November Music Thread

[Wafflenose]

Let's have a new thread for November... I'm not sure if the old one will last long enough. This is a place to talk about music lessons, practice, exams and anything to do with learning instruments/ singing. We have beginners and advanced players of all ages.

I am mum to two girls - Goo (newly 11) - Flute, Recorder and Piano, and Rara (8) - Cello, Recorder, and one month of Clarinet so far. She won't put the clarinet down, so I think we've found The One.

Shaky what a relief. Good luck with results.
Gherkins can't help either sorry. The whole festival thing is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Fleur I know how you feel but it'll pass. We're all tired at the end of the day and our support sometimes just isn't perfectly toned because we're all human.

Sorry Gherkins, I'm well over the border and Eisteddfods are foreign territory for me.

Shaky: must be a massive relief to you, congratulation. I am being ambitious and hoping there could be a grade 8 day for us oneday. By then she will be on her own, just thinking of it makes me happy

Fleur: feel for you. Every day I am on the train home I plan what will be happening in the evening, how can I win(meaning 30-45mins proper focused practice). It rarely ever happens. For example, last night because she was too tired so bed at 8, no practice. Its so hard to be calm.

Well done Shaky! Bet you're so relieved! Next tranche of dates has come in for miniprada and school selection process 😬😬

We have certainly had our ups and downs with my supporting practise. As drummersmum says we are only human. I think that we can see where music can take our children and the opportunities it presents. It's how I met my husband of twenty-something years.
My children both love music and have had their moments of hating it on this run up to exams.
Miss 12 looks like she is going to get stuck into some serious technique. We have her results! She got 127. Haven't sent the comments yet.
Miss 10 is doing lots of fun stuff for the rest of the term and then ARSM is on the list for next year.

Evening all,I'm feeling quite screamy tonight. Ds has come home and decided that he's not going to practise his pieces but instead do a piece that his school music teacher has asked him to do for their winter concert. Don't feel I can say not to do it especially as we don't have a date for his audition yet. He keeps forgetting to use the bottom third of the bow for some reason.

On the plus side,he's working through his theory books. He finished one last night and has got straight onto the next one.

School homework has gone out of the window.

I need a drink!!

shaky 127! Many congrats to her.

Green I too use the journey back from work to write a plan for the evening's practice (which rarely starts before 19:30). Without a list of practice points/scales etc the evening here can get heated.

Shaky that's an amazing score. Many congrats.

Shakey Congratulations to your DD!

Congratulations Shakey, you can put your feet up for a while now.

Shakey

Congratulations to your dd, she's done really well.

Hello Gherkins,

I'm not sure about the one your teacher will mean but this is the one that we go to most years, although dd doesn't compete.
I would imagine the format would probably be the same, maybe not international and huge, but gives an idea.

international-eisteddfod.co.uk/

Well worth a vist folks, we love it.

Shaky well done to your DD, that is a fantastic result.

Prada good luck with the next selection part!

Thank you ladies for your support, much better tonight, in fact I put all the books she needed to do in front of her, went at the opposite corner of the room and left her to it. She could see I am trying to detach from her practice but she asked me to please sit next to her for her sight reading practice to tell her if she's playing them correctly. I did and all went well.

Green today it was 7:45 when I thought "we should start music practice" and all I could think was "can I just forget about it? Shall I leave it and have an early night?" But then luckily DD asked what time it is and decided it was music practice time.

She played one of her pieces so beautiful, now I understand what it means when people say "you can play a grade 2 piece at grade 5 level". She has a very easy piece, around grade 2-3 level (Bartok) that is just assigned for her to find it really easy but interpret all the dynamics, put her own interpretation on it, feel it and make it her own. It is her "fun piece". And she did. She plays all the markings beautifully and added her own fingerprint to it. It made me very proud to listen to it.

Fleur that is exactly what Goo is trying to do with her piano pieces. Each one (two pages usually) takes her 2-3 days to learn, and it's always memorised by then (lucky girl), then she spends two weeks getting it to the right speed, thinking about pedalling, balance, articulation and the performance. I think that if she can do all that in two weeks, the pieces are getting a bit easy for her now, but her scales and sight reading are still lagging behind. I think the teacher is hoping it will all catch up at some point, and that she will start with either Grade 4 or Grade 5 next year, but Goo has other ideas... no piano exams, ever. An exam right now would certainly kill her passion for it, so we'll see if the time is ever right. I think she was looking forward to being done with them really, with flute and recorder exams looking to be over and done with in around 18 months' time if we don't particularly bust a gut.

I have just done the music festival entry for me, my kids, all of my groups from the village school, a few private pupils, some duets and trios... 30 items and £208!!! This is excluding a couple I might enter through my main job (at the private school) and Rara's strings classes, which her teacher is taking care of. Fortunately, the village school is covering the group entries, and various parents have paid bits, so realistically I can deduct £85 from that figure.

Well done to your dd Shaky!

Well done to your DD Shakey. Hope you don't have to wait long for the other.

Still a bargain Waffle, compared to exam fees. Our Festival syllabus is just out so DS2 is planning entries.

I

Yes, it is really - the average cost was £6.00 - £6.50 per class.

Someone had a big day today and so excited and happy that she is now (finally) allowed to use ink pen...and there was an hour solid and focused practice. Well, I dont even know such thing exist!

Congratulations to her!

At our school, they can get them from the second half of Year 3 onwards... then they are removed every September and the kids have to earn them back. Every single year! So Goo is now 11, and only allowed to write in pencil until her new teachers (well, teachers of two months now) decide to 'assess' them! Crazy! If she'd been born two months prematurely, she'd be at secondary school now, and allowed to write with whatever she liked.

Waffle Goo is a clever girl saying no to exams. And well done to her memorising her pieces, DD is the same, memorises everything first time she plays it therefore she needs lots of separate sight reading practice, she is behind on that, grade 4 practice book at the beginning.

DD's "fun piece" is basically given to her to manage independently, her teacher has no input except telling her at the beginning when she would consider the piece performance ready. Then DD takes over and plays it to her when ready. This was assigned last week, she keeps them short so she can get satisfaction out of them as the other pieces are long term ones by the time they are perfect. The exam pieces and the other ones except the fun one do get scrutinised every lesson.

Well done to minigreen! I remember when DD got hers, she was ecstatic!

Oh nice minigreen! I didn't hear about DS' pen license till weels after he had been given it. Forgot to mention I want to write a book about girls and women's relationship with stationary.

Fleur I am so in love with your piano teacher!!!!!!

weeks no weels

Shaky - amazing score!

Green - ahh yes the ink pen. Exciting times! At our school you can then progress to the heady heights of the fountain pen!

Just google and it says it varies, every school has their own policy and eventually everyone writes by whatever they like. She was the first in the class so it was a massive grin, could never thought of her as a competitive child(or I have been ovetaken all the competitiveness of this household).

Memorising things too fast becomes our problem now(speaking of a photographic memory child). In the past it helps greatly(Eg. maths, theory in 2 months from Zero with much less effort than usual). Now when she grows up she needs to slowdown, absorbs and thinks in deep, for music...to feel it...(thats why we were told we murdered the 2 pieces we studied too fast, it could be a pass but that was it). For maths to understand the intuition, go beyond the concept and exploring different solutions. She could easily get frustrated if she doesnt "get" things as fast as in the past as she relies too much on her memory rather than "learn" thing.
Anyway, then come to our second child who is kinda opposite then I moan about her to my mom too(just today). I think I am just a moaner!