**My apologies to everyone I had mistakenly told the recital was this weekend – I had thought we were in the last week of April, but we do have one more week of lessons. The recital will take place next weekend**

 

Dvorah

Recommended minutes to practice: 10 minutes a day

What to practice: Ode to Joy, My Invention

How to practice it most effectively: In Ode to Joy, we learned the middle part of the piece today (the letters we wrote on the yellow construction paper). In this section, our E-F bit is faster than the rest of the letters which are all quarter notes. Please spend some extra time with this part of the song. The full song form will be 1st line, 2nd line, yellow page, then 2nd line again. In My Invention, we added a repeat sign to make the song a little longer. Please play the first time through loud, and the repeat soft for contrast.

 

Diya

Recommended minutes to practice: 15-20 minutes a day

What to practice: Do-Re-Mi up the scale, Do a Deer, C 5-Finger Warmup, Firefly

How to practice it most effectively: For a vocal warmup, please sing the C major scale using do-re-mi etc. First play and sing along with the piano, but then try singing up the scale without the piano, doing your best to connecting smoothly between the syllables. This lesson you did the whole scale in one breath! In Do, a Deer let’s continue playing the piano notes as you sing, but pay extra attention to the sol, la, ti sections. On piano, these are: G-C-D-E-F-G-A, A-D-E-F#-G-A-B, B-E-F#-G#-A-B-C. To make the piano playing easier, cross under your finger 3 every time. In the C 5-Finger Warmup, please follow along carefully to make sure you’re not accidentally repeating your Gs and Cs. The finger numbers written over the exercise will help with this. In Firefly, let’s add the 3rd line (from bar 9-12). Continue using your sayings to help you with any notes you’re unsure of, as well as noticing steps vs. skips distances.

 

Marco

Recommended minutes to practice: 10-15 minutes a day

What to practice: Mexican Jumping Beans, Sailing in the Sun, Ferris Wheel, finishing up theory page

How to practice it most effectively: Mexican Jumping Beans will be our warmup song this week: the little dots above or below the notes are staccatos, meaning you play nice and short, with a bouncy wrist. In Sailing in the Sun, please be really obvious about your quarter rests, and gradually try to speed it up a little! Ferris Wheel is sounding quite confident – when singing along, stay on the 2nd highest C for the last part; it’s definitely too high to sing!

 

Oliver

Recommended minutes to practice: 10-15 minutes a day

What to practice: C position skips warmup, The Rainbow

How to practice it most effectively: Our C position skips warmup can be done hands together now:  both hands in C position will play C-E-G-E-C, trying your best to connect. In The Rainbow, please only play the first 3 lines hands separately for now. Notice the back and forth RH pattern in the first couple of bars of the 1st and 2nd line. As always, use your sayings for the treble clef to help you read the melody. If towards the end of the week the song starts feeling really comfortable hands separately, you can try hands together!

 

Alice

Recommended minutes to practice: 15 minutes a day

What to practice: Yankee Doodle, A Joke for You, Little Do You Know, Attention

How to practice it most effectively: In Yankee Doodle, please pay extra attention to bars 5-6 where we skip from E to C then back to E. You can start singing the lyrics along to this song! A Joke For You introduced 2 new LH notes: C is on the 2nd space, and D is on the 3rd line. RH is still playing in our regular C position. For Little Do You Know, please sing along with the lyric video, and do your best to follow the girl’s part whenever they sing together. The third chorus is the trickiest part, since she hops up to an upper harmony. Still continue singing Attention since it’s a great contrasting song. We’ll start with that one next week.

 

Linda

Recommended minutes to practice: 15-20 minutes a day

What to practice: New Shoes, Pure Imagination

How to practice it most effectively: New Shoes’s lines 1 and 2 are already doing great hands together, so let’s work to add lines 3 and 4 together as well this week. Line 4 is a nice contrast to the first 3’s bouncy rhythm – ground down into those accented chords. Pure Imagination is sounding more and more comfortable every week – you can start humming or singing the melody while you go through the shapes to feel the rhythm and flow a bit more. The chords to watch out for are the E-7b5 (E-G-Bb-D) and the F-7 to F7 transition (only the Ab changes to an A natural).

The Cry Me a River PDF can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/163jvg2D3bXxtVyUiRG-GLct9F9tGoNQL/view?usp=sharing

 

Emet

Recommended minutes to practice: 20 minutes a day

What to practice: Bb major scale (hands separately 1 octave), Piano Man

How to practice it most effectively: Our Bb major scale has slightly different fingering from our usual scales. The 2 flats to use are Bb and Eb. RH’s fingering is 4-1-2-3-1-2-3-4, and LH’s fingering is 3-2-1-4-3-2-1-3. For Piano Man, the biggest thing to practice is actually our page flip! RH should get off the dotted half note C in bar 33 ASAP to flip the page over (no need to hold for 3 beats since your pedal is down). The way to practice this is to go from bar 31 until the “da da” section a few times. In addition, be conscious of where you are in the music even if you’re not looking at it 24/7 just so you don’t accidentally slip into another verse’s RH pattern. In the ending, be extra clear with your pedal changes so each chord sounds distinct – time is on your side here since it’s a rit!

 

Kollel

Recommended minutes to practice: 20-25 minutes a day

What to practice: Ab major scale, Canon, Dance of the Dragonflies

How to practice it most effectively: For the Ab major scale, please play it hands separately for two octaves each hand. For Canon, start a little slower than you usually do – give yourself time to breathe and look ahead to what comes next. As you go through the song, continually remind yourself to keep this slower tempo, since the instinct is to rush. I suggest isolating the 3rd and 2nd last lines, particularly noting the difference between bars 32 and 36. The biggest thing that will take this piece from good to amazing is playing with dynamics. Remember that the important thing isn’t not making mistakes, it’s how we recover from the inevitable few mistakes. For Dance of the Dragonflies, continue playing the first 2 sections; RH please do the staccato articulation from the first section in the second section as well. Bar 15 is one to isolate slowly, since RH plays staccato while LH plays legato.