March Music Thread

[Wafflenose]

Here you are - a new thread for March! I can't believe we are now up to 700+ posts each month. Thank you all.

I am Waffle, Mum to two girls. I have Goo (11), short for Kajagoogoo, which is 'short' for Kaj, which means... well, that would be telling! Her younger sister is Rara (8) - Rara is what she used to call herself when she was learning to speak. Goo plays the flute, recorder and piano. Rara plays the cello, recorder and clarinet. We have Grade 7 Flute and Grade 1 Clarinet booked for the end of this month. I think we might have Grade 3 Cello and Grade 4 Piano coming up next term. Goo is off to secondary in a few months, and I really don't know if she will ever manage to fit in her last couple of recorder exams. I'm all for saving money though.

I will try my best to read everything and follow this month. Last month's thread moved so fast!!

I think it was psychological clutch as we only play couple of pages pieces, the other children must play 4-5 pages long piece(except we havent known the piece that well which is possible). I will ask her to try without the book at the end of her practice, before the performance. I will watch it again this weekend with my daughter too, she will be fascinated about it I am sure.

Fleur: how nice, we were brave ourself to meet up with few violinists in the concerts that we went (begging the security to allow us to get through then usually they tell us where to wait and the wait was ...long). The question we are usually asked back when we say that we play violin too was "oh, nice! Who is your teacher?". By then I knew having a good/great teacher for violin is the key to success.

Kutik, i am very amazed with your son especially when he only has lesson at school. We used to have group lesson at school and it wasnt great(to say the least). Almost everyone in her class has dropped, couple are still doing it havent started with g1 after these 2.5 yrs. I hope mine could take the lessons from school in Secondary as by then her technique has overcome the very basic phase and I shouldnt have any involvement at all(hearing teacher moans about no-practice etc)

We didnt hate scales so much until g5 piano last term ha ha ha. However I must say scales are good for this(my) child to learn that even if something is really boring however its needed so you just have to keep your head down and learn it. Now, if she wants to practise the wonderful pieces...fine... do 2 scales first(if it was piano g5 then probably ...5 scales first instead).
I wrote my teacher a long email about what we saw last weekend with our local festival. He told us a story of him came from a less advantaged background and loved music so much. He eventually made it to London Royal school of music with a scholarship and has been in London since. His income is mainly from teaching at a weekend music school, students( like us) and play in a couple of churches.

Green I must say I AM amazed with your very smart DD!

I wouldn't have let him take up violin if it had not been at school. When he started a long stubborn campaign to let him learn violin he had already started piano so travelling to another teacher during weekdays seemed too much to me (he was hugely involved in sports back then). Now I understand how much he loves violin so I don't mind a bit of journey if needed. But he loves the teacher and loves being a school violinist so I'm happy to keep this arrangement until he moves to secondary. I'm not sure what happens when he starts secondary. The school he is most likely to end up with has no music so we have to seek outside school lessons...

I will second Ferguson's recommendation. It was very good. I was telling DS1, in his first year of Physics at uni, about some of it, and he said they had covered that in a lecture a couple of weeks ago.

Greenleave, they may ask about your teacher because -

1. literally all professional musicians teach - they may hoped to hear a familiar name
2. music world is soooo small-they all seem tol know each other
3. orchestras nowadays have a rotation of self-employed musicians who move from show to show rather than be residents of a one particular orchestra, hence see (2) above
4. I personally think that there is no fixation on teacher's names in this country as England is good at making orchestra musicians but not soloists (correct me if I am wrong). It is countries like USA or Russia (perhaps Germany too?) where it counts - as they are major suppliers of soloists....Few names immediately jump into mind - Ivan Galamian, Dorothy Delay, Itzhak Perlman in USA, Peter Stolyarsky, David Oistrakh, Zakhar Bron in Russia. Just googled- Nigel Kennedy ended up in Julliard School-student of Dorothy Delay - I wonder - would he become an international star if he stayed in the UK?

Have you heard of the most recent UK child prodigy Leia Zhu? She is a student of Zakhar Bron (who is actually Swiss resident now :))

Memory playing - we play from memory too.... don't like it.... bad for sight reading plus she starts looking around whilst playing and loosing concentration.... but have no idea how to fix it....
On the other hand-our third piece for the forthcoming exam - teacher said-make her to listen to it for few times every day - she will learn it by ear quicker than by music... And she did! She looked at music of course, but remembered the rhyme.... So life is never perfect, you have one skill but loose on another....

rhythm, mistype!

Only - Nicola Benedetti trained in the UK i think? and of course many cellists have :) But i don't know enough about these things to have a view, i must admit.

Talking of Leia Zhu - here is her Meditation for miniPrada given the topic a few days ago
www.leiazhu.info/with-piano

Stringchild, oh no, I am not saying that there are no stars here, of course not! There will be occasional ones here and there, but as a rule... We are not a mass production of classical stars here unlike few other countries-this is what I meant. But of course with the competition like Musician of the year, etc-there are chances for a stardom...
And I was talking about violin, to be honest I am not that familiar with the other instruments, we may have have a good school for some instruments, for sure :)

Yep, read my post, it was quite late already and I did not specify violin :))
Saying that I read that it is common for all instruments, but again -I am not into other instruments therefore rely only on one source of information I read which may be incorrect of course ;)

Out 5 found playing from memory very hard (probably due to lack of practice but also poor short term memory I suppose too perhaps). (Singing exams are all from memory by the way - one reason one of mine stopped after passing grade 7 although I am sure if he sang the pieces every day with me for a few months he would remember them). I was very impressed by the winner at the competition my son came second in last week who played so well from memory. (Actually my main skill is sightsinging - I always seem to be really good in all early choir rehearsals because I tend to sight sing better even than professional singers... and then my "brilliance" wears off once we hvae had a few rehearsals and others know the line. it may be because of practice but also perfect pitch as if I lose my place I can find it again absolutely as it were without reference to the other parts or even the notes we were just singing. It's a pretty useless skill except in the aural tests of where a key has modulated too. In fact it's a nuisance as if a piece is sung a semi tone down it's really hard as I'm having to transpose it and years of accompanying my 3 brass playing sons has not made it get easier either.

Really can't keep up at the moment but would avoid drum pad and go with the Roland that drummers linked to. DS1 has similar at home and uses the acoustic kit at school.
Coco - we have form in this house for passing despite scales disaster so definitely don't think it's time to worry!
For fans of Helen Czerski and the sound waves programme, you might like her Storm in a Teacup - the physics of everyday life - Minigreen I'm looking at you!

"Who is your teacher?" usually comes up very early in any conversation, right after "have you come far?". It may differ in other areas of the musical world but brass is certainly a place where the old concept of patron and protege is alive and well. A Big Name teacher is known (and is known by) people who matter in that sphere of music. They thought that you were good enough to teach, they are lending you the benefit of their name and they will benefit from your name if you go on to be any good. They have walked the path you're starting on and can advise you on everything from contest repertoire to who doesn't get on with who because of something that happened twenty years ago.

When people talk to me about DS they will refer to "that lad of yours" because I'm his parent but he is spoken of to his teacher in the same way. I don't know whether having a big name teacher makes you a better player but you do most definitely benefit from their connections.

Dd has got 4 minor scales that she doesn't seem to conquer, she forgets the fingering everyday and needs to be reminded. Oh well still time, hopefully she'll manage to memorise them by June.

Thanks for advice about drums loose and drummers. Will think really hard about space!

Re: playing from memory - my DC are fiends at that. They would remember everything after a couple of weeks. Weirdly DS1 would memorise piano pieces but not cello. DS2 memorises everything. I can memorise about a couple of lines... Once I memorise one whole page of a Rachmaninoff prelude (the thing was 6 pages long). That was the height of my achievement.

Tiger I sight-read too. And I can't transpose. I don't have perfect pitch, but once I "tuned" my ears I can't easily change key ... Maybe it's a question of practice?

Icould - that is interesting; sometimes i worry that i don't 'do' the best for DD as i have no clue how the music world works :(

NeverEver yes I forgot to say, that is the other weird thing dd does, memorises all her piano pieces but not her clarinet ones, which are much straight forward being only one line of music to read and only 4-5 lines of music compared to 2-3 pages of piano music.

I think it is the visual impact, she can see her fingers playing the piano, not on the clarinet. She will eventually memorise the clarinet piece but not as easy as the piano. She needs to play a bar a couple of times and she memorised it.

I must say I dislike this "connection" business... But we don't know anybody and we don't care.

Fleur It is strange, isn't it?

But I would imagine that practically, it's more useful to memorise piano pieces than one-line pieces because you can squeeze more music into the one-line ones and you wouldn't need to turn pages quite so often. Sometimes I memorise a few bars here and there just so I can turn pages at the convenient places.

Yes much more useful to memorise piano pieces, I agree.

I don't know anything about "who's your teacher" question. First because dd was with her teacher when she met the pianist (and a composer of the first works which were divine) and secondly because I don't actually care about the politics of the music industry just yet.

I believe that no amount of connections will make you a famous pianist (or musician) if you are a crap player, and if you are a great player you can make the connections once you decide you want a musical career and you attend a music school, concerts, and so on.

I must confess I am not interested just yet in that side of things as dd is just 9.

Just to clarify-I am interested in how music world works for its own sake, not because of my dc :). As I said before, we have certain problems which don't even let us to enroll to JD or apply to NCO, let alone plan grand music career :) Therefore the interest is only theoretical at the moment :)
As for connections....yes, I think it is a combination of talent and teacher's connections (or parents money). We parents tend to believe that talent can make its way but I think it is rather exception than a rule.
Sorry for being a bit cynical :)))

Ds always performs without music. He once had to memorise 28 pieces for 3 days workshop and did it without a problem. When asked how he did that he said he would memorise them visually. So he turns the pages and follows the music he can see in his mind. He is good at finding patterns too so it may also help memorising things.

As with 'who is your teacher', we were asked a couple of times in the past. There was always a awkward pause then conversation moved on. Both his teachers (piano and violin) are not known at all. I'm seeing them as a hidden gem!

only I'm equally cynical - I hope that talent would make its own way but I certainly don't expect it to!

Never 😜👍

My ds finds having music in front of him can be more of a distraction (so prone to make mistakes). He keeps music near him when he practises as he makes a note along the way. But he wouldn't take them for performance. He seems to play better without.

The formula of connections and money on top of talent and luck doesn't seem to be for music only I'm afraid!