Spring 23 music thread

[thirdfiddle]

I saw some sunshine today so it's officially spring! Here's a new thread for all things musical.

With a nod to those who started the series, well before my young folk picked up an instrument or I braved the vipers of MN. This little corner is for support only, and bragging about your young folk's musical achievements is positively encouraged.

How are things looking for new year? Anyone new want to join us for a chat? Any lurkers want to delurk? All welcome from pre beginners to music college and beyond.

@herbaceous Fantastic!

@herbaceous that is such brilliant progress. I think learning one instrument must help another hugely. What will he want to do now with piano?

can I ask a question of those with kids at these levels? How long are the lessons your children are having?Dd has only just changed to 45 mins on flute and still has half an hour and then 20 minutes bassoon and voice respectively. She’s basically grade 8 on them all, though only has the exam done on flute.

No-one ever told us lessons should be longer but a relative who teaches piano now says he only ever teaches hour long lessons post grade five.

her mds place gives three hours a week of individual tuition but it is up to her HoD how it is split at new school, though with our input. Not sure what is best.

Dd has 45 on oboe which frequently over runs to an hour as it's her teacher's last lesson of the day. She has only 30 minutes on piano, her teacher would like it to be longer but it's so expensive and I don't think she would fit it into the timetable. It means she probably makes slower progress but that's fine. She's working towards grade 8 but has to do a lot of the work herself at home because the pieces are long by this point so he can't hear them all. Three hours sounds fantastic, especially as it will be spread out during the week which will make it easier to take things in. No advice really. I know dds oboe teacher would happily spend three hours a week with her! ( He often asks for videos in between times if they are working on something specific). Will it signal to them her priorities if she chooses different lengths, is that an easy decision to make?

Dd is g 7/8 piano and has a 45 min lesson although it's really an hour as it starts at 7.30 (am!) and her teacher's next one after that is 8.30. We only get charged for 45 mins though.

Cello (g6) is still 30 mins. I'm wondering if we should push that to 45 mins now she's above g5.

Voice (g4) is still 30 mins and will stay that way as that one's just a fun thing for her.

She has them all through school and it's a scheduling nightmare! One (voice) is a rotational lesson so she misses one timetabled lesson a week to go but now she's moving into year 10 we cant't do that. We're moving to 7.50am to get it in before school.

I'm sure your DD's new school will make it easier than that though and three hours of lessons sounds wonderful.

Thanks all- it sounds like a lot, but the standard is that for your first study you do two hours a week- so that means splitting the final hour between flute and voice. I can’t imagine anyone needing two hours a week of bassoon lessons but that is probably a failure of imagination on my part. Because she’s only been playing it three years it really doesn’t seem long since she could really only play it for ten minutes without being exhausted- but the pieces are so long for everything now.

her HoD has said he’s happy to consider and adjust- they seem to recognise she’s not really made an instrument choice yet (I think it is like in those Pullman novels
where your daemon hasn’t settled!) but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. I know the flute teacher will want more…

Ds started with 20 minute lessons at school for the first couple of years. When he left school and moved to a private teacher (he was about Grade 5 standard at that point) his lessons were 40 mins. After about 6 months he asked to increase to an hour (he was about Grade 6/7 ish by then.

Youngest dd could happily spend two hours on bassoon!! I guess they build stamina and the teacher will probably do a lot of talking to start with as they decide what bits of technique to change ( hopefully not everything at once!) Although it would be torture for the teacher as she doesn't talk much. Don't forget the dark arts of reed making - teacher can often have to spend a while scraping reeds for them and then once they are making their own it's worse. Double reeds have a whole other level of neurosis! Also secondary instruments - cor, pic and contra take up time. So exciting to hear about what it's going to be like!

great to hear such variation- it is hard to get much done in 20 mins I think especially if teachers run late. I agree timetabling in school is a nightmare @QueenMabby dd2 always used to get the tutor time slot at her school
but it means she has literally never been to an assembly. She reckons she hasn’t missed much!

@horseymum think dd2 is thinking back to the dark days of the pandemic. she was completely new to the bassoon and her teacher had nothing else on so would
very generously teach dd for hours … she would emerge exhausted…

dd does have more stamina now but lessons have always been very intense - the directive is ‘performance level air always’ - which means ‘no slacking on breathing’ and her lessons were early on Saturday mornings and she’s a lazy teen! And sometimes they’d spend half an hour on one bar…

I think it will be strange for her building up such an intense relationship with a new individual teacher. She has met new bassoon teacher but we haven’t. First male teacher ever too.

not sure what happens with reeds. Current teacher offering to post them for now- she’s always made dd’s for her. She’s a bargain compared with howarths and uses much prettier thread colours.

She will have to learn for herself eventually I guess though she has definitely now met professional bassoonists who don’t make their own…

Dd has never had a picc lesson- though she is the picc player for her wind band. How is your dd getting on with the cor anglais- dd says the girl in her wind band found it too difficult so there is no cor player at present!

Re lesson length, think DS’s are 30 mins, due to timetabling at school. He gives very precise things he wants DS to work on away from lessons though. Which sometimes he does!

And yes - I think being a chorister does hardwire musicality into you. Chord progression, structure etc just seems baked in.

@minisnowballs - last year dd was in morning registration once a week!

I'm already starting to schedule in what she's got on. She's moving up to chamber choir (replaces girls' choir) and chamber orchestra (in addition to string orchestra and sinfonia) so much scheduling required!

Excitingly school are putting on a music tour next summer which we've said dd can go on. A week abroad with musicy people playing music - bliss!

DD has 45 minutes on piano and is just starting on G8, 40 minutes on singing (also G8) and 40 minutes on cello and clarinet (both G6). She also has an additional 45 minutes on aural on an adhoc basis. The 40 minute lessons are in school so that’s what everyone gets - though some of the afternoon slots are only 35 minutes but they rotate them so no one misses out.

I wish DS could have longer lessons at school, but each period is an hour, so they schedule two music lessons per period.

He’s starting year 20 next month, so I guess it has to be balanced with GCSEs!

Wow @yodaforpresident i thought my dd was balancing a few instruments (she’s dropped cello thankfully) - how on earth does your dd fit it all in!?

Congratulations @herbaceous - fantastic result!!

Re lesson length - I had 45 minutes until I went to conservatoire, where the lessons are 1 hour, so much more than that for school children doesn’t really seem necessary to me. Quality is better than quantity!

That’s a real issue @minisnowballs as she needs to practise more at the higher grades and she also does LAMDA at G6 level and MT productions. Personally I suspect that cello will be put on the back burner / is it even possible to move though grades slower and still keep making progress?

Realised I said DS is going into year 20 next term! I do of course mean year 10.

Piano may have to just tread water for a bit. He also French horn and viola lessons at school, organ lessons once a fortnight or so, and wants to have some singing lessons too. He's in various theatre things both in and outside school...

So impressed with all this scheduling. Dd gave up lamda after grade 4 as it felt like she didn’t have enough time either in or out of school- and I’m afraid that for her, with cello, the answer was no @yodaforpresident - it just slipped below everything else and she stopped practicing it.

She does still play it in church - and the pieces was doing in lessons were around grade 7- but they were never polished or finished. So in the end it has been the first thing to go.

but she is just about to go into year 10- so older, I think.. she does still do drama and finished her bronze d of e etc, but she’s busier than I would like her to be.

@minisnowballs the scheduling is tricky and the cello teacher is already unhappy that she took up clarinet - I would be sad to see her stop though. It’s good that your DD still has the opportunity to play in church, so it could be something she looks at when she has more time in the future? My DD is just about to go into Y8 so she still has a couple of years before the schoolwork really ramps up so we will see.

LAMDA - she only does one grade per year now so I don’t think we can go much slower there….

She has tried out the organ @herbaceous and is keen to start it too but not until G8 on the piano is done.

@SweetforOrchestra that's good to hear - I do wonder how much DD would take in with longer lessons - some of her teachers can do an extraordinary amount with half an hour, and she needs time to put those things into practice in between! 45 minutes seemed like a good compromise.

@yodaforpresident I'm sure she'll always benefit from having done cello, for tuning and just understanding of how string instruments work, but I'm not sure she'll ever take it further. No need to be a one-man band and her new school will have such exceptional cellists of course (at her current one she is the best they have) so she'll never play it in anything. It is such a lovely instrument to learn though, so I'm quite sad!

Back home after an amazing holiday here but realising just how much there is to do to get DD2 ready for new school. Then there's DD1's GCSE results and rooms to get ready and documentation to do in readiness for the arrival of our Ukrainian guest (who will get her GCSE results along with DD1). All before September 6. Eek!

I did three instruments through GCSEs and A levels and it was a bit of a stretch to fit practice time in around everything else. I think four instruments would definitely have finished me off! My DS's piano teacher only offers 30 or 45-minute lessons; an hour is a long time to focus consistently and also a long time to play for, depending on the instrument. I could easily manage an hour-long piano lesson but I did tend to flag towards the end of my hour-long clarinet lessons.

That must have been quite the workload @StuntNun! I’m not musical in anyway so didn’t have that pressure.

I think that it really depends on the teacher as to how longer lessons work. Our old piano teacher used to struggle to fill 30 mins but his technique was mainly to listen to each piece once and point out maybe one thing 🙄. For the last year on grade 7 she has had 45 mins and they've been really intense and she didn't really think she needed any more as they got through a lot and there's a question as to how much more she could take in. From Sept she will have 1 hour with her new teacher which feels about right on piano grade 8. Also piano stamina doesn't seem as harsh as woodwind!

She's been having 1 hour violin lessons for the past year too- but that was mainly to make it worth the violin teacher travelling to us. She is excellent at breaking the lessons into sections though so it never feels too much, so they'll spend some time on a study and learning a particular technique and then another chunk on pieces etc. i was worried it might be too much for her (she was 9 when they started on this, but it's worked really well).

DS has 30 min lessons on both instruments - not sure how much that's because CYM don't push longer ones as harder to schedule or if he just doesn't need longer yet. Piano plays grade 6 pieces comfortably and flute grade 6/7.

DD's piano teacher covers all kinds in her one hour. Mostly pieces but up u til she took it, she would weave theory in to every lesson. Scales, arpeggios etc are done every lesson. She is also an absolute perfectionist (in a lovely way) so will drill down on the pieces.

In lockdown we used to send her recordings and she'd send me these hilarious voice notes saying things like "MiniMabby that was beautiful. Just one or two little things. In bar one...." they'd be sooo long!

@QueenMabby dds teacher is like this now- he'll ask for a video then send really detailed feedback. He's very particular! But she thrives on it.

Dd too. She's crushed by harsh criticism but her teacher's so ridiculous with her comments "minimabby - you sound like you're playing in a fish tank" (smudgy pedal) or writing funny things on her music to remind her to do things they've spoken about that dd is not upset by it.

Dd is also a perfectionist. What made her want to switch cello teachers was that he "wasn't aspirational enough" for her. He was happy with good enough and she's just not.