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

💻  https://colourfulkeys.ie/blog 

💻  https://vibrantmusicteaching.com 

💻  https://vividpractice.com 

🎙️ Why I Almost Quit Teaching Music (But Didn’t)

💻  Bigger Better Brains

🎙️ A Chat with Anita Collins

Where to find me: 

Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunity
Official Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEd
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDeb

Introduction

Gday, I’m Debbie O’Shea and this is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 177.

 

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

Debbie O’Shea  

Thank you so much for tuning in everyone. Coming up is part one of a chat I had with Nicola Cantan. She lives in Ireland, which is nowhere near where I live in Brisbane. I still love speaking to people on the other side of the world. It’s amazing. Now she is a piano teacher, educator extraordinaire. I’ve actually come across some of her work in the past without realising it’s who it was. Colourful Keys is sort of one branch of what she does. Vibrant Music Teaching is her website, her handle, and she is vibrant and she is clever, and I absolutely loved having a chat with her. If you like this episode, you might even want to shoot it to a piano teacher that you know. Share it please. I really value it when you share my episodes. I also value ratings and reviews. I’d love it if you took some time to do that. But back to Nicola, this is part one of my chat and there’s a whole lot of takeaways, not just for piano teachers. Do not tune out because you’re a classroom teacher and oh no, it’s a chat with a piano teacher. No, there’s heaps of stuff in there for you. Get in there. Enjoy part one. 

Debbie O’Shea  

Today on the Crescendo Music Education Podcast I am joined from the other side of the world. I’m joined by Nicola Cantan. Did I do that right?

Nicola Cantan  

You did it fine.

Debbie O’Shea  

Oh, okay. I was so worried I get people’s names that bit wrong. Names are very personal. But Nicola is from Ireland and I came across Nicola’s podcast and I was so impressed. I just really liked listening to the podcast and what she had to say, and I thought that you might bring a lot of value to my listeners.

Nicola Cantan  

Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Nicola Cantan’s Teaching Journey

Debbie O’Shea  

I’m going to start with just a quick bio, which is really just a summary, so anything I miss out you can tell me at the end. All right, so Nicola is known internationally for helping piano teachers move beyond traditional note by note instruction into lessons that are playful, musical and deeply engaging. Her work blends strong pedagogical thinking with practical, classroom ready ideas. She’s particularly known for the way she applies Kodály inspired principles to piano teaching in a way that feels accessible rather than overwhelming. Oh my goodness, that’s so good. Nicola supports thousands of teachers around the world through her blog, resources and podcast. I was particularly inspired by the episode I listened to where you drew the parallel with water and dipping your toe in and then just paddling and then eventually swimming. Being a Kodály inspired teacher myself it was fascinating to hear you talk about the application of those philosophies to piano teaching. Now, most of my listeners are primary/elementary music teachers, but I certainly have quite a few instrumental teachers and studio teachers who tune in because, as we know, we’re all music educators, aren’t we? So I loved listening to that and I think you’ve got great value for us. So before I go on, is there anything in your bio that you’d like to add that I didn’t mention?

Nicola Cantan  

No, no, that’s good. It’s a good summary. 

Debbie O’Shea  

Good stuff. Excellent. All right. Now, looking back to your journey as a music educator. What would you say would be a defining moment, or moments as you journeyed as a piano teacher? 

Nicola Cantan  

Wow. Okay. I think it starts with the defining moment of my teacher when I was 15 suggesting that I start teaching, because otherwise I never would have begun. But I think the bigger change for me was at some stage I took a short break from teaching for a year while I was working in another industry, and I came back to it, and at some stage my student had a struggle. I can’t remember what specifically she was struggling with, but I couldn’t figure out how to help her. She had transferred. She moved over from Serbia to Ireland and transferred from a completely different education system, and I was trying to find how to help her with some particular thing, and so I googled it, and this was a long time ago. I had never thought to google anything to do with teaching, and that’s what led me to blogs, and then going on to write my own and discovering all the different ways we could teach. Because I think as classroom teachers you’re more likely to be exposed to okay, this is one way things are done. This is another way you know through your degree or whatever. But as private music educators, we often just do things the way our teacher did them, because we don’t know there’s any other way, and we don’t always know to ask a question about how things could be done. So that was the moment for me that everything flipped and I realised how creative music could be, but how creative teaching could be as well and it just opened up all this stuff that I wanted to explore.

Rethinking Traditional Piano Teaching Through Kodály Principles

Debbie O’Shea  

Oh, that sounds amazing. I know if I think back to my piano lessons when I was a child, there was nothing creative about what we did. That was the book. Those were the black dots up there and that meant you put your finger there. I hate to say it but it was like a slog, let’s just transfer what’s up there to your fingers. Yes, there was no art to teaching really. It was just a translation of a print medium into your fingers. In fact, the way I learnt it wasn’t even that connected to sound.

Nicola Cantan  

Yep, absolutely, yeah. I mean, it can cause students to just completely switch off their ears when all we focus on is that written page in front of us and if they stray from that in any way, even a way that could be called interpretation, we don’t let them. I mean, that’s the traditional way. So, yes, it can be a very uncreative space. It doesn’t have to be, and I feel like that’s changed a lot in the last couple of decades, but it can be a very strict, mathematical almost environment.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yes. So you started exploring, and you came across, did you come across specifically the Kodály philosophy or Kodály I approach, or just aural approaches. How did you stumble into all of that?

Nicola Cantan  

Yeah, so I started exploring and I was exploring all sorts of things. I came back to Kodály because one of my students was taking an exam and in the local exam board here, I don’t know if this is true in ABRSM, I know it’s not true in a lot of other exam boards, but in our one as well, anyway, the one I had grown up with, you had to do sight singing in your exam. No matter what type it was, you had to do these sight singing exercises. I had hated them as a student, because I was never taught anything about how to do them. They were just this terrifying thing. I was a fairly quiet kid, this was just mortifying and horrible. It got worse when I was a teenager, of course. So my student was coming up to this exam, and we were doing the sight singing exercises and I was thinking, okay, there has to be actual instruction I can give on this, like I have to actually help, because this was horrible for me. It can’t be horrible for my student. So that’s when I started going back to solfa and exploring Kodály that way. I had actually started my whole musical journey in basically a Kodály inspired class now that I remember it with that lens, but at the time, obviously I didn’t know that and my mum probably didn’t have that label. It was just like an early music thing, but it was all these stories based on the solfa names, so it was clearly coming from that background. So that’s when I got into solfa and gradually from there the rhythm syllables and other aspects of Kodály teaching, I have to say, since your audience will be much more well versed than me, I only have a little bit of proper Kodály training, but from that exposure, found out about a one week course that the Kodály Institute of Ireland does for primary and secondary teachers, mostly, but you can go as any type of teacher. So I went to that a couple of summers as well. It’s just like a one week intensive course and I found it fantastic. I include loads of ideas from that as well.

Debbie O’Shea  

They can make the biggest difference, I think, if you get a chance to do that with others on that journey. I actually had no intention of going here, but I’m going to tell you about my early piano. I ended up being a primary music teacher and so I went I better go back to piano. I want to get a bit better. So I went to a very traditional teacher, an older lady, highly recommended, gets people through exams. So I’d never done an exam, because Mum and Dad were not, mum didn’t even finish primary school. They weren’t highly educated, and they got me piano lessons like that was massive. The first person in the family to have music lessons type stuff. The teacher said, Oh, is she going to do exams? And they turned to me, you know this like nine year old kid, do you want to do exams? No, why would I want to do exams? So they went, Okay, no exams. So I learnt piano. Didn’t do any exams. Occasionally, I got to play John Paul Young music, which was cool, but I bought that myself and worked on it, and then I thought, I better do an exam. So I’m 25 and haven’t learned piano since 12, turn up and say, I want to do an exam. So she got me to play a few things and said, you can do grade five with practice. I went, Okay, so I diligently learnt. I did Trinity College exam, grade five. She says to me a couple of weeks before the exam, oh, you’re going to have to have some aural testing too. So, literally, a couple of weeks. She said, So listen, this is major, this is minor, this is augmented, this is diminished. Okay, alright. Now, luckily, I had also been going weekly to musicianship training because I had discovered Kodály philosophy and I was doing exercises and musicianship and (sings) do me so me, do one. So thank goodness in my head, because I’d done this other training, this other stuff popped in. I would have had no idea. Can you echo, sing this back? Can you do this? There was all this aural component, which was not dealt with and I thought, this is not musical, really. So I won’t digress with too many Debbie stories, but I think it’s a fairly common thing in “traditional teaching”. Is that fair to say?

Nicola Cantan  

Yeah, I think it is. To be fair to teachers I think there’s several reasons why it happens. First of all, they didn’t get any training, so they have no idea how to teach it. They just somehow figured it out. In some cases, they just naturally got it so they don’t really know what to do with a student who doesn’t, which was me, I didn’t get it at all. I didn’t know. But I mean, some of my teachers came from other countries and had come through different systems, so they don’t know where you’re coming from, and they don’t know, they’ve had a lot more music in school, for example. Anyway, the backgrounds are all different, but I think that experience two weeks before the exam is unfortunately pretty typical. It’s just like, oh yeah. We also have to do that, like the whole time you’re doing scales and pieces, scales and pieces, and then they say, Oh yes, sight reading and aural, let’s just have a run through those. Okay, you’re fine. But it’s like not even teaching to the test. Like, I wouldn’t even call it that, because in that format you don’t really teach anything, but it’s only preparing for those specific exercises or hoping your student can already do it. That can be a very damaging thing for people’s confidence and can really give them a sense that they’re not musical, or all these other labels that they put on themselves just because they didn’t have training in that. I mean, anything can be taught. Sight singing can be taught. Listening to different types of chords can be taught. But if you’re not taught about it and then you’re expected just to guess. You feel like you’re just failing. You know you’re just failing and flailing in that exam and giving it your best possible guess. Maybe you have that information from elsewhere, or maybe you don’t, and it’s just tough luck. But the thing I’ll say about what makes this so hard in many cases, is the short lessons and what we’re expected to include. This is different in different countries but depending on how much music is being done in school, we often, as private instrumental teachers, are trying to teach all of music. If there’s very little music in school, we’re just expected to teach all of music, and then it somehow, some person, at some stage, popularised the idea of 30 minute lessons. So when you put those together, if teachers are only teaching for 30 minutes and they’re expected to cover all of music, it just becomes so difficult to fit it in, and that’s why we get this two weeks before the exam. Oh, wait, there’s aural exercises we have to do. Here’s what they sound like. Have your best guess.

Planning, Collaboration, and Building a Teaching Community

Debbie O’Shea  

I think it forces you, I guess, to really spend time in your planning and make everything you do intentional or serve a couple of purposes at the same time, because I know we only have half hour lessons in our typical primary classroom here, so it’s pretty hard to squish everything in when you’ve got 25 or 30 in that half an hour. So I think planning would be fairly essential. What’s planning look like for you? That’s just an aside. I’m just wondering about your planning.

Nicola Cantan  

Yeah, for me personally, I’ve experimented with different types of planning over the years. It’s pretty well honed at this stage, but I know you’re asking specifically about me, but before I say anything, I’ll just say that for beginner teachers, planning should and does take a lot longer. So I think that’s where a lot of private teachers fall down, is it’s taking them so long, and they think, Well, this is impossible. This can’t be the way that it’s done. So then they go back to just winging it, which is very common. If you have a classroom of 30 kids that’s not on the table, you don’t think, Well, I’ll just see how they show up and then take it from there. But if you are teaching one on one, you can just be a reactionary teacher. It won’t be the best situation for your student or for you to get fulfilment for your lessons, but it is possible. So I think there’s that temptation there, combined with it will take you longer to plan in the beginning, you won’t know the materials, you won’t know different options, you won’t have your toolkit. For me, I have two other teachers who work for me here and we plan our lessons together. We have a weekly meeting, and we go through all the students and make sure everyone’s on track and do all of that together. Then there’s a lot of overlap as well. So it’s a bit different now than it used to be, but I used to spend a lot of time sitting down and writing carefully what I wanted to do, and then after the lesson, looking at my plan and saying, Okay, what didn’t fit? What did I think I was going to be able to do? What didn’t land the way that it should? So I think it should be that constant revisiting and then planning for the next week and then revisiting to learn from what’s going right and what’s not in the beginning and then over time, you do get a little bit niftier with it.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yeah, that sounds wonderful. It also sounds great that you get to plan collaboratively too. Collaboration when it’s done well, is just so inspirational, isn’t it? You bounce off each other’s ideas and check things out. That’s wonderful. I think a lot of studio teachers don’t have that. They’re quite isolated I would imagine.

Nicola Cantan  

Yeah, I think so, in many cases, they don’t even know, as I said earlier, to look online, to go out there and see what’s out there, like they just need to take that first step, because now there are so many online communities, some of which I run, but there’s so many different options for different stripes of teachers to find their people that they can connect with and they can meet up with on Zoom or just chat asynchronously, just text. But to have people that when you say, Oh, I have this one student and I can’t XYZ, to have someone say, I’ve had that too, or that sounds really tough. I mean, that can be so life changing for teachers. So taking that first step is really important. You have to reach out. You have to look for your community. It’s not baked in. You’re not in a school environment in most cases.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yes, and I want to get back to your community, for sure, I want you to tell people about that, but before we leave, about you starting to experiment with different modes of teaching in your studio. Could you just share your toe dipping story? Just in a bit of a summary? From when I listened to your podcast. Oh, actually, we’ll link to the episode in the show notes so people can go and listen to the episode. But I thought that the analogy of the water and how just try one activity, but stick to your tutor book, that’s dipping your toe in, that was just such a good progression. Do you mind sharing that with us? 

Nicola Cantan  

I mean, I probably said it differently than I’ll say it now, because that’s an older episode. So definitely people can go back and listen to that. As you say, you can share the link. I think a lot of teachers do get overwhelmed, especially with a label like Kodály or anything else, and think, Well, that’s going to mean I have to change my whole teaching. I need to retrain. I need to restart the whole thing. If my students are currently in the middle of a book, I’m supposed to rip them out of that and put them in something else. They just think they have to go all in right away, because maybe right now they’re all in with something else. So some teachers they just are a x method teacher and that’s how they think of themselves. But I think there’s so much to be learned from all different approaches to teaching, and there’s no wrong way to do it. I mean, you’re not going to make some irreparable mistake if you just try a different way, if you try one of our games, or you try one Kodály activity or you try something. But I think for teachers out there who have only done it one way and are comfortable with that, yes, just dipping the toe in the water, just getting one activity to mix up their lessons a little bit. I always suggest if you’re bringing in something new into your lessons, do it first. That’s my suggestion, because a lot of teachers put it at the end of their lesson plan and then they somehow don’t get to it, that scary thing that they didn’t really want to do. So just doing it first. Do a warm up that’s Kodály based if that’s what you’re interested in, do a little listening game at the start of the lesson if you want to get better at teaching aural skills, whatever the thing is, put it first. It can be two minutes long and then you can gradually expand it from there, once you see how well that goes, and start trying different ideas. But it’s not all or nothing, and it’s not you have to jump into the deep end. You can just take it a little bit at a time and gradually start to change how you think about your teaching.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yeah, I love that, It must also fuel you as a teacher. I believe teachings a creative craft and if you’re just doing the same thing all the time you must get bored as well, because I think we’re creative beings.

Nicola Cantan  

Yes, I agree so much. Actually, one of my little soapbox topics is I think teaching is one of the most creative things you can do, but it’s not naturally so, you have to be invested in it. You have to make it so. I get questions from teachers and get comments from teachers from time to time that get at this they’re saying, but how do you deal with the boredom, or how do you deal with the kids that don’t practice? The answer is, if you are trying new things, if you’re engaged with what you’re doing, then it doesn’t get boring. Then you don’t get frustrated with the kids that don’t practice, because you can still do something else with them. Of course, ideally, they’d practice. But that doesn’t mean you have to have an incredibly boring lesson and just have Groundhog Day and sit there listening to the same pieces with the same errors as last week, you can do something different. You can get creative and find new ways to reach students. That’s the other part of the creativity. This is what makes our studios more inclusive. If we teach the traditional way, we’re teaching for kids who can sit still and listen and follow dots on a page the way we explain them in that format. That might be you, if you’re listening to this and you’re a music teacher, because you might have come through that system so you don’t see necessarily that there’s anything wrong with it. I was able to sit still for 30 minutes. That was fine with me. It doesn’t mean that it’s fine for every type of child and it doesn’t mean that the kid who can’t sit still for 30 minutes isn’t musical or can’t benefit from music.

Debbie O’Shea  

That’s a very important point. It definitely is.

Sign-off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. Remember, all I can be is the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress. Don’t lose sight of the funny side of life. Why should you wear glasses in maths class? Because it helps with division.