Category Archives: Students

Parents! How to Help Your Students Practice ~ Day Five

Posted by MaryO on

We have established that regular practice routines will not happen without proactive piano parents. So, how can parents be proactive practice assistants even if they have never touched a piano?

Day 5. The Youtube Liaison: As students get older, it can get harder for piano parents to be active in the home practice process. By transitioning from an authoritative role to an assistant role, parents can be supportive by performing simple tasks such as searching out quality Youtube performances of pieces their children are playing. It can be a really useful experience for teen piano players to see and hear performances of the pieces they are about to play.

A Manuscript of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K331 was Discovered in Budapest in 2014

Posted by MaryO on

mozart-sonata-k331

The manuscript of Mozart’s A major piano sonata K331 has been discovered in Budapest. Having spent the majority of its life in the Budapest’s National Széchényi Library for decades, the coveted manuscript was rediscovered by Haydn scholar Balazs Mikusi.

“When I first laid eyes upon the manuscript, the handwriting already looked suspiciously ‘Mozartish’,” said Mikusi, who is the head of the music collection at National Szechenyi Library. “Then I started reading the notes, and realised it is the famous A Major sonata … My heart rate shot up.”

The piece was composed in 1783 and contains Mozart’s most popular jam, “Turkish March,” which has become a piano lesson staple all over the world.

Although, unfortunately, Mikusi can’t say how or when these pages found their way to Hungary; they reveal subtle differences from the published editions of the sonata. The key variances are seen in the phrasing, dynamics and occasionally the notes themselves.

“It is very rare that a Mozart manuscript pops up. Moreover the A Major Sonata had no known manuscript, so it is a really big discovery,” he said.

The library has only released teasing images of the manuscript, nothing more.

From Manuscript of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K331 Discovered in Budapest’s National Széchényi Library : Classical : Classicalite.

The whole sonata:

Parents! How to Help Your Students Practice ~ Day Four

Posted by MaryO on

We have established that regular practice routines will not happen without proactive piano parents. So, how can parents be proactive practice assistants even if they have never touched a piano?

Day 4. The Lead Vocalist: Most people are not too comfortable with breaking out into song in public, but they will happily sing in front of their own children. Parents of your littlest piano students should be encouraged to sing along with song lyrics. Just make sure that the sing-alongs happen with songs their children already know quite well. Sing-alongs do not work when a song is first being learned.

Parents! How to Help Your Students Practice ~ Day Three

Posted by MaryO on

We have established that regular practice routines will not happen without proactive piano parents. So, how can parents be proactive practice assistants even if they have never touched a piano?

Day 3. The Piano Piece Request Line: The most accomplished piano students always revisit pieces from their past to brush up on skills and to simply revisit some old favorites. During practice sessions, parents can get involved by requesting their children to perform some pieces that they have enjoyed hearing from past recitals, playing classes or just for fun.

Parents! How to Help Your Students Practice ~ Day Two

Posted by MaryO on

We have established that regular practice routines will not happen without proactive piano parents. So, how can parents be proactive practice assistants even if they have never touched a piano?

Day 2. The Practice Videographer: Piano teachers love to know what’s happening at home. By being a videographer, proactive piano parents can provide teachers with valuable home practice recordings that can be used to improve technique, posture, rhythm, and more.

Parents! How to Help Your Students Practice ~ Day One

Posted by MaryO on

Don't Forget to Practice!

We have established that regular practice routines will not happen without proactive piano parents. So, how can parents be proactive practice assistants even if they have never touched a piano?

Day 1. The Practice Practice Bouncer: Let’s begin with the simplest of tasks for piano parents. To encourage effective daily practice, proactive parents must act as the Piano Practice Bouncer.

This job requires parents to keep family pets, siblings, and friends out of the piano room.

Even more importantly for older students, this job requires keeping cell phones quiet during practice sessions.

Treble Maker!

Posted by MaryO on

 

When my students are first working with the Grand Staff, they are often confused about the placement of the various clefs.

In piano music, we generally use only the G-clef (Treble clef – not “trouble clef” as some think!) and the F-clef (Bass clef)  I try to show students how the curvy part of the G-clef wraps around the G above middle C and the F-clef looks sort of like an F marking the F below middle C.  I draw out G and F on the staff to show how these could have looked.

Originally, instead of a special clef symbol, the reference line of the staff was simply labeled with the name of the note it was intended to bear: F and C and, more rarely, G. These were the most often-used ‘clefs’ in Gregorian chant notation.  Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions.

Over time the shapes of these letters became stylized, leading to their current versions.