Vinh Pham from Ho Chi Minh City successfully applies his own piano teaching technique in the US’ Merry Melody Music Academy, a famous music conservatory, by combining technical theories with inspirational music composing to create improvisational play in his lessons to motivate his students' imagination and enable them freely express the emotions.  
 

Vinh Pham

He also teaches his students the harmony and counterpoint principals as well as modulation of piano pieces from one key to another to play a harmonic and contrapuntal melody rather than just a beautiful one, according to VEHO Press.

Vinh Pham initially played piano “for fun” when he was already 16 years old but his talent deeply impressed the piano teachers at The Conservatory of Ho Chi Minh City, who helped him perfect his technique and get ready to apply for upper level training at the Longy School of Music of Bard College after just 4 months of private studying.

This is an unprecedented feat in the field of classical music, where young musicians often start at 3- 4 years old and then accumulate 10-15 years of experience before being admitted to the conservatory.

He was accepted into Longy under gifted scholarship and years after, he was invited to be Music Director at First Parish Unitarian Universalist of Medfield - a famous historical missionary in Massachusetts where he really found his passion to teach piano for the beginners.

“Longy is famous for successfully applying creative music teaching methods and I feel so proud to study at the school, where I have met many young students and inspired by their passion for music,” Vinh said.

Immersed in the American and European piano teaching traditions, the talented Vietnamese also conducted a thorough research on the Vietnamese piano teaching method and is able to create his own unique piano teaching method, which can be called “quintessentially” Vietnamese.

“Instead of the usual boring scales and technical plays, I created exercises that my beginners can sing along with, some of these exercises are based on the traditional Vietnamese pentatonic scale which makes it easy to sing even for the little kids,” Vinh shared.

Besides, he also adjusts his methods toward special group of students including the sightless ones.

The successful pianist plans to publish a book on piano teaching methods by 2020. Hanoitimes

Ha An