Sara
Listening
- Rebecca Clarke’s “The Seal Man” (for piano and voice)
- Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata, first movement (for piano and viola)
Technical Exercises – Continue with E Major
- Scales, triads (solid HS and HT, broken only HS),
- Arpeggios (only HS – thinking of blocked hand positions moving from the arm horizontally/sideways instead of crossing fingers under)
Schubert – continuing slow hands separate practice for the most part – be patient with yourself! We aren’t aiming for speed at this point, just to get things comfortable and settled in your brain/hands. Speed will come with time.
- Thinking of bouncing between hand positions from your arm, instead of trying to make everything legato in the fingers!
- Focusing on LH jumps so that you are building them into your memory, this will allow you to focus more on your RH while playing.
- For RH: making use of your arm to help with awkward hand position changes like in measures 7-8 and 9-10.
Sonatina in F – Finding entire hand positions and mentally grouping things up, like in measures 25-43 in the RH (thinking of 3 big hand positions, instead of each individual note)
- Thinking about the “conversation” in this piece to help with remembering rests (like in measures 43-50), always leading to beat 1 of the next measure.
Bartok – Continuing with #25-28
Clara
Technical Exercises – Continue practicing 5 finger major scale positions starting on C, G, and D (watching out for F# finger 3 in D position) – practicing hands separately and together; trying legato, detached, and staccato articulation.
Lesson Book – pages 47-49, 50-51 if time. Focusing on reading steps around the home notes (Middle C, Treble G, Bass F).
Hakim
Celebration – starting new piece, watching for changing hand positions and making sure you are confident on note names!
Distant Chimes – Continuing to work through, map out hand position changes as solid chords in the same way as celebration.
- Writing in note names for starting hand positions if you need to
Bartok – Work through exercises 1, 2a, 2b, and 3
- Make sure you are 100% confident in your starting notes, then try reading through based on the shape of the line/whether we are stepping up or down – don’t worry about individual note names yet.
- Once comfortable playing through, practicing while saying note names out loud, trying not to slow down at all.