Summer Term Music, Musicians and Music Exams thread

[Wafflenose]

Hello again everyone! I know not everyone in the UK has gone back to school yet, and some of you are overseas, but term here starts today, so it's time for a new thread. Please post away about your children, your own musical studies or any questions about music exams/ learning an instrument generally. We have a helpful and experienced bunch of people here to answer queries or reassure you.

I have MiniWaffle, who is 9, and BabyWaffle who is 6. Mini has passed Grade 5 Recorder and Grade 4 Flute, and also plays some trumpet, piano and ukulele. Baby has passed Grade 1 Recorder and Initial Cello, and tinkers with the piano (when it's not in the repair shop...)

This term for exams, we have Grade 3 Theory (Mini) - as a warm-up for Grade 5 which will hopefully take place next year - and Grade 1 Cello (Baby). Both in June. I am doing Grade 2 Xylophone for the NCO Parents' Challenge! We have been challenged to learn an instrument unrelated to our proper ones, and I'm really a clarinettist.

Dd loves scales . She also loves the aural part of the exam as apparently (her teacher says) she has a natural ability for it. Got maximum in her aural and really good comments about it.

She hates sight reading though. Not sure how she will do in the future exam, she got 17 last time which is a pass mark but not her strong point.

We are fighting memorising now, she is really good at it which is good on one hand but on the other she ends up not reading music. She knows her notes but she only reads them once and then memorising it.

Even worse if her teacher is playing a passage for demonstration she is memorising it and that's that, no music reading.

Any advice?

Hi Fleur - my dd is the same; aural is very natural for her but she considers sightreading as the work of the devil :). Playing in lots of ensembles has helped a lot. Also building It Into practice, not just as excerpts but pieces too - I found making her slow down is bery effective as she was trying to sight read at performance speed which is rather ambitious! She tends to be note perfect but sloppy on rhythms.

chauffermummy That's not an uncommon profile at all, but does clearly show the areas that she needs to develop with her teacher before next time. I know of a little boy who got a merit for Grade 4 singing when he was 8 or 9, having just scraped through the aural (I was teaching him piano at the time, and his parents asked me to help with the aural for his singing exam) but scoring only 9/21 for sight singing! They moved away after that, but I would hope his teacher worked hard on those areas before putting him in for the next grade.

My understanding is that at grade 3 she should be able to sight read grade 1 pieces. She can do that very slow but I don't think she is anywhere near sight reading grade 1 pieces with confidence and in Rythm.

Her teacher is doing her best not to demonstrate unless she really has to and she is asking her to sight read new pieces in every lesson but it is sometimes so slow that an examiner would probably kill himself with boredom. Mind you, she sight reads grade 3 level repertoire which I assume will make her find grade 1 level easy...

We'll see, I think next exam will be the C session so there is still time to improve. But I don't think she'll ever like it or better, not hate it.

She'll get better. Every time she plays a new piece, she is sight reading after all. I'm glad she is loving the new piano (and I liked the bit about hugging the old one!)

Thank you for the reassurance Waffle! It is playing constantly at the back of my mind as it would be a shame to knock her over for it but being so young she doesn't understand the need to practice it.

I spend my evenings repeating "look at the music, read the music" as even when she does mistakes she can hear them and instead of looking up at the music she is working out the right note by ear.

I'd get her a fun book of way too easy pieces for the summer (along the lines of Really Easy Jazzin' About or What Else Can I Play - Grade 1, and just casually leave them lying around...

Fleur I think volume of pieces learnt has a lot to do with this, and that students who move up quickly through the difficulty levels are more likely to find that sight reading lags behind. This is particularly true on piano as sight reading is objectively more difficult due to having two lines to read simultaneously, so it requires a higher volume of practice.

My dd is very, very good at sightreading on guitar and sax - I've seen her sight read grade 4 and 5 rockschool exam pieces almost perfectly, and she could easily sight read the sax pieces she played for her recent exam (grade 4 ish) at a decent tempo. She also graduated top of her theory class with full marks in the note-reading exam.

But on piano - she is rubbish! She'd struggle to pass grade 2/3 sightreading. The problem is that she's never played the necessary volume of easy pieces - she either improvises/ plays by ear, or she works on much harder pieces which she commits to memory.

The answer, if your dd is willing, is to play lots of easier pieces. My DD has no interest in doing this as the things she aspires to play are either complex, or aren't written down anywhere!

I'll give it a try with easier pieces. She loved The Giant is coming from grade 1 but it wasn't her chosen piece as she liked another piece better in that section so I'll see if she agrees to give it a go at learning it herself over the summer period.

The truth is there doesn't seem to be enough time, by the time we get home, have dinner and she practices her piano (what her teacher asked her to do) there is only enough time to do a bit of mathletics and read her book.

But over the summer I may convince her grandparents to stay at our house some days (she will go to theirs) and she may have a chance to pick up a book and play that way.

Fleur It will definitely help DD to play other pieces independently over the holidays. Maybe the secret is to find music she doesn't already know as she is so good at working things out by ear? According to my piano teacher, a lot of children find sight reading difficult in the early grades and he uses flash cards - you can get them off amazon. What he does is to play games e.g. snap - if the two notes match by letter name - or does a timed test to see how quickly they can recognise them, aiming to get faster and faster. You can start by just showing the note and asking them to play it on the piano and then speed up how fast you show the cards. The ones I've got have key signatures as well!

Fleur At 15 Ds is a good sightreader but he didn't start off that way. His teacher would play a new piece for him before they started looking at it and the result was that he "couldn't" play any piece that he hadn't already heard. He flat out refused to look at the dots. We fed this back to his teacher and then he found that he was having to do more work with new pieces. His attitude to sight reading changed, once he had to do it he found that he could do it.

Thank Loose I'll look for some flash cards and try to use them at home in a fun way. And yes, I'll get her to play stuff she didn't hear before.

Ishouldbe dd's teacher tries not to play much to her, she played the pieces once so she can choose the ones she likes or she plays a passage she may find hard just to demonstrate. She knows she's good at memorising so while she says it is great skill to have it does play against her sight reading skill.

I am not worried as she does know the notes and intervals (up/down) but she is slowish at it which means she can't keep a rythm.

Hopefully as she gets on higher grades she'll get better at it more so as she'll be older and understand the purpose of practising sight reading.

G5 violin now done for myself and DD. Suffered from bad nerve and had worse than usual bouncy bow... Hoping to pass with 110 or above. DD should hopefully do better than that. It will be bittersweet (mainly sweet) to get beaten fair and square by her. I'm so happy it is over! Best of luck to all adults and DCs still doing exams.

Just heard that DD who did ABRSM piano grade 2 got a Pass - 118 marks. Haven't had the breakdown yet.
It was only 6 months since she did Grade 1 and got Distinction - 138 marks.
We are really pleased that she got a very solid pass given the shortish time span - of course would have been nice to scrape into a Merit, but hey ho!
We are now going to have a break from exam pieces (although will be on Grade 3 scales) and won't be looking at another exam until this time next summer.

Congrats to everyone else on their results. I'm sure the hard work pays off not just in terms of their musical achievement, but also in lots of other areas of life too.

Many congratulations Chocolatewombat, that's an excellent result! Good luck to WhereShallWeGo - grade 5 is very impressive!
Well, Ds2 has just done his grade 2 piano and admits he was afflicted by nerves (I could tell in the warm-up!) so we will have to see. At least he put in really solid practice in the last month, so he was able to keep going and he cheered up enormously after his treat of a chocolate muffin!

Chocolatewombat I am adopting Wafflenose's line of "success starts at the pass mark", there's never going to be a time where it matters whether you got D/M/P at grade 2. It matters that you've got a secure grounding for the next stage and that's in the bag now.

Whereshallwego we did a combined father and son G6 brass exam (same day but different instruments). I swore that they were never doing it again because the level of competition in the run up to the exam was fierce. At G6 my husband could rely on 30 years of playing plus G6 theory and on the day he got the highest score of any of the pupils entered by my son's teacher. My son was unable to take into account that he had only been playing for four years and was a theory refuser and although he didn't get that many points less than his father he still saw his merit as a failure. I hope you both get a good result and a better outcome than we had.

Great to hear someone passing it on, Ishould. Very true.

I can't remember if I said, but I had 11 pupils doing Recorder exams the other week. They got 4 passes, 6 merits and 1 distinction. Last week, I had a Grade 1 clarinet with ABRSM. This week, I have another Grade 1 clarinet, two Grade 2 flutes and a Grade 2 piano. And next week, a Grade 6 clarinet. Not the most distinguished bunch ever, but hopefully they will all pass.

Great news for Mini today (who is now not so mini, as she is 9, nowhere near puberty but already up to my bottom lip). She re-auditioned for South West Music School last month, played averagely, had a great interview... and we were told her sound isn't great. So imagine my surprise when the letter arrived today saying that not only has she got back in, but she is skipping the Feeder stage entirely and going straight to Feeder Plus, with a mentor, and a budget for lessons. She needs some - she has me for Recorder (not even lessons - she teaches herself the pieces I suggest!), her godmother for Flute (which we are happy with right now) and is trying to teach herself the piano again. I don't want her to be entirely focused on music, especially as it isn't what she wants to do as a career. Mini has taken care of this herself though, by signing up for Chess, Art and Netball clubs at school next term. To add to Choir, Orchestra, Recorder Group, Folk Group, SWMS and NCO. So music still wins right now!

Wow well done MiniWaffle - that's fantastic and what a great scheme to provide mentors and lessons. She should be really proud of herself, and with NCO too. How are the purple patches?

And well done you too - that's a lot of exams!

Thank you! SWMS means we won't ever have to think about driving to a Junior Dept (ie Cardiff) every Saturday, which is good. Mini wants to do it all, but is apprehensive. She overthinks everything.

To my surprise, the purple patches ran to 17 pages!! She ended up playing for 5.5 hours on Saturday - 2.5 hours going through about half of them in detail (the easy half!!) and 3 hours at Regionals. Many are not too bad, but she's procrastinating about practising the difficult ones. How are your DD's?

Miss 8 actually loved scales - until this grade (6) where she has to learn melodics AND harmonics. Now she sees that actually they can, once committed to muscle memory, conspire against you. Her minor arpeggios want to turn into diminished sevenths. Her melodics want to change into harmonics in the second octave. It's driving her mad. Fortunately she has over 8 weeks to iron out the kinks. She does know all her scales but not effortlessly yet. All the melodics are a notch slower; she hesitates before playing so she can make sure her fingers are going to behave!

Miss 11 has started her grade 8 scales now the new syllabus is out. She doesn't like hates scales. I've told her and explained how they work. I've shown her all my Taffanel and Gaubert flute studies (in all the keys) and exercises journaliers - and tell her how lucky she is that she doesn't have to do many.
She remains unconvinced.

Receiving email from his teacher that DS(9) got his G7 violin 142. He got G6 piano 134 last term, G5 theory 95 autumn term. What a brilliant year of music. Very proud of him.

Waffle - slow start for DD as nco on Sunday was quite a trek into hot London; but looks like lovely pieces. Need to get dd's wind-playing stamina up before the course somehow or I fear she will be shattered by day 3.

Bettertochange - wow what a great year and a fantastic violin result. Hope DS is pleased!

wow, some fantastic achievements being shared by you all, well done to all the DCs (and parents for doing what you have to do!).

Junior school era over for us, see you all next term!

Bettertochange, what a fantastic set of results, as you say it was a brilliant year for him.

Wafflenose what great news for Mini (the audition, not the 17 pages of music homework). Do they find/recommend the teacher or do you have to do that yourself?

I am beyond pleased that the group DS is with don't get any music in advance of the course - it doesn't give me something else to nag about.

Well done for all the fantastic achievements of musical DCs! You must all be very proud!

Dd started one of her grade 3 pieces last week and she enjoys it, it is one of the alternatives which she really liked. I can't wait to see if she'll be able to memorise this one also as it is of course a longer piece compared to what she did until now.