"I can't even begin to describe how wonderful Dr. Grant is, as a teacher AND a friend. She taught me more in the few years with her, than I had ever learned. I loved going to lessons with her because she's fun, energetic, intelligent, and very talented. Even though we had fun conversing, she always got right down to business. She takes her teaching very seriously and it shows! It shows through her students. I've seen so many talented pianists study through Asia; she is the ONLY teacher I would even think of learning from!!!"

Taylor Newcomb-Weiland, Sioux Falls, SD (Student)

I am an adult student who has spent the last 4 years in pursuit of a music degree. I have excelled at music theory, studied pedagogy, and taken lessons under three teachers with doctorates. Throughout my education I had nagging concerns about the quality of technical training I was receiving.

I was practicing an average of 4 hours a day, and was concerned about injury. I researched educational resources on tension in keyboard, but they were only available on the East Coast. Dr. Grant was referred to me by Tim Coates a highly regarded tuner and specialist in refurbishing pianos. 

Dr. Grant trained me on hand position, and taking the key for richest tone. We trained for months on the skill of playing without tension. It was a success; after years of playing with tension Dr. Grant altered my playing to a tension free approach. 

I am most grateful to her for the rare skills and immense patience she has. I have returned to the University with apparent skills and exceptional repertoire that have surprised the faculty! Comments from the faculty have been made on my musicality and tonality!

Dee J. (Student)

I had the good fortune to take piano lessons from Dr. Grant for six months right before she moved to Iowa. I’m a professional jazz and R&B pianist and singer, but I didn’t start playing piano until I was in my forties, and I’m mostly self-taught. When I started taking lessons from Dr. Grant, she saw that my mechanics were not right. So she started me out with exercises for the thumb under the fingers and fingers over the thumb, then had me work on four-octave scales and arpeggios in the Russian style and a few of the Czerny's School of Velocity Etudes. For the first month, my playing was horribly uneven, and I could only play the Czerny pieces at really slow tempos. But Dr. Grant was encouraging and told me not to worry about speed but to concentrate on evenness and to identify the fingers that were causing “stumbling” in the middle of passages. Since I took up piano late in life, I’d always assumed I’d never be able to play with any real facility. But working with Dr. Grant, I started playing much faster and easily than I ever imagined possible.

Dr. Grant not only transformed my mechanics, she also taught me so much about musicality. Although we weren’t able to work on repertoire much, I did play for her some of the Bach pieces I’d been working on. She taught me so much about how to interpret Bach and how to practice difficult pieces like the Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Partitas. I’ll be working on what I learned from Dr. Grant for the rest of my life.

Sammy H. (Student, SFSD)