Summer Sky:
- Level: Early to Mid Elementary
- Pages: 4 pages, 2 pages of music, cover included!
- Style: Relaxed
- Bonus and Features: mp3 performance track; First notes have note names in them to help find position and learn note names.
- Format:PDF instant download
- Series: Entering Beautiful Places
Summit Reflections:
- Level: Early to Mid Elementary
- Pages: 4 pages, 2 pages of music, cover included!
- Style: Thoughtful
- Bonus and Features: mp3 performance track; First notes have note names in them to help find position and learn note names.
- Format:PDF instant download
- Series: Entering Beautiful Places
Evening Rain:
- Level: Early to Mid Elementary
- Pages: 4 pages, 2 pages of music, cover included!
- Style: Dark, brooding, but beautiful
- Bonus and Features: mp3 performance track; First notes have note names in them to help find position and learn note names.
- Format:PDF instant download
- Series: Entering Beautiful Places
Entering Beautiful Places is the second level of music in our Beautiful Places series. Each piece features a beautifully composed elementary piano solo on the white keys. The first time each note is presented, the note name is written in the note, making it helpful when students are first learning to read music. The patterns are helpful in reinforcing notes names as students continue to read without note names in subsequent notes.
This set of Entering Beautiful Places is especially suitable for pre-teens, teens, adults, and any piano student who wants to play mature sounding, beautiful piano music.
Videos:
Summer Sky – Early to Mid Elementary
Summit Reflections – Early to Mid Elementary
Evening Rain – Early to Mid Elementary
Entering Beautiful Places Bonus:
This Entering Beautiful Places Bundle comes with bonus mp3 recordings performed by Wendy Stevens. These recordings will help elementary level students remember the rhythm of the piece as well as receive inspiration to play it beautifully. You are permitted to send these example performance tracks to your students to help them learn the pieces.
What is the Studio License?
Entering Beautiful Places is delivered digitally (through your email receipt) and is studio licensed. This means that you can print and use these pieces for any student that you directly teach for your entire lifetime of teaching.
Sandra –
I gave Summit Reflections to a new adult student last week and she loves it!
Valerie Alfonso –
The Entering Beautiful Places pieces make WONDERFUL recital selections because of their sophisticated sound! I absolutely adore this series, and I think Wendy has hit on something very special. Each student that has played these pieces feels sophisticated and like a “true musician”–what a gift to be able to give a beginner! I love that we can focus on expression almost immediately because of a limited (yet still attractive!) note set. Hooray!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Angela –
These latest Beautiful Places pieces have been so successful. I bought the Beautiful Places pieces and took them with me to a new teaching job I have in a primary school – children up to the age of 11years old. They range from complete beginner to Grade 3. So apart from the complete beginners they mostly arrived a little rusty after the long summer holiday, not all of them had remembered to bring their music. But I was able to give each of them a piece with pedal in all the way through and they ALL loved it! Yes the pieces were very easy for some of them but they were so delighted with the sounds they were creating they were really happy to play them. It was great to have something that made everyone feel so enthusiastic and excited to play.
Chris –
I teach 70+ private student and they are all learning/learned your finding beautiful places music. Even the advanced students.
I can’t tell you how your music has changed my studio for the better.
Joyce –
I introduced some of your new pieces to an adult and a teenager and they couldn’t be more enthused about them!
Stephanie –
I have loved both of those sets – Finding Beautiful Places and Entering Beautiful Places!
The Entering Beautiful Places specifically have been perfect for an adult student returning to piano after years away. He wants to jump back into things like he used to play, but doesn’t have the reading chops yet. These songs are helping reinforce the notes while allowing him to play something beyond “kiddo music” which he specifically requested to avoid as much as possible.
These are definitely a winner!
Ginny –
I think it is amazing you can compose pieces that sound gorgeous and are fairly easy, in terms of notes. These Finding Beautiful Places, Entering Beautiful Places, and Color Rote and Reading® pieces are haunting, touching, comforting and beautiful!
Obviously the most difficult thing in these pieces is playing softly and with expression, but you have given us the wonderful blueprint of the melody and harmony!
Joanne –
I bought the 2 bundles, “Finding Beautiful Places”, and “Entering Beautiful Places” and they were exactly what I needed at exactly the right time. Serendipitous indeed!
I currently teach a partner lesson with a young mother and her 11 year old son. The mother is a beginning student, and the boy is one I’ve struggled to teach for a couple years. He has ADHD, and took his lessons after school. He was on medication to calm him down, which made him taciturn, lethargic and non-cooperative at lessons after school. When his mom came to a conference visit, I rashly offered to give them a partner lesson. Wow! Talk about footprints on the tongue!
Well, we now have lessons on Saturday mornings, and my little boy is energized and responsive…probably because he gets to bully his mom into playing the right notes at the right time!!
And the reluctant teacher? Success there too, as I’ve been using Finding Beautiful Places for mom. She’s an artist and the cover art and evocative music of this series has completely captivated her, especially because the pieces use a wide range, expressive melodies and tons of pedal. They’ve recently purchased a beautiful grand piano for their home, and these lovely pieces let her feel like she’s playing refined adult music. Her son, meanwhile, who was dragging his feet with his methods books, seems delighted with “Entering Beautiful Places.” I assigned him “Evening Rain” for the bass clef only, with the instruction that he teach the piece to his mom in the treble clef as imitation.
Can’t tell you what magic these pieces are doing for these lessons!
Pam –
Entering Beautiful Places has been a success with my teenagers especially — simple, conquered in one week, but gorgeous to listen to and perform. Asking an older student to “polish” them (i.e. more dynamics or specific technique movements we’re currently working on) is welcomed with pieces like these. Frequently I give students a full “review” week — usually when they are traveling and missing a lesson — so they love to have these pieces with granted permission to revisit and play again with no strings attached or stress involved. 😉
Katherine Hutchinson –
I have been using Beautiful Pieces to supplement my adult beginner students tutor books. They have been hugely successful in motivating students but more to the point have helped them experience success and great satisfaction in playing musically mature and appealing pieces despite their relative beginner status. Sometimes there have been concepts that the tutor book hasn’t yet covered, but a simple explanation and the accompanying recordings have helped them quickly pick these up and will be a great introduction and reminder when we do come to cover those elements later on. I am very pleased to have these pieces as a resource in my music studio. Thank you Wendy for seeing this gap in the market for adult/teen students and filling it!
Barbara –
I want to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed working with your “warm-up review pieces” like Dusty Blue, Evening Rain, all those beautiful pieces that I think of as easy reading but have just the right amount of challenge. I’ve had so many students be willing to work on them a long time – I tell them it’s to practice dynamic differences but really some of these kids need reading practice and it ends up being both. What I’ve noticed is that my students love the sound of the pieces so are really willing to work on them long term to make them sound good!
I also have a student who has cerebral palsy and can only play with one index finger of each hand – these pieces have been invaluable to her so she can play something that sounds good but isn’t too challenging!
Keera –
I have all of the Beautiful Places series now, Finding Beautiful Places 1 and 2, Entering Beautiful Places 1 and 2, In Beautiful Places, and Exploring Beautiful Places. All of my students enjoy them. Even my more advanced kids like to play through them as a relaxing warm up. I recently started offering group workshops for beginner adults, and they love that these pieces sound beautiful and elegant.
Shannon –
Hah! My beginners LOVE the beautiful places music so so much! One student in particular is falling in love with piano because of the piece “Evening Rain.” He performed it on April 29 and had his parents in tears. I also sent him the mp3s that come with our purchase for “Forbidden Creek” and “Ancient Ruins” and his mom text me: “My son says ‘I HAVE TO LEARN THESE ASAP!’” This is a kid who JUST started lessons and his mom told me up front “He has very limited interests … and he doesn’t really like to practice ANYTHING” … so I knew going into lessons would be a challenge. But thanks to your music, he is playing piano daily and so proud of himself!!!!!
Joyce –
I held my end-of-year studio recital this past weekend. Typically, I teach a lot of higher level theory and a wide range of piano levels but the last few years has seen me inundated with ‘littles’. Fully half of the recital pieces were by Wendy Stevens! Students played all of the ‘Finding Beautiful Places’, ‘Entering Beautiful Places’, some short sheets, then ending with ‘Guy Eye’! I want to thank you for such a wide variety of enjoyable, pedagogically sound and pianistic music. One little girl came up to me after the recital and said “I want to learn ALL of them!” She – with confidence, and after only about 6 months of lessons – played ‘Misty Mountains’ to an adoring audience of her parents, 3 grandparents and several siblings. It was great to see very young students at the beginning of their musical journey playing and enjoying ‘real music’! So, thank you! I can’t wait to get my hands on the second set of Finding Beautiful Places and Entering Beautiful Places!
Caren –
I’ve been using these a lot for my young teens and adult students.
Beautiful and easy to learn.
Emily –
I bought Summer Sky for a 13 year old student I’ve had for 1.5 years who is still not reading notes, but I taught it by rote and she LOVED it. I have been so perplexed over her because she’s not a little kid, so the lush sound appealed to her, but
it allowed me to cater to her learning speed. Thank goodness for this series!