Striking a Chord From a Distance

The first note of Ray Foulkes’ weekly piano lesson is the staccato double ring of his telephone.

Every Monday at 8 p.m. in the southern English town of Romsey, the basement waterproofer picks up his cordless phone, clicks on the loudspeaker and sits down at his piano to practice jazz and pop standards with teacher Mark Miller.

Miller listens closely to Foulkes’ every note and offers advice and guidance -- from his studio outside Chicago about 4,000 miles away.

Technological advances in the last decade -- including super-clear lines, cheap Internet-based calling and online video -- have combined with a naturally sharp ear to allow Miller to teach music to students thousands of miles away.

Classes in academic subjects such as math and English long have flourished in so-called distance-learning programs. And their growth has tracked the rise in Internet-access speeds. Music lessons, though, have long relied on an intimate side-by-side relationship between teacher and student.

Four years ago, Miller bucked convention to offer long-distance lessons to students as far away as Germany, Australia and Hong Kong. He hasn’t met most of his students in person.

Miller is on the leading edge of a subtle shift in music education. Video and audio technology is so cheap and reliable that major music programs and conservatories, such as Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Cleveland Institute of Music, have established video conferencing facilities to support a growing number of online courses and activities. UCLA offers some online Berklee courses to its students.

The schools don’t, however, provide live one-on-one lessons over long distances. And some music educators question the ability to teach effectively over the phone or Internet, especially to beginning students.

“With any instrument, there’s a physical interplay that’s necessary,” said professional jazz saxophonist David Liebman, who also teaches master’s and doctoral programs at the Manhattan School of Music. “There are things you have to see, especially with a beginner.”

Miller, who charges $80 an hour for lessons, plans to add Web cameras so he can see what fingers his students are using on each key and to show them how a piece should be played.

“The video is great,” said Miller, 46, whose studio is in the northwest Chicago suburb of Barrington.

Miller’s long-distance epiphany came in the late 1990s during his daily trip to a lunchtime gig at a suburban Chicago office complex. He figured he was wasting five hours a week on the road -- time better spent teaching.

“The bottom line was that I was losing money, so I thought, ‘Why not teach over the phone?’ ” he said. “I could teach concepts, go over lead sheets and other things.”

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Miller played in a quintet on Grand Cayman Island and in combos around Chicago while teaching piano in person.

His brother had been telling him how quickly long-distance phone rates were falling and steering him to cheap providers.

“I did have some misgivings,” Miller said. “I wasn’t sure I would be able to hear what I needed to hear. My ears are my eyes.”

But a trial with a nephew in Las Vegas proved to him that he could hear all the notes being played, and he started offering lessons over the phone in 2002.

Foulkes, his second paying long-distance student, was searching the Internet for some jazz venues when he stumbled across Miller’s site at pianoweb.com.

“We corresponded by e-mail first,” said Foulkes, 46, who couldn’t find anyone near his small town to teach jazz and pop standards. “We had similar experiences. We both gave up classical music as children.”

Usually, Miller’s students buy a headset and adapter to plug into the phone. Foulkes often uses the loudspeaker on his phone. Miller can hear his students play, and they can hear him if he wants them to stop or repeat a few measures.

Like distance teachers everywhere, he takes advantage of e-mail for both written and audio lessons. He sends charts to his students that show which finger to use for each note.

That he can’t see what fingers students use is “a slight drawback,” he said. “Sometimes, I don’t realize they’re playing a chord with the wrong hand, but that’s only happened about half a dozen times.”

The Skype Net-phone service Miller uses also offers video and conferencing, which he plans to use to see his students play and offer long-distance group lessons.

Although the tech tools he uses are unconventional, his students are attracted to his approach to music, which ditches classical training and focuses on left-hand chords, or combinations of notes, and simple right-hand melodies.

He focuses on chords first, pushing students to memorize, over time, about five-dozen chords. The initial chords he teaches provide the basic rhythm for the 1960s hit song, “Louie, Louie.” From there, right-hand melodies are added.

Classical music, learned the conventional way, long has been the cornerstone of piano lessons, said retired University of Arkansas professor Martha Ann Edwards.

Finding someone to teach chords, theory and improvisation for modern music is almost impossible, she said. Even at the university, the best she could do was to teach herself jazz songs by ear.

Ruth Rothstein of Chicago was 81 when she started taking lessons in 2004. She couldn’t find anyone to teach her what she wanted to play.

“They all taught strictly classical,” said Rothstein, a retired chief of the Cook County Bureau of Health. “I don’t really want to do that. At 83? Are you kidding me? By the time I learned a Bach piece, I’d be dead.”

Now she’s playing songs like “Autumn Leaves,” “Bewitched” and “Love Me Tender” -- and, she said, “I’m loving it.”

Even though she lives about 30 miles from Miller, Rothstein has never met him in person, opting instead to take lessons over the phone. It’s a selling point for many of Miller’s students.

“I thought it was interesting, and non-threatening. It doesn’t matter what I look like,” said Hemet resident June Cantwell, 67. She took classical piano training as a child and started up again in June with Miller.

At the university and conservatory levels, distance learning opens new revenue bases for schools and teachers.

Berklee, which counts Quincy Jones, Diana Krall and other famous musicians among its alumni, has created a separate online operation, Berkleemusic.com, that offers courses and certificate programs. Its enrollment has been doubling every year for the last three years, reaching 1,200 students this spring. The school offers 80 courses online, mostly geared to contemporary music and career-oriented students.

At the Cleveland Institute, instructors teach master classes in person and over the Internet. Last month, the school swapped students -- virtually -- with the Royal College of Music in London as directors from each institution taught the others’ students through video conferencing. The institute has done the same with the famed Royal Academy of Music and other conservatories.

Mark George, Cleveland’s distance learning director, and students were part of “Kinetic Shadows,” a show put on jointly with USC four years ago. It combined dancers and musicians from different locations in one performance.

“It was cool stuff,” he said. “It’s fun to live on the edge.”

Miller is learning a few marketing skills from his use of the Internet. Last fall, he hired a Web expert in Karachi, Pakistan, to help drive traffic to his site.

“I used to be the 43rd or 49th site down the list in some search results, but now I’m in the low double digits,” Miller said. “I even hit No. 3 on MSN.”