414: Pattern-Based Teaching with TopMusicSheets Composer Juan Cabeza

Great music teaching isn’t just about what’s on the page, it’s about what students can create beyond it. In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Juan Cabeza, our featured TopMusicSheets composer and a passionate educator from Madrid. Juan shares how his love of pattern-based teaching led him to compose music that supports creativity, improvisation, and confident reading—pieces designed to be pulled apart, explored, and reimagined. We discuss how he teaches in both school and private settings, his influences from Piano Safari and Forrest Kinney, and why his pieces are meant to be a starting point, not a final product. If you’ve ever been curious about teaching with patterns, or how composing can grow naturally out of your teaching, you’ll love hearing from Juan.

• Juan shared his passion for composing pattern-based piano pieces to support student learning.
• How pattern-based pieces help students read, improvise, compose, and perform more confidently.
• He demonstrated how simple changes in rhythm, direction, or hand position can transform a piece.
• How understanding musical patterns helps students play more fluently and memorize more easily.
• The value of teaching patterns from the start as key to developing strong sight readers.
• How his music encourages creativity and motivates students through ownership of their learning.
• How his compositions use just a few notes or hand positions, making them highly adaptable.
• He suggested using these pieces to teach transposition, rhythmic variation, and full-keyboard exploration.
• The importance of improvisation was stressed as a powerful teaching tool.
• His journey into composing, influenced by Forrest Kinney and the Piano Safari method.
• How student recitals and parent feedback encouraged him to publish his compositions.
• He encouraged teachers to view his pieces as starting points for creativity, not fixed endpoints.

Links Mentioned

• Juan’s website: Me Gusta El Piano
• Juan’s books on Piano Safari
• TopMusic Piano Podcast 062: Inspiring Creativity with Juan Cabeza
• Find out more about TopMusicSheets here
• Become a TopMusic Content Partner today

Today's Guest

Juan Cabeza is a pianist, pedagogue and composer. He teaches private and group piano students at his studio, in Madrid, where he specializes in students in the elementary and intermediate stages of study. As a result of his research in piano pedagogy, Juan created a blog, megustaelpiano.com. Here he expresses his ideas about teaching and learning piano, provides teaching resources, and suggests interesting piano repertoire. Juan Cabeza is the author of Piano Train Trips, Miniatures and the two Diversions books published by Piano Safari. He has translated into Spanish the Piano Safari Method and Create First by Forrest Kinney. He has also created the online improvisation course Piano Patterns in Harmony, which has been recently nominated for The Art of Piano Education Awards 2025.

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