Owens Corning Will Donate $1.1 Million to Habitat for Humanity

Innovative piano instructor John Stonko has owned and operated Atlanta Piano Teachers in Georgia since 2009. Outside of his professional activities, John Stonko supports several organizations, including Habitat for Humanity.

In a recent press release, Habitat for Humanity announced that the Owens Corning Foundation will provide $1.1 million in cash and gifts to support its work through 2017. An active supporter of Habitat for Humanity since 1997, the Owens Corning Foundation has sponsored a number of Habitat’s special events over the years, assisted in its builds, and provided materials that helped the organization insulate and/or roof over 1,100 homes.

As part of the new three-year partnership, the Owens Corning Foundation has already donated $200,000 to Habitat for 2015 and will donate the same amount in 2016 and 2017. In addition to cash donations, the foundation will provide $500,000 in gifts, such as insulation and roofing materials, that will be used in Habitat’s affordable housing projects around the globe.

Benefits of Learning Chords and Scales

As an experienced piano instructor, John Stonko helps students to understand how music theory contributes to better playing skills and a deeper knowledge of musical structure. John Stonko stands out as the developer of a proprietary method known as Cogent Playing Patterns.

Music students often ask, or wonder, what the end goal is in learning chords, scales, and other elements of theory. Many students learn these skills in isolation. They practice major scales and minor scales, as well as arpeggios, before they open their repertoire books and begin to play their pieces, and many students never make the connection between the two. However, a close examination of even intermediate-level pieces will reveal that scale passages, broken chords, and other such patterns appear throughout the repertoire.

Once they are able to identify chord types and scales, students then develop the capability to see and hear these patterns within a piece. They also learn to hear where the tonal center of a piece is and identify where the piece modulates, creates dissonance, and resolves again. This helps the student to create an informed interpretation and bring out the nuances of the music.

Music Students Display Their Skills at Formal Recitals

In his 20 years as a piano teacher, John Stonko has positively influenced many musicians. At the Emory University Center for Life-Long Learning in Atlanta, he founded the piano program and instructed students in music theory, history, and sight-reading. John Stonko also organizes recitals for his students to demonstrate their performance skills.

Typically Stonko chooses a thematic title for a recital, such as Songs of Passion, which referred to the music’s desired effect, the time in which a song was written, or the inherent drama in a piece of music. He introduced each selection and explained its relation to the overall theme with a well-chosen anecdote.

The program included a variety of songs, including classical standards such as Pachelbel’s Canon in D and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. Other pianists chose more contemporary popular tunes, including A Whole New World by Alan Menken, The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and My Funny Valentine by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers.

After an after-concert reception, the performers expressed gratitude at the opportunity to display their talents to a large audience of 130 people.

Thinking in Key Playing – Honing Awareness of Musical Characteristics

John Stonko, owner of Atlanta Piano Teachers, uses a variety of innovative techniques to improve student fluency. John Stonko teaches students his Thinking in Key Playing methodology to help them connect with different key signatures.

Throughout the history of Western music, composers and players have noticed that different keys have different characters. Christian Schubart, a writer and composer from around the turn of the 19th century, characterized C major as pure and innocent, while D major was passionate and wild; F minor, he believed, felt like inconsolable depression, while C minor almost celebrated the pain of unrequited love. Musicians attributed this difference to the ability of an additional sharp to add brightness and light to a piece, while flats on the other hand provoked sadness and internal reflection.

When students learn to hear these differences in character between the keys, they are better able to begin to ‘think in key’ when playing a particular piece. This understanding then translates into their muscle memory so that their fingers know when to reach up for an F-sharp in the key of G, or down for a B-flat in the key of F. Their playing becomes more fluent, and at the same time more in tune with the emotional tone of each individual piece.