Sorry!
We have had to cancel the half term special musical workshop “Heroes and Legends” due to other commitments.
Instead, why not come to a pre-Christmas “piano party” - on a more informal scale then the larger Summer concert, but also involving fun, food and drink, and playing to an audience of your friends and family.

Adult players for pleasure party date: December 5th!

Younger learners party date: December 12th!

Little Missenden Festival

“England’s best-kept secret festival”

I would like to recommend that you check out the programme for the Little Missenden festival this year which has five outstanding and different visiting pianists this year. Most concerts take place in the lovely setting of the church of St John the Baptist, Little Missenden, a small Saxon-cum-Norman building with a fine acoustic.

For full listings and to book visit:
http://www.little-missenden.org/

"Theory is cool" pages are growing!

I have produced some web pages to help with the ABRSM Theory tests at Grade 5 and above.
These pages are available at http://www.piano4t.co.uk. Follow the links to the aural pages at “Learning to listen” or to the theory pages at “Theory is cool”

The theory pages are designed to help you to:
x recognise keys and scales,
x create harmonisations of melodies,
x understand rhythm and metre
x access a dictionary of musical ‘jargon’

The aural pages are designed to help you to:x plan your listening, x get more from what you hear, x better understand the music you play x hear great performances of piano repertoire

October workshop

Unfortunately we have had to cancel the ‘Heroes and Legends’ workshop which was planned for the October half term.

We hope to run a similar event in the future, but our other commitments would have prevented us from giving this the preparation time it deserved.

We apologise for any disappointment.

Exam successes

Congratulations are due to the following:

Cristina B who passed Grade 3 Piano
Ben M who passed Grade 2 Piano with Merit
Sophie H who passed Grade 2 Jazz Piano
Bryony C who passed Grade 1 Piano

Walk with the stars

I am doing the walk with the stars event on June 20 in aid of St Francis Hospice. Please do consider sponsoring me for this event by clicking on the badge above or going to the event page here!

Exam successes

Congratulations to all those who have been successful in piano and theory exams this Spring:
Romy, Isobel, Sophie, Lucy and Isabelle

Date set for next pupil concert!

I hope that as many students as possible will feel able to play at the summer soiree on June 19th 2009

7.00 pm

The theme will be Time and Space

Wycombe Music festival events

MUSICAL EVENTS FOR MAY 2009


WYCOMBE ARTS FESTIVAL – Tel: 01494-512000
www.wycombeartsfestival.org.uk


Fri. 8 May 7.30 p.m. Gypsy Fire Swan Theatre £10
Latin American and European Gypsy Jazz Guitar

Sat.9 May 1 p.m. Vitae Drummers Free
Traditional West African rhythms, songs and dances

Sat. 16 May 4 p.m. Noah – a musical for children All Saints H.W.
Children to take part in animal procession during show

Sun. 24 May 7.30 p.m. City of London Sinfonia Swan £12-19
John Lill – piano children free

Family concerts at the Barbican and Southbank

The following are warmly recommended:
SOUTHBANK CENTRE – Tel: 0871 663 2500 www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Fri. 8 May 7 p.m. Peter and the Wolf Royal Festival Hall £12-45

Sat. 9 May 11.30 a.m. Philharmonia Family Music Day Queen Elizabeth Hall £9/£5
Tour through Europe. Free craft & percussion workshops at 10 and 10.30 am. Concert ticket allows you to book for one workshop

Sat.16 May 11.30a.m. London Philharmonic Orchestra Royal Festival Hall £8-14 (adult)
Funharmonics Family Concert £4-7 (children) Fisticuffs and Fairies

Sat.20 June 2.30p.m. The Little Mermaid – 4+ yr olds £12/£9
Play with music and puppetry

BARBICAN – 020 7638 4141 www.barbican.org.uk

Sun.31 May 2.30p.m. LSO Discovery Family Concert £7/£4
‘Global Express- - for 7-12 yr olds

Fri.5 June 7.30 p.m. Evgeny Kissin £15-65
music by Prokofiev and Chopin

ROYAL ALBERT HALL – 020-7589 8212 www.royalalberthall.com

Sun. 26 July 11 a.m. Free Family Prom

Family concerts at the Wigmore Hall

The following are warmly recommended:

Sat.23 May 11 .a.m. Giddy Goat Action-packed musical story about facing fears and making friends – 5+

Sat.13 June 10.30a.m. Ideal Spaces, Ideal Places – 11-16 yr olds
Exploring relationships between art and music

Sat.20 June 10:15a.m. The Buzz: Family Workshop for 5+ yr olds Bee stung with amazement: composition workshops,instrument making, play-me-a-doodle art activities and instrumental demonstrations by members of the orchestra

Sat.27 June 10.30a.m.Musical Landscapes for 6+ yr olds

Earth hour

From melting glaciers to increasingly intense weather patterns, we know that climate change is already impacting life on our planet.
On Saturday, March 28, 2009, at 8:30 pm, piano4t will take part in Earth Hour—the world’s largest global climate change event. By simply turning out all non-essential lighting for one hour we will join tens of millions of concerned citizens throughout the world in calling for action to save our planet for future generations.

We’d like to encourage you to join in with this important and inspiring effort.

Led by the World Wildlife Fund, more than 50 million people in 370 cities around the world took part in Earth Hour last year. The lights went out at Sydney’s Opera House, Rome’s Coliseum, the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. Even the Google homepage went dark for the day.
This year, Earth Hour will be even bigger. In Britain cities large and small have said they’ll participate with more signing up daily. They will join international cities such as Beijing, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, London, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rome, and Toronto.

To get a better sense of the magnitude and inspiring nature of the event, take a moment to watch WWF’s video about Earth Hour 2009 by visiting www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjWD8pbK5t8.

Participating in Earth Hour is easy, fun and absolutely free. To get more information and to sign up to for Earth Hour 2009, just visit

Music - a means to an end?

That's it - I have finally had enough of the Mozart effect!

I'm afraid I have very little fellow feeling left for those who say that they encourage the study of music because it improves literacy/ spatial reasoning/ memory. One young parent today told me how great it was that my son studied tap dance because it was so good for building numeracy skills. Hmmm, it is always quite difficult to stop the lad dancing, but place a maths book anywhere near him and he'll high step it away pretty quickly. He goes to dance lessons because he loves it, and that's good enough for me!

I think it's time to put those classical music for kids CDs away and start doing something musical - singing, moving and playing - just for the love of it, and not as a means to an end.

Snow days

How fortunate to have a day off school. Try to add an extra 20 minutes to your practice time every day. Here are some ideas:

- if you are learning a new scale, try to improvise in that key for three minutes

- play a duet or accompany a sibling or friend who sings or plays another instrument - ensemble playing is a great way to develop sight reading and a good sense of rhythm

- photocopy a piece you think you know, cut the copy up into bar-sized chunks, and jumble them up; see if you can play any bar, any time, without too much trouble

- see if you can arrange the jumbled bars into the right order again without playing them - if so, you can clearly hear the piece well in your head, congratulations!

- think of a song you know by ear and try to pick out the tune at the keyboard. Don't forget to give your left hand a part to play too if you can!

Don't forget to tell your teacher at your next lesson about what you have created in these or other ways

Welcome to the piano4t page

The purpose of these pages is to:

• provide teaching and learning resources for piano technique and musical literacy
• provide links to websites concerned with music teaching and learning
• present research on specific areas of interest, including distributed learning

Here on the blog you can keep up to date with upcoming concerts, special student achievements and awards, and other news.

Learning to listen

As you prepare for Grade exams I recommend you use the hofnotes on-line training pages to practise for the aural tests. Do let me know if you would like access to these.
But there are new elements to listening tests at higher grades. You need to be able to discuss with the examiner features such as the texture, form, style, and period of a piece of music.
I have produced some web pages to help with these parts of the test at Grade 5 and over.

These pages are available at http://www.piano4t.co.uk/learn_to_listen.htm

They are designed to help you to:
x plan your listening,
x get more from what you hear,
x better understand the music you play
x hear great performances of piano repertoire.

x and .. just possibly... get better marks in listening tests too!

Family concerts at the Barbican

Not to be missed:

Sun. 8 Feb. from 10 a.m.

LSO Discovery Family Day:

Dance, from tangos to waltzes, ballet to tarantellas. Don’t forget your dancing shoes! For 7-12 year olds.

There are different workshops and activities so it is definitely worth making a day of it!






Family workshops
10am -12.30 £5

Musical activities
1.30 pm
Free if attending concert

Concert
2.30 pm
£7 adults/£4 children

Wigmore Hall family concerts

Sat. 31 Jan. 11 a.m.
Percussion- exploring amazing sound world from African rhythms to an explosive work for nine drums.

Sat. 7 Feb. 2.30 p.m.
Secret genie of the violin - unlocking the mysteries of this most beautiful of instruments: virtuosity, soulful songs and gypsy dances in a programme featuring Mozart, Saint-Saëns and Ridout.

Sat. 28 Feb. 10.30a.m.
Haydn Seek – painting pictures with music - from chaos to calm, sunrises to sunsets, worms to whales, Papa Haydn and his team help you to compose your own musical creation – to be performed at end of day.

Sat. 21 Mar. 10.30 a.m
Rapunzel, Rapunzel – with students from the Royal Academy. A fun day of singing, song-writing and storytelling, ending with performance.

New exam syllabus

Trinity Guildhall and the Associated Board have each produced a new piano syllabus for 2009.

At group lessons to kick off the new term I played a few of the new exam pieces you may be learning in the next few months.

But to hear more of the pieces on the new lists, visit www.abrsmpublishing.dloadshop.com/

You can download three MP3 tracks (one from each list) pretty cheaply. It is really worth listening repeatedly to the tracks you like, even just as ‘background’ music. You can do this as soon as — or even before - you start playing the pieces yourself. That way, you absorb all the rhythms and melodies really naturally and learning to play the pieces will be much easier.

You can still play the current pieces in exams in the spring session of 2009.

However, you must prepare the scales from the new syllabus for all exams to be taken in 2009.