Tag: music

General

Music-Related Pet Names

Joy Morin

My husband and I recently rescued a cat (pictured at right)!  We spent a lot of time thinking up a name for her.  I wanted to give her a music related name, but as it turned out, we ended up agreeing to name her “Kira.”  But for any of you who might wish to give your pet a musical name, I’ve compiled a long list of my favorites!

Edit: We adopted a second cat! Guess what: we named her Coda. 🙂 

Pianos

  • Kawai
  • Steinway
  • Story & Clark (cute names for a pair of cats)
  • Mason & Hamlin
  • Schimmel
  • Yamaha
  • Bosendorfer
  • Fazioli

Tempo & Style Markings

Resources, Technology

A Piano with 4 Pedals?!

Joy Morin

Stuart & Sons is a Australian-based company who build hand-crafted pianos.  They are unique pianos for a number of reasons:

What is so special about Stuart & Sons pianos?

  • They have 4 pedals.  The fourth pedal is a second soft pedal, called the dulce pedal.  It brings the hammers’ resting point halfway up to the strings, reducing the intensity of the hammer strike and giving the pianist more control over sound quality and color.
  • They have a “bridge agraffe” string coupling device, which “enables the string when struck by the hammer to vibrate vertically and for a longer duration than in conventional piano designs.”  This allows the piano to have an unusual clarity especially in the low and high registers, and to have better dynamic and sustaining qualities.  Read this article for a more information. January 2018 update: “An Australian applied mathematician, Dr. Bob Anderson, was asked to look at the bridge agraffe. The first thing he noticed was that the equations defining the vibration of strings were deficient in that they did not take not account the changing length and tension of the string throughout each cycle. He won an international award for his revision of the mathematics of vibrating strings. He then showed that the conventional pinning of the strings resulted in elliptical polarisation of the vibrating string. This resulted in a rapid decay, a poor sustain, wasted energy in the string’s ending up vibrating horizontally instead of vertically, and non-harmonic DISTORTION of the note. (Harmonic distortion is fine, non-harmonic distortion is noise).” (credit: Ian Lowery)
  • Stuart & Sons pianos have 97 keys instead of the usual 88.  The outermost keys are both F’s, putting middle C exactly in the middle of keyboard. January 2018 update from Stuart & Sons: “My second point is that the Stuart is now running to 102 notes, and by mid 2018 will be running at 108 notes, which is the limit for the piano. (Any lower is inaudible, although its presence can be FELT. Any higher, the string is too short for the hammer).” (credit: Ian Lowery) Continue reading “A Piano with 4 Pedals?!” →
repertoire / methods, Resources

A New Adult Student Book on the Market: “Returning to the Piano” by Wendy Stevens

Joy Morin

Check out this announcement at the ComposeCreate.com blog: Wendy Stevens has written a new adult piano book entitled: Returning to the Piano: A Refresher Book for Adults.  I often have a hard time deciding what adult method to use with my adult students.  Especially when they aren’t true beginners and have had previous experience with piano, I don’t like putting them through overly method-y books!  In addition, many adult students want to learn pieces with tunes that are familiar to them.  This book looks like it may be a good alternative for those types of situations, or simply as a supplement to an adult method.

Here is the description from the Hal Leonard site:

I just ordered a copy from SheetMusicPlus.com and I can’t wait for it to arrive so I can try out all the arrangements myself!  =)

Group Classes, Memorization, Performances, Printables, Teaching Piano, Worksheets

Just added: Performing at the Piano Worksheet

Joy Morin

Just added: a new free, printable worksheet called:

>  Performing at the Piano Worksheet

Just in time for the spring recital season, this fill-in-the-blank worksheet is intended to help prepare students for an upcoming recital or other performance by discussing stage presence and performance etiquette.

Terms/concepts covered in the worksheet:

  • Memorizing
  • Applause
  • Bowing
  • Checking the bench
  • and more.

This worksheet can either be sent home with students, completed one-on-one with the student during the lesson, or — my favorite — done as a group as a studio class or group lesson.   It would be fun to complete this worksheet as a group just before a practice run-through of a recital.

To download, visit the Printables > Worksheets page and scroll down to the P’s for “Performing at the Piano worksheet.”

Your turn!  Share your ideas for preparing students for recitals in the comments!

Announcements, Group Classes, improving as a teacher, Motivation, Performances, repertoire / methods

Listening and Communicating in 4-Handed Piano Music

Joy Morin

A colleague of mine and I are planning to learn some four-handed piano music this summer, and perhaps do a whole recital together of just four-handed music in the fall semester.  So I’ve been digging around on YouTube, looking for repertoire ideas.  And I have couple of cool videos to share with you today:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuZF6oaCnw

What a great video to show students!  Everything is so perfectly synchronized, and their playing is so beautifully expressive.  They are AMAZING musicians.

Here’s another fine duo team.  Perhaps the coolest thing about this video, however, is the piano they are playing on: a Pleyel Double Grand Piano!  I’ve never seen anything like it!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYfdB0CvSg

There are some important benefits of playing four-handed repertoire.  Both players must be actively listening and communicating with each other — not only so that they are together beat-wise and so that the melody and accompaniment ideas are balanced, but also so that they are playing musically together: shaping phrases together, executing rubato together, and calling and responding to each other’s melodic motives.  Developing these skills while working on four-handed repertoire can give a whole new perspective to solo piano repertoire!  Besides — working on four-handed music can be a lot of fun!  =)

Watching these videos looks like so much fun, I think I’m going to dig through the duet music on my shelf and find some duet pieces to assign to some of my students to work on over the summer too!

Composition, Resources

Decorate Your Studio Idea: Bach Invention Manuscripts

Joy Morin

I just discovered these manuscript copies of Bach’s 2-part inventions over at the IMSLP’s Petrucci Music Library.  I always find free pdfs of music scores that I need on their site, but I never realized that they also have pdfs of some hand-written manuscript copies to download as well!  Although this is not Bach’s handwriting, but it is still a remarkable part of history — and looks really cool.  According to the site, this manuscript copy dates from around the 1790s.  Can you imagine having to copy music by hand?  What an art!

While I was so captivated by this manuscript copy, it occurred to me that printing some of these sheets off on acrylic print paper and then framing them would be a great way to decorate the walls of a piano studio!  I think students would really enjoy admiring the hand-written manuscripts, especially if they were working on the same piece.

To download:

Click this link to visit the Bach inventions page.  Scroll down until you see the download with the editor listed as “Peter Gronland” and says “Undated manuscript copy, 1790?”.  As always, be sure to carefully follow the site’s copyright restrictions for your country (in the US, basically all works published before 1923 are in the public domain).

Music Theory, Printables, Worksheets

Just Added: Navigating at the Keyboard Worksheet

Joy Morin

A new free worksheet has just been added to the Printables page: Navigating at the Keyboard.

This worksheet is for young beginners who have only just recently been exposed to piano.  This worksheet is designed to help them become familiar with the layout of the keyboard so that they can locate and identify the keys by name.

This worksheet reinforces:

  • recognizing black-key groups of 2 versus 3
  • finding C on the keyboard
  • the musical alphabet (it only goes to G, and then repeats)
  • then finding D-G on the keyboard

This is an excellent worksheet to send home with a young student after their first piano lesson.  Visit the Printables > Worksheets page and scroll down to the N’s for “Navigating at the Piano worksheet” to view it now!

Announcements, Motivation, Performances, Teaching Piano, Technology

A Follow-up on Recording Students Before Performances

Joy Morin

I don’t know about you, but I have some students who are participating in a spring performance coming up soon!  Last week, I recorded my student Jean playing her recital piece during her lesson (click to read more about recording students as preparation for performances).  Then we spent some time listening and discussing the recording.  Although it took a little bit of time to set up the devices need for recording ahead of time, I found that it was well-worth the time setting everything up and spending on doing a recording activity.

The set-up:

Using my digital recorder as an external microphone, I was able to capture video with high sound quality using iMovie software on my MacBook Pro.  Later on, I edited the videos using iMovie again and uploaded them to YouTube.  (If anyone would like more details about how exactly this is done, just ask! I can explain further.)

The result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N56ZHpnWfnw

The piece Jean is playing is an arrangement of Borodin’s Polovetsian Dance, from Dennis Alexander’s book, Especially For Adults. Continue reading “A Follow-up on Recording Students Before Performances” →

Music Theory, Printables

Just Added: Reference Sheet for Reading Music

Joy Morin

This free printable is a handy reference sheet to give out to students who are just learning to read musical notation from the staff.

What it contains:

  1. notes and their values, eighth through whole.
  2. rests and their values, eighth through whole.
  3. word mnemonics for figuring out the letter names of notes on the staff:
  • Treble staff lines: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge
  • Treble staff spaces: FACE
  • Bass staff lines: Great Big Dogs Fight Animals
  • Bass staff spaces: All Cows Eat Grass

There are many different word mnemonics for remembering the lines and spaces on the staff.  Which ones do you use?

CLICK HERE to view the Reading Music | Reference Sheet printable now!

Announcements, Resources, Reviews

Book Review: The A to Z of Foreign Musical Terms

Joy Morin

Book Review:

Ammer, Christine.  The A to Z of Foreign Musical Terms: From Adagio to Zierlich a Dictionary for Performers and Students. Boston: ECS Publishing, 1989.

Ever try looking up a musical term, only to find that the word or phrase you are looking for is not listed in your musical dictionary?  This has happened to me fairly often…until I bought this book, that is.  Somehow, this slim book has so far always managed to contain definitions for all the terms I’ve needed to look up!

I ordered this book from Amazon.com when a voice professor at my college recommended it to me.  It’s a great resource for students, vocalists, solo pianists, and collaborative pianists – and at about $11, you can’t beat the price.

My rating: 5 stars (out of 5 stars)

Group Classes, Music Theory, Printables, Teaching Piano, Worksheets

Just Added: Write In The Barlines #2

Joy Morin

That’s right, a new free printable worksheet has just been added to the Printables >Worksheets page:

Write In the Barlines #2

This worksheet is for use after using the Write In the Barlines #1 worksheet.  This time, students must draw the barlines through both staves of the grand staff instead of through just one staff.  This worksheet has 4 examples in four different time signatures, including 6/8.

This worksheet is designed for the late elementary / early intermediate level student, to reinforce the following concepts:

  • measures
  • barlines
  • ties
  • meters (2/4, 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8)

Click here to view and print it now!