About Your Zoom Piano Teacher
Kelsey Georgesen
Kelsey (she/her) is a pianist and educator based in the Midwest, teaching and performing online on traditional Kiikaapoi land. She uses a variety of musical styles to make electric connections in our minds, and genuine connections between people. Kelsey specializes in teaching piano to adults and teenagers in a way that allows you to dive deep into the music that you are truly excited about while exploring new ideas and skills.
Kelsey approaches music as a vessel for building community and exploring creative elements of yourself. In her own musical practice, she composes and improvises, and is most excited to play styles including blues, jazz, ragtime, stride, roots, and folk music. As a listener, Kelsey keeps eclectic tastes and is always looking for something that is new to her, tapping into global artists and styles of music that are both contemporary and antique. If you want to connect with other pieces of Kelsey’s work, be sure to check out her podcast, Earth Noise.
Rooted in Joy
This is the foundation of everything that I teach. Joy is what brings us to learning music, and joy is how we learn intuitively and innately. All of my lessons and classes start from a place of joy and community care.
Regenerative Systems
The remote piano lessons are designed to be accessible for all, starting with sliding scale pricing for classes and free and discounted private piano lessons for Black and Indigenous students. All videos have the option of live captioning, and a copy of the recording afterwards.
Global Exploration
Music is not performed in a vacuum, it is absolutely a social product. I love to learn about people and the world around me by using music as a viewing lenses. This global perspective shows up in piano classes, and in my podcast, Earth Noise.
Reparations Accountability: Free Lessons for Black & Indigenous Students
Kelsey is doing daily work to make her music as accessible as possible by teaching inclusive history and by accessing a variety of genres in her lessons and performances. Her classes are available at a discount for students who are Black and Indigenous. You are invited match her commitment to donating one private lesson a week to students who are Black and Indigenous at the bottom of this page. If you are Black or Indigenous and are interested in free or discounted piano lessons for yourself or a member of your family, please complete this form.
In 2021, Kelsey’s pledge to donating 20 hours of lessons has already been matched, and Kelsey was able to open up 2 additional slots of free lessons. Help us double these offerings, so that we can shared lessons with more students. Our goal is to offer 5 free lesson slots by 2022.
To learn more about Kelsey’s commitment to dismantling racism in music, visit her living document titled Anti-racism in Music. Please consider donating to match Kelsey’s commitment to teaching a free lesson to students who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Kelsey’s Musical Journey
Spirals
I believe that we all make music innately. As children, we sing and use music to play and to tell stories about the world around us. It is one of our many imaginative tools for connecting with others and understanding our experiences. I spent much of my time as a child singing stories about the things I saw outside, and recording little cassette tape “radio programs.” The best musical toy, though, was my grandfather’s player piano.
If you’ve never seen a player piano, it is an antique instrument that uses a paper roll of musical notation and foot pedals to pump in order to play music automatically. It’s like the analog version of those pre-recorded songs on your electric keyboard. When I was a kid, I would sit at the family piano and pump the pedals for what felt like hours, singing along with these old boogie-woogie piano rolls until I was too tired to pump the pedals! Eventually, my family saw the need to support my enthusiasm for music by enrolling me in piano lessons. My piano lessons were pretty traditional: I learned from method books, starting with classical styles and dabbling in jazz sounds.
Kelsey and her sister, Kendra, at the family piano as children.
My grandpa’s player piano is what really ignited my excitement about music, but finding community in school through music groups and ensembles really catalyzed that passion further. I joined band and played trumpet, and later learned electric bass so that I could play in the touring show choir ensemble. These experiences pushed me outside of familiar territory, and had me learning new songs and styles of music. By high school, my whole world revolved around music. I became the drum major of the marching band, was the rehearsal accompanist for the choir, and spent all of my free time going to rock and metal concerts with my friends. We even had our own band for a minute, but I quickly learned that there’s not a lot to do as a keyboard player in a metal group.
My college experience was not as radiant. I moved from experiencing music as a connector, something playful and community based, to lessons that featured competition as the primary motivator. Trying to learn jazz was stressful- the teachers, bands, and rhythm sections were male dominated, and the only way to advance your standing in the ensembles was to enter a competition against other players currently in a group. By the end of the experience, I found a few genuine and impactful teachers and had a small network of charismatic women musicians to lean on and learn with together.
Teaching music has given me opportunities to explore the world, and to build life-changing connections through the shared experience of making music. While in school, I spent 22 days in Jamaica, learning local folk songs and drumming patterns, and teaching the songs that we were learning in local elementary schools. After college, I spent a semester teaching music on the Navajo Nation. Some of the high school guitar and choir students took time to share their music with me. I will never forget the student who stayed after school to teach me traditional Navajo songs, writing the Diné lyrics in a journal for me, and singing together with me. When I was ready to live in the city, I spent four years teaching general music on the south side of Chicago. Being a part of an overloaded system in Chicago showed me that I wanted to do better as a teacher than the system would allow me to. Witnessing the institutionalized racism present in these communities incensed my dedication to personal anti-racism work, and to using music as a transformative vessel for learning more about social context and history.
I began the transition into private music teaching and performing in 2020, imagining that the year would be full of live performances and summer music intensives. Of course, that is not what happened, but I was delighted to discover how expansive online piano lessons can be. Taking private piano lessons through Zoom has shown us the advantages of remote music learning, including the ability to work from our own instrument, listening to one person and playing along at the same time, and watching the movements and hand positions from above the piano. I am currently producing the Earth Noise Podcast, and developing containers for unique group piano lessons for adults. It is my goal to expand this work, and to continue creating exciting, multi-genre piano classes and filling them with folks who are enthusiastic about learning piano.