Musical appenings

Sight Read 4 Piano is a great iPad app, developed in Britain by music examiner, Christopher Wiltshire to help you improve your sight reading. The app is free, but only includes a few sample exercises to show you how the program works. From the screen above, you click on an exercise you'd like to play, and a new page opens up on your iPad, with a counter ticking down, while you scan the music.
After a few seconds the music disappears. When you are ready, you tap the screen and a two bar count-in begins. After it is finished the metronome continues and a ding! alerts you to start playing.
Then something alarming happens: the music starts to disappear, one bar at a time! But this is a good thing, because it is teaching you to keep going and not go back when you play a wrong note.

When you first begin using the program, you should start a few grades lower than where you are aiming to get to. You may find initially that it is making sight reading harder, not easier. But once you get used to playing in time with a metronome, and can cheerfully play wrong notes and keep going, you have already begun to be a better sight-reader.

For a piano teacher (and there are also modules for people who play other instruments), the most cost-effective version of the program is the whole package. If you only want examples from your own exam system, or only from a few grades, each exercise is proportionately dearer.

I bought the whole lot, which gives me more than 1000 examples and loads of flexibility.

Scale Blitzer is an all-Australian app developed by Abe Cytrynowski, and Andrew and Samantha Coates, of Blitz Books fame. This app costs about $7 and then an extra $3-$6 for modules for your particular exam grade.

The app encourages you to practise up to 16 scales at a time, and tests you on your playing in a wide variety of ways. I am currently road-testing the app with my students, and hope they will like it enough to purchase their own copies to use at home.

It includes fun ideas and characters, and gets you playing your scales in different forms, at varying tempos and volumes, and with plenty of different rhythms. The program develops security and accuracy, and the many different activities provided should keep students enthused and motivated to perfect their scales.

It is designed for your iPhone or iPod, but also works on the iPad, which is my favoured tool in the studio.

How To Get Your Child To Practise

Cynthia Richards' How To Get Your Child To Practise ... without resorting to violence is an excellent book, well worth your time, but - it's out of print!

Aren't you lucky I can pass on Mrs Richards' handy tips? I read this book at my sister-in-law's place. She is also a music teacher.

Today I am passing on the positive points, but in my next post, I will tell you what she tells you not to do. The tips have all been tested by Cynthia, who is a parent and music teacher herself.

1 Start early
2 Practise with your child every day
3 Set up family rules for practising
4 Use incentives when needed
5 Handle conflicts by

a avoiding emotional involvement
b being friendly
c being matter of fact
d not giving in

6 Enjoy your children's music
7 Praise them for their successes
8 Look for stumbling blocks and do your best to remove them
9 Focus your efforts on getting your child hooked on music

If you chew over this advice, one point at a time, you will find it will help you in parenting generally, as well as in getting your child to practise.

I'd love to know what you think about these tips. Have you tried any of them yourself?

Who is the cool dude playing the flute? If you know, please tell me and I'll credit him properly. I know he was playing at Open Day, but i didn't get his name.

The Joy of Piano Duets

Playing the piano is a great experience. You can be a whole orchestra all on your own, and don't need anyone else to be able to create a complete piece of music.

But solitude can get pretty boring after a while. Someone said that solitude is OK, as long as you have someone to talk with about it later.

Many pianists don't experience the joy of playing with others. But there is something you gain from playing piano duets which you don't get all on your own.

Today my wife, Joan and I have been playing Ulrich and Wittmann's piano duet arrangement of Beethoven's Septet. It was written for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass. You may recognise the third movement, because Beethoven also used it in his Piano Sonata, Op 49 No 2 in G Major. This pleasant performance is by musicians from the Verbier Festival Orchestra.



There is a free copy of the piano duet arrangement at the wonderful Petrucci Music Library site.

If you are not in the habit of playing piano duets, you might prefer to start with something easier. Wilhelm Aletter's Four Easy Piano Duets might be a better place to begin.

If you go to the main page of the completely free This is a link to piano duets at the site. Some are labelled as "easy" but "easy is in the fingers of the player" [or is that "mind?"]

I love the scene in Robin Williams' Millennium Man where the robot plays the Berceuse from Faure's Dolly Suite with the little girl.



Katia and Marielle Labèque are sisters who usually play two pianos. Here they are performing Leonard Bernstein's America, from Westside Story.



But perhaps the most enjoyable piano duet is this one from a student concert of the second movement (Andante con cozyta) from P.D.Q. Bach's Sonata Innamorata.

Free sheet music

Stephen Watson, conducting his prize-winning entry in the composition competition

Does it surprise you to learn that our most popular post so far was the one about free sheet music? In that post, we told readers about the terrific Petrucci Music Library, which now contains 94,000 scores of music for orchestra, violin, piano, chamber ensemble, guitar and almost any instrument you could imagine.

If you are interested in playing music that is over 70 years old, this is a great site for you.

We also gave a link to a site where arranger, Richard Harris, has generously hosted oodles of pages of free copies of his arrangements of film music, popular classics, Christmas music and more.

If there is so much sheet music available free of charge (not forgetting the many illegal download sites), why would anyone visit a music store, whether physical or online, and pay for the stuff?

One good reason is that music stores sell books. Remember them? One great thing about a music book is that it probably contains music you weren't looking for, but which may be a great complement to the music you wanted.

For example, if your music teacher tells you to get a copy of Scarlatti's Sonata in C Major, L 252, you could download one from here. You'd get a readable copy and you'd have it almost instantly.

But if you decided to buy this book which contains that sonata, you'd get a modern edition, with fingering, information about the meaning of the signs on the music, advice on how to play the trills and ornaments, an introduction about Scarlatti, an article on how to paly ihs style of music and 13 other sonatas to have a play through.

You can't beat the price of a free download, but a book gives you a lot extra for only a few dollars.

A remarkable Australian

I thought I had put all of this week's papers in the recycle bin, but discovered that a page had fallen out of Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald and was sitting on the kitchen table.

I'm so pleased that I hadn't thrown it out, because it contained a great story about one of the world's most remarkable musicians.



Leslie Howard has a place in the Guinness Book of Records for completing the largest recording project by a solo artist. This project is his 99 cd set of the complete piano works of Franz Liszt. He has also recorded another 60 or so cds, giving him the largest discography of any solo instrumentalist. And he has the largest repertoire of any pianist who has ever lived.

Mr Howard has recorded and performed more than 300 premieres of Liszt's piano works. He prepared many of these himself, by working systematically through Liszt's unpublished manuscripts.

Leslie Howard was born in Australia and achieved fame as a young man on Showcase, a 1960s talent program. He has lived in England since 1972, but has regularly come back to Australia to give concerts and masterclasses.

In 2011, Liszt's bicentenary, he will perform three concerts in Sydney, including

Discovering Liszt, a lecture-recital at Sydney Conservatorium on Friday, 6th May

a recital of Liszt and Rachmaninov pieces at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith on Saturday, 21st May

and a two piano recital with Simon Tedeschi at Angel Place on Thursday, 26th May.

Barbara Bruce, OAM

We are delighted to announce that former Mitchell Conservatorium piano and music theory teacher, Barbara Bruce, has been awarded an Order of Australia medal, in recognition of her services to Music, as a pianist, teacher and mentor.

Mrs Bruce was a teacher and also for a time, director, of Lachlan campus of Mitchell Conservatorium. She can now put OAM after her name. Congratulations, Barbara!

Who Am I?

Guten Tag. Today is my birthday. Do you know who I am? I was born on 27th January, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria. I died in December, 1791, just a few weeks before my 36th birthday.

In my short life I wrote over 600 pieces of music. My father put some of the first pieces I wrote into a book for my sister, which is called Nannerl's Music Book. You can find a copy of these first pieces here, which is a special internet site from Germany, which contains copies of all of my music. You might like to download the pages and try them out. Some of them are easy, but some are harder than they look!

Here is a short extract from a film about me called Amadeus, which is my middle name. Do you like the laugh they gave me?

Do you have a video of your performance?

Mitchell Conservatorium now has its own Youtube channel. We would love to feature good quality recordings of excellent performances of Mitchell Conservatorium students on our channel.

And I would love to use your videos on this blog.

The video above features Stephen Aveling-Rowe playing Bach's Toccata in D Minor on the Opera House pipe organ. Stephen learns cello from David Pereira and piano from David McKay. We can't claim credit for his great organ playing, but we can chuckle that his organ teacher is also a David: David Clark from Cooranbong.

Masterclasses

Mitchell Conservatorium is hosting three masterclasses on Sunday, 7th November at 11 AM in which three distinguished musicians will share their love of Music and expertise with selected performers and also interested observers.
David Miller, AM will conduct a masterclass in piano and accompanying. David is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading pianists and accompanists. He has been appointed a member of the Order of Australia for his services to Music.






Philippa Paige, member of Sydney Symphony, teaches violin at Sydney Conservatorium, as well as teaching string teachers their craft. She will also be conducting a masterclass, where she will be sharing insights into violin playing and teaching at 11 AM on Sunday, 7th November.

Peter Jenkin teaches clarinet at Sydney Conservatorium and is one of Australia's most versatile performers on the clarinet. He plays in a diverse range of styles and is eager to share his specialist knowledge with teachers and students in Bathurst on Sunday, 7th November at 11 AM.

He will be joined by David Miller, AM in a concert at 3 PM, which features works by Scriabin, Verdi and  Brahms. The concert will conclude with Elena Kats-Chernin's wonderful Russian Rag.

David Miller will also be conducting a masterclass in piano and piano accompanying, earlier in the day.

Music Is For Life

A charming trailer for a heart-warming new documentary. I hope we get to see it in Bathurst!

When are you too old enough to play and sing? Alice is 106 and is still playing, every morning and afternoon.

During the time she was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, she performed over 100 concerts for fellow inmates and played all of Chopin's Etudes from memory. (This camp was intended as a showpiece to the world, to deceive people into thinking that Jewish inmates of all concentration camps were being well-treated.)

How many keys?

Piano by Stuart and Sons

Do you notice anything unusual about this piano? Can you work out what the lowest and highest notes are?

Unlike the standard piano that you would see at Mitchell Conservatorium, it has 8 octaves, from F to F. For more than a hundred years, pianos have been manufactured with 7 and a quarter octaves, with a total of 88 keys.

The Thursday, 21st October, 2010 Sydney Morning Herald announces that Wayne Stuart, the manufacturer of the piano pictured above, has extended this range even further by creating a piano with 102 keys, from a very low C to the high F on the piano pictured.

Some composers are writing for the extended range, but the existence of the strings on the piano can enhance its sound, even if the actual keys are not included in the piece of music being played.

If you would like to hear how these pianos sound, Stuart and Sons are offering a free demo cd at their website, where you can also read more about their interesting, Australian-made pianos.

But for a wonderful live performance on a beautiful Bechstein grand piano [with 88 keys], you won't want to miss Elena Day-Hakker's concert at 2.30 PM on Sunday, 31st October at Mitchell Conservatorium, in the west wing of Bathurst Court House in Russell St.

What are piano lessons for?

Elissa Milne is a prolific composer and editor of books for piano students. Her own compositions are fresh, fun and original and the collections of books she edits are always reliable, interesting and full of variety.

In her thought-provoking post What are piano lessons for? she makes these points.

1. Piano lessons are for learning to do cool stuff on the piano

2. Piano lessons are for learning what the piano can do so you can do whatever you want on it.

3. Piano lessons are for understanding other people better

4. Piano lessons are for understanding yourself better

5. Piano lessons are for understanding the world better

6. Piano lessons are for exercising your body, your emotions and your intellect all at the same time.

7. Piano lessons are for changing who you are

8. Piano lessons are for joy.

That's the skellington. Now please check out her whole article.