Emily Peplin has taught piano lessons in private and music schools, from Waunakee to Waukesha, since 2003, and while studying piano performance at UW-Parkside with Dr. James and Susan McKeever, conservatory students who had studied with noted pedagogue Olga Kovalevsky Conus. She has also studied with Rachel Bittner Diedrich and Natalya Berdnikova, following years of piano lessons that began at the age of six with her first teacher, Arlys Buch, former church organist for St. John’s Lutheran Church in Waterloo, WI.
Emily is an accompanist with the First Congregational Church in Fort Atkinson, and operates The Piano School of Fort Atkinson, where she teaches group lessons. She also performs solo jazz/pop piano standards each week at Highway Harry's in Johnson Creek, and is currently pursuing the Licentiate Diploma (LRCM) in Piano with The Royal Conservatory of Music.
Sharing her passion for continuing education and music allows Emily’s students the opportunity to experience piano lessons as an entry into the arts – one that takes structured and fluid approaches alike. While students are learning rhythm, reading, and theory, they are given the aptitude to perform these skills through accumulated technical expression. All music studied is given stylistic context, helping students connect harmonic structure to an otherwise linear track through advancing repertoire, via the individual interpretation of music.
Along with the Royal Conservatory Certificate Program offered to WCCM students, Emily also utilizes a curriculum incorporating an interactive app to help students achieve note reading and rhythmic accuracy, by playing along with recorded audio tracks as they unlock new levels of mastery.
With these designed approaches to teaching, students are supported in personal repertoire choices, for those who may wish to learn through hearing the music they know (pop and radio hits/film and gaming themes, etc.). Reading is supplemented with etudes (technical exercises) chosen to deepen the expression of the music aurally perceived by the student, emphasizing stylistic relationships between contemporary and historic/period music.
As an approximate parallel to classical training, this approach builds aural skills suited to eventual introduction to jazz/rock styles of music appreciation/theory. Students following a more classical progression also may learn introductory levels of jazz, at their request.
An interdependent progression between classical and contemporary music teaches students how to discover a love for the piano that opens the door for them to express their dreams, and to appreciate the value of others’ work to achieve them, too. Modeling this for students remains central to helping students first find a love for their instrument, and then to continue to seek its limitless capacity for connection, by participating in events designed to showcase student performances and projects.
Apart from pedagogy/method selections, Emily’s overall philosophy of teaching is centered in building listening, technical, and rhythm skills as an emotional component to reading and playing music, by teaching students how to develop their own internal sense of feedback, from their own creation of sound. Emily regards this connection between mental, aural, and visual coordination as having its “gravity” in emotions, and as what develops aesthetic taste and conveys individual and artistic style.
Helping students to find theirs, and to connect it to the broader industry of music and all aspects of performance, is Emily’s primary goal within her instruction, as life’s most wondrous moments are so often made with our memory and our music. In playing an instrument, Emily believes that everyone can better appreciate the quality of experiences they have in their own lives, in drawing ideas and intuition together in unforgettable ways that connect people with time and place.
Emily is an accompanist with the First Congregational Church in Fort Atkinson, and operates The Piano School of Fort Atkinson, where she teaches group lessons. She also performs solo jazz/pop piano standards each week at Highway Harry's in Johnson Creek, and is currently pursuing the Licentiate Diploma (LRCM) in Piano with The Royal Conservatory of Music.
Sharing her passion for continuing education and music allows Emily’s students the opportunity to experience piano lessons as an entry into the arts – one that takes structured and fluid approaches alike. While students are learning rhythm, reading, and theory, they are given the aptitude to perform these skills through accumulated technical expression. All music studied is given stylistic context, helping students connect harmonic structure to an otherwise linear track through advancing repertoire, via the individual interpretation of music.
Along with the Royal Conservatory Certificate Program offered to WCCM students, Emily also utilizes a curriculum incorporating an interactive app to help students achieve note reading and rhythmic accuracy, by playing along with recorded audio tracks as they unlock new levels of mastery.
With these designed approaches to teaching, students are supported in personal repertoire choices, for those who may wish to learn through hearing the music they know (pop and radio hits/film and gaming themes, etc.). Reading is supplemented with etudes (technical exercises) chosen to deepen the expression of the music aurally perceived by the student, emphasizing stylistic relationships between contemporary and historic/period music.
As an approximate parallel to classical training, this approach builds aural skills suited to eventual introduction to jazz/rock styles of music appreciation/theory. Students following a more classical progression also may learn introductory levels of jazz, at their request.
An interdependent progression between classical and contemporary music teaches students how to discover a love for the piano that opens the door for them to express their dreams, and to appreciate the value of others’ work to achieve them, too. Modeling this for students remains central to helping students first find a love for their instrument, and then to continue to seek its limitless capacity for connection, by participating in events designed to showcase student performances and projects.
Apart from pedagogy/method selections, Emily’s overall philosophy of teaching is centered in building listening, technical, and rhythm skills as an emotional component to reading and playing music, by teaching students how to develop their own internal sense of feedback, from their own creation of sound. Emily regards this connection between mental, aural, and visual coordination as having its “gravity” in emotions, and as what develops aesthetic taste and conveys individual and artistic style.
Helping students to find theirs, and to connect it to the broader industry of music and all aspects of performance, is Emily’s primary goal within her instruction, as life’s most wondrous moments are so often made with our memory and our music. In playing an instrument, Emily believes that everyone can better appreciate the quality of experiences they have in their own lives, in drawing ideas and intuition together in unforgettable ways that connect people with time and place.