Diya
Recommended minutes to practice: 15-20 minutes a day
What to practice: warmups, Reflection, C’s Rock, Mozart’s Five Names
How to practice it most effectively: For your warmups this week, see if you can go through all 5 vowels for the 5-note major warmups. For the skips sliding down warmup, stick to just “ah”. Another good guideline is for the higher 5-note warmups, use open vowels like “ah” or “oh”. For Reflection, keep up the great work with your open vowels and gentle vocal tone! The one spot to be careful of is “Why is my reflection someone I don’t know” because it’s such a long phrase; the best place to breathe is after the word “I”. I’ll link a good karaoke to practice with below – the flute is also doing the melody, so you can use this to guide you. Please remember you can still always go back to using the lyric video to review. C’s Rock on piano will be a warmup song this week; our main piano piece is Mozart’s Five Names. The hands both start in C position, but as the piece goes on there are circled finger numbers which mean you must switch position. As long as you use your sayings you will be good to go! Anytime there is a slur, do your best to connect.
Dvorah
Recommended minutes to practice: 15 minutes a day
What to practice: Sailing in the Sun, Ferris Wheel
How to practice it most effectively: For Sailing in the Sun, we are ready to work on some details like dynamics and articulation. In line 3 we have lots of cool things going on. First, see if you can do a down-up legato between each LH low note and RH’s skip. We want to be as connected as possible under our slurs, even if they go between hands. Then, see if you can start piano (soft) and slowly get louder and louder until the end of the line where we are forte (loud)! For new song Ferris Wheel, we start in the same position as the other piece – thumbs are neighbours on C and B. Again, the main focus is being nice and sticky with our fingers during legatos. For the ending, try to do the f – mf – p dynamics, as well as the pedal!
Aria
Recommended minutes to practice: 10 minutes a day
What to practice: lip bubble warmup, Do You Wanna Build a Snowman, Let it Go
How to practice it most effectively: The lip bubble warmup we did in class is a great one to slide around your range! Take a deep breath and gently start high, then make your way down low as smoothly as possible. Try counting and see how long you can keep the bubble going. The idea here is to not push too much air right at the beginning, but instead stretch it out over a longer period of time. For Do You Wanna Build a Snowman, please try to memorize lyrics for the first verse (so beginning of the song until ‘it’s like you’ve gone away”). For the high notes like “away”, do your best to keep your voice light, like a choir tone. We want to avoid the crackling that comes with pushing too hard. You can practice this by first singing “it’s like you’ve gone a-HEY” a few times – the “H” will help you get into that softer, head voice tone. For Let it Go, we worked on just the chorus (from “let it go” to “the cold never bothered me anyway”). These lyrics seem to be close to memorized, so this week please work on getting them all feeling really comfortable. On that last line, because it goes so low, we talked about “whisper singing” – softly and kind of sneakily so even if you don’t hit the lowest note, it sounds in character.
Oliver
Recommended minutes to practice: 15 minutes a day
What to practice: Half-Time Show
How to practice it most effectively: Our new piece Half-time Show has both hands in F position. RH please make sure you’re using the FACE in the space saying to help you remember your notes. Notice that when we are playing with just space notes we will always be skipping. In bar 3 and 7, the two hands are playing 3 notes all together! Just make sure LH is playing a 5th (the Star Wars interval) while RH is on an A. In the last line, the hands are always playing the same letters – see if you can do the staccato articulation in this line!
Linda
Recommended minutes to practice: 20 minutes a day
What to practice: Minuet in A Minor, Tired Turtle Express, preliminary looks at Early One Morning and More
How to practice it most effectively: The Minuet in A Minor is very close to done! Two places to isolate to help with dotted rhythms are bars 5 and 14. In each case, start by playing with only the hand that has the dotted rhythm while tapping quarter notes with the other hand. Once that feels good, you can add the other hand on its quarter notes. For Tired Turtle Express, try putting bars 7-8 hands together right away so the melody makes sense (this complete string of 8th notes will also help establish the long-short swing rhythm better). For the rhythms in bars 3, 4, etc. it might help to speak either “long-short-long-short..” or “1+2+…” swung counting out loud, noticing how the eighth rest comes in on beat 3 (a long portion of the beat). Adding LH in later in the week will help because LH’s quarter note lands on that beat 3. Early One Morning is a sweet song to have a look at if you’re feeling like you’re done with the Minuet. The new jazz song I’m linking you is More; this piece is in E flat major (3 flats, Bb, Eb, and Ab). I suggest playing that scale a few times to familiarize yourself with which notes are diatonic – if you’d like as a bonus you can also try playing the 4-note chords of the scale. Do your best with the slash chords, but don’t worry if anything is confusing – we will discuss everything next week!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TEzJBwyuGBbJgbR8rcsr5avzoLfmNbi2/view?usp=sharing
Ken
Recommended minutes to practice: 20 minutes a day
What to practice: Lunar Eclipse, rhythm exercises page 26, Scarborough Fair
How to practice it most effectively: For Lunar Eclipse, give it a shot with the pedal this week! While playing, make sure you’re counting with “ands” so we get a clear difference between eighth notes and quarter notes. In the 3rd line, LH goes to an Ab – please double check those bass clef notes there. The tenuto markings (lines under some notes) are not as strong/loud as an accent; see if you can make them just slightly stand out from the rest of the bar. Great work with dynamics especially top of the 2nd page! Before playing Scarborough Fair, please practice counting and clapping the 3/8 time exercises on page 26. This piece can be played hands together right away, just don’t use the pedal yet. LH, notice what chords/intervals you are playing.