Madison

Good work this week Madison. Over the March break, simply keep up your technique by playing through your two handouts everyday, making sure you maintain lifted fingers! Apply pressure with each finger as you play so that you strengthen them! In other words, remind yourself to play louder all the time! And trim your nails! Do Not Practice with Long Nails!

We’ve gone over all parts of Lone Star Waltz, you have two weeks now to put it all together smoothly and confidently, preferably with no pause. This is not a difficult piece for you. You should be able to get it together rather quickly.

Besides the handouts, practice some scales here and there. Especially, practice any scale two octaves hands separately until you feel confident with the crossovers between the thumb and third and fourth fingers. You’ve gotten the hang of this a couple times before but you haven’t yet maintained your progress because you do not practice scales consistently :)

All in all, 15-30min of practice on most days should do.

If I don’t see you after the March Break, I wish you the very best of luck, it’s been a real pleasure to have you <3

Julia

Julia you have made tremendous progress vocally with me and I am very proud of you! I don’t think you even notice the progress you’ve made!

For our Phantom of the Opera songs, please make sure you have them memorized cold, if you haven’t already. These are almost performance ready, after memorization, we just need to run them regularly so that you get a deeper and deeper feeling for the song and pattern of your breath for each song.

RCM Level 1 song selections: Dites-moi, This Land is Our Land, Song of Summertime

Dites-moi- come cleanly off for those tests at the end of each verse, sing with you full voice, as if you will hold them for longer and then just close them off with your lips by ending the words on time. This song is charming and quaint and almost cliche, just enjoy it. This Land – we’ve all heard it before, and may have learned different versions of the melody but we need to make sure we sing precisely what is on the page, I’ve circled the trickiest notes, just be careful about those notes! And please sing the piece with feeling, thinking about the words and shaping (adding dynamics) accordingly. Well of course go over that more together. Song of Summertime is the only piece in the whole book that goes high enough. I will be looking into RCM levels 2 and 3 because I am feeling that very soon they will be more appropriate for your voice and ability.

Bohemian Rhapsody – I think this is such a cool song selection and would love to start you on it right after March Break.

Brazilian Song – I just wanted to again encourage you to reflect if there might a song in Brazilian which you would like to introduce me to. It would be lovely for you to have learned and memorized a couple Brazilian songs for performing whenever you like, they can be a valuable part of your repertoire since they express a big part of who you are!

Piano

After the March Break I will introduce you to scales.

Ride Down Hill and Little Tune are both easy for you, focus on the shaping and dynamics as spoke about and marked for you in your book. The bigger piece is Afternoon swing. Tackle this one over the break and we’ll go over it together when you return.

Have an amazing trip!!