Be A Star!, Book 3: Early Intermediate to Mid-Intermediate Piano Book

Book 3 respects the work you've already done with your students in earlier volumes while genuinely advancing their analytical toolkit. Rather than simply presenting harder pieces, Costley builds on Helen Marlais' proven methodology to deepen how students hear music, transforming them from note-readers into musicians who understand structure.

Purposeful and energizing. Each piece invites students to become detectives, spotting recurring patterns, harmonic structures, and formal shapes that make the music cohere. There's real satisfaction in recognizing how a composer builds ideas and lets that awareness guide your fingers.

Early intermediate to mid-intermediate piano students ready to move beyond rote learning and develop genuine analytical skills. This book works best with students who have completed earlier volumes in the Intervallic Reading Series and are prepared to engage actively with music theory concepts during their practice.

• Encourage students to label chord progressions and identify harmonic patterns before playing a piece through. This analysis step transforms practice into discovery and builds confidence.
• Ask students to sketch the formal architecture of each piece (identifying phrases, sections, cadences) as part of their preparation. Playing becomes an act of understanding rather than decoding.
• Have students isolate intervallic patterns they notice and practice those patterns in isolation. This focused work sharpens both their ear and their technical facility.
• Play through entire pieces without stopping, even on first reads. The goal is to experience the composition as a unified whole, not to perfect individual measures.

Use Book 3 as your core repertoire for mid-level piano students during the school year, assigning pieces systematically to reinforce harmonic and formal concepts taught in theory lessons. Student recitals featuring these pieces become teaching moments; audiences hear music that sounds assured and unified because the performers understand its architecture.

• Identifying and labeling chord progressions and harmonic functions
• Recognizing compositional forms and structural phrases within pieces
• Reading and understanding intervallic patterns and their applications
• Analyzing musical patterns and relating them to performance
• Sight-reading with greater accuracy through pattern recognition