May Music Thread

Oh, and she's got an overnight camping trip on the 15th to the 16th...

Do you have a date for it Trumpet? DD's is sometime in the last week of June. Just the little matter of theory on the 17th to do beforehand...

I am also trying hard not to think about it double ( and am hoping that the teacher is right and ds will do fine )

Thanks Trumpet. DD2 just freezes if someone asks her to sing, so her teacher thought she should do Trinity for that reason. At least 2 of her pieces are on both lists, so she didn't have to change them. The third one that she started recently is so fast when played at full speed (first movement of a Vivaldi bassoon concerto in A minor), but at least it has an 8 bar and a 16 bar rest in it which will give her recovery time - and the excerpts are full of fast runs. I try not to think about the exam.....

Double no we have no experience of Trinity exams but necessary for us as ds hasn't got round to theory yet however he really likes the aural much more than Abrsm so we might stick with it for grade 8 too . Ds's teacher likes trinity as he thinks the aural is better suited at the higher grades for non singers ( ds can sing but hasn't had lessons yet) and he likes the orchestral excerpts practice with loads of transposition as this is a more realistic test of what you need to be able to do as a trumpet player ( ds can do this transposition just not the sight reading going back and correcting his mistakes and then losing his sense of rhythm is also a big problem here for ds)

Fleur it's not a really helpful suggestion because it's not all that practical but it's duets that really push DS with his sightreading. He still doesn't realise that's why he plays duets with his teacher and why it's usually something that he's not seen before.

I survived GCSEs last year and you can too. What helped for me was looking on Twitter and The Student Room immediately after the exam to gauge popular opinion. If it is thought to have been a stinker of an exam and no-one could do question ? then you can reassure him that it's not the end of the world and the difficulty will be reflected in the mark scheme. If he comes out and thinks he's totally bombed it then there's usually the bones of a specimen answer on TSR the same day, that might reassure him that he's done better than he thought. We had the Maths Moment where DS came out utterly convinced that he'd failed but when he looked at the TSR answers he decided that he might have scraped enough marks for a C. It turned out to be an A.

Thanks ealing I think I'll ask her to pretend she's accompanying somebody on clarinet, that should send the message across as she knows she'd be put off if her piano teacher would stop to correct mistakes in the middle of an exam. Maybe it will work.

Not easy to correct fleur, but one thing that worked for us was asking DD to pretend she was playing with others; or with piano, she was the accompanist for a singer. Then she wouldn't be able to go back as it would knock the vocals out. I was only able to use this as she knew what it felt like when the accompanist was out of sync. It weirdly worked.

Foundout same here, first exams today, he has three, two French ones and a biology. Good luck to your dc too!

Thanks guys! Feeling better today, woke up at stupid o'clock and made the kids pancakes. I did join the GCSEs support thread but decided not to constantly post and read as I was freaking out even more.

On the sight reading subject, any suggestion of how to encourage dd to stop corrections and keep going even if she made a mistake? So say she needs to play and e flat and she played natural, the moment she realised she missed the flat she'll correct it which of course affects the rhythm.

well, dc1 has his first GCSE exam today. I have promised to drop him off at lunch time, as it's in the afternoon. He is quite calm about it.But forgot to remind dc2 about music practice, and dc3 just didn't have the time for it....

Fleur, I just keep smiling, keep calm (on the outside) and it does eventually finish! Last year I had GCSE DD and A level DS1 so this year seems a bit calmer. Oh and of course Mumsnet, we had/have a couple of brilliant support threads going.

I got an apology and a thank you from DD in July for putting up with her!

The control part comes out in lists, I organise everything I can!

. But we know better.

ealing just saw that! Not sure my dcs think I know anything about anything! 😀

Fleur you are just human like the rest of us and these are stressful times. Dd will be fine. You are doing all the right things with DS and he'll appreciate it in the end. Not sure my DS1 and I will still be talking to each other by the time he does his GCSEs!
Good luck all the dcs with exams and roll on summer holidays!

your children going through them (obviously) though I wouldn't be saying that if I were referring to music exams for stars like loose

Thank you Alex. You are right, the maturity required to play some pieces only comes as mine gets older. She's also playing parallel repertoire with having 2 teachers (highly conventional but agreed with both...another story), that is probably spreading her efforts too thinly. But, she wants to do the showy, non syllabus piece justice to her home teacher before she gets too sick to teach due to her failing health. Let's hope we can get Scene de Ballet over the line to concert standard for a change! It is a rather lovely piece.

Oh and well done also on the exam deferral, if if it's just a short reprieve to jumping grades

Fleur , to you and all you other non music exam parents undergoing GCSEs, ASs' and A levels etc...hang in there.

Oh Fleur, I feel for you. You can rest assured that you are millions time better than me, tonight I got home and was told that my daughter didnt get her costume for a school performance right(what costume?) then I found out she didnt wash her face in the morning because there isnt a face cloth(I threw a torn one last night and forgot to put one back). Then when we finished the bed time stories with the baby and she already had her Ortho-K glasses on we realised we havent had the school homework done then we had to do it. Just be able to climb to bed now. The fact that you care and be there and help him as much as you could then you have already done better than me. And similar to me you are non-musical and you sit in your daughter every lessons and help her with her practice then you again score better. I must say I organised everything during the day when I am at work so I have to do minimum when I am at home, including lessons, swimming etc. You are a great mom. And tears and tantrums blah blah blah, you havent seen me roar, sometimes it doesnt have anything to do with my kids.

Alex: hahaha, great news indeed! I so support 1 exam less(more savings for lessons and instrument). I was picking up my daughter yesterday and was just hoping to bump into either you or the Boy.

Trumpet, Double: these are very impressive progress in a short time, such an aspiration for me to learn.

Ines? What is Ines??? I meant 'ones' - 'next ones...

Anyway, I just read Fleur's post. Oh, Fleur, I'm sure you are not alone. Even the calmest person I know, and I'm from the country with full of Buddhists, have the moment like you with DD.

I don't know what to say, but please don't feel too bad. I'm sure DD understood and may actually be happy that her mom apologised. My mum didn't apologised at all! I think if she had apologised, even only once, I would have felt so much better.

On the exam front dd generally does extra pieces/studies up to about 2 months before the exam. She stopped having any extra work on top of the pieces around beginning of April if I remember right. She does use the sight reading books but that's because dd is a memoriser, she is great at it, she only needs to play a piece a couple of times and she's memorised it. While this is great from a performance point of view realistically it means she needs additional dedicated sight reading exercises otherwise she's rubbish at it.

In fact she's finished the grade 5 "improve your sight reading" and she's now doing it again. Plus the grade 5 specimen sight reading book. She is really good but for the life of me I can't get her to stop correcting herself and keep going. If she's made a mistake she'll correct it therefore the rhythm suffers. Suggestions?

But anyway the last exam he did was a year ago and we have no future plan for next Ines. Not sure if he will ever go back to the game... After all the madness of the auditions, we are having rather peaceful time this term. No exam, no audition, nothing!

Raspberry how do you keep sane? I am literally going from a state of "at least it will be over" to "omg this is the ACTUAL exam, no more chances to f...k up!!!". I am going from feeling sorry for him to feeling like I'd like to shake him up and shout "OMG YOU NEED TO REVISE MORE!!! ALL NIGHT! EVERY NIGHT! AND DAY!"

Obviously this is going on inside me, on the outside I send him nice texts from work telling him he shouldn't stress, it will be fine, try and relax, and I bake him cakes and make him pancakes for breakfast. 😳

What's worrying though is that I am taking it out on dd, for some reason the instinct and the need of being helpful is kicking in, obviously DS doesn't want me involved, therefore I have spent last night and tonight being extra "helpful" with dd's music practice. I am ashamed to say I made her cry tonight by telling her one of her pieces is not progressing and now I feel bad. I did apologise but I still feel bad. I don't know what got into me I think I'll go out for a walk tomorrow.

Sorry for the whining, I am a bit a lot of a control freak and I feel like I am out of control completely.

Trumpet DS's piano teacher is the same as yours. She never really just focused on exam pieces during those run-up periods. DS always had a few pieces to learn along side of his exam stuff all way through. That's why we probably didn't feel like we were working towards an exam at the time. Part of reason for her to throw DS with lots of new pieces was to help his sight-reading, as she told me later on. DS never used those sight-reading practice books actually. But I think he ended up doing something similar by managing his weekly homework given by the piano teacher.

to you raspberry and everyone else going through exams with theirs dcs

Fleur good luck to your DS, and to all those with academic exams.

DD starts her AS exams on Wednesday. This is my fifth consecutive exam season!