Hi everyone! Happy February :)

Liam

*New Piece* Major-Minor Bop. Ensure you play very staccato, but not with a tense arm. The RH will be finger staccato which feels like scratching a spot of the keys, or your fingers runnin gon a treadmill. The LH will be doing wrist staccato which involves strong finger joints, and a fluid wrist like when you knock on someone’s door.

Continue work on Going Undercover. Some ideas could be: getting it faster. Creating your own arrangement (you wanted to slow down during the 2nd line and then speed up line 3 to the end – cool!). Transposing to another key, maybe G? Pick something like this and work towards it this week.

Great job with Gb Major scale! Your next challenge is doing LH 8th notes, RH quarter notes on C major. You can do it the other way around, now work on this! Be sure to start with hands 2 octaves apart.

Fiona

Lightly Row hands together. Think of this like 4 little songs put together for practice sake. Treat each line like one of our sightreading flashcards and work to make it the best you possibly can during each practice session. You *know* how to play this entire song perfect, with a little practice you can connect the puzzle pieces!

*New Piece* first 12 bars of Forest Song. Awesome sightreading!! This song is in D position, and therefore is D minor. I really like this piece (I remember learning it myself!) and I think you’ll have a great time making beautiful music out of it. The new concept here is half rests, so be sure to count 2 beats of silence for each half rest.

Keep playing your C and G major scales.

Marita

Minuet – first half HT now, second half HS. Really good work on the notes here!

Lunar Eclipse – be confident! You play this way better than you think you do. Give the ending section a little more love and you’ll have an awesome piece! Have fun adding the sustain pedal.

Young Ludwig – Trust the process with this one, the reason pieces like this where the hands copy each other are introduced this early is so it’s not so hard and scary when you get to harder music that includes it. Music almost always will have melodies that cascade over each other, and it’s better to learn the coordination necessary for this with easier notes than being overwhelmed later on. You’ve got this one!!!

I wrote the keys you should practice your scales and triads in in the front of your repertoire book :)

Sara

Chinese Kites – awesome notes and rhythms!! Woohoo! Now let’s add in the articulations. Pay careful attention to the staccatos and the slurs.

Harlequinade – Really good attention to detail! I like your lively, bouncy touch! Great fix on the evenness. You can start thinking of what story this piece brings to mind, and therefore how you want to shape it further dynamics wise.

Sonatina Mvt. 2. Nice! Keep plugging away at this one to get it even more fluent, but awesome fixes on the legato and the dynamics! You made very attentive observations of the performance we listened to of this one, I think you CAN do better dynamics than that YouTube lady did! Let’s shoot for the moon with beautiful dynamics in this tender Adagio :)

Next week I will look at your technical exercises (scales, triads etc) and look at your physical approach to it as well.

Sina

*New Piece* Boogie Boarding. This piece introduces the idea of broken and blocked/solid triads. It uses C Major. Be sure to count accurately, particularly to notice the tied quarter notes on beats 4+1. Pay attention to the dynamics in this one since the notes are objectively not that tricky. Start loud, line 3 get a little quieter and then crescendo to a big finish!

*New Technical Exercise* C Major triads. A triad exercise is moving through all the different “inversions” of a chord. In this case we are doing C Major, like the diagram below shows. This is CEG, EGC, GCE, then CEG again. Same notes just in different orders. For the RH I like using fingers, 135, 125 (because of the larger gap between notes), 135, 135. LH would be 531, 531, 521 (because of the larger gap between notes) 531. Practice slow and steady, imagine your hand is a crab walking up the keyboard.