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.