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.

The weird and the wonderful

lira organizzata by Wolfgang Weichselbaumer

This strange-looking instrument copy of an 18th century instrument is called a lira, or lira organizzata. The composer Haydn wrote five lira concertos. This recording of the first movement of Haydn's Lira Concerto in C will give you some idea of what it must have sounded like.

Thierry Nouat and Matthias Loibner playing liras

In this photo of a rehearsal of The Ensemble Baroque de Limoges in 2005, you can see the two lira players turning cranks with their right hands, while manipulating sets of keys with their left. Matthias  Loibner says the instrument is an organised hurdy-gurdy. Harry Edwall's article in The Musical Quarterly gives more detail about how the instruments worked.

I'm going to play a couple of movements at Bathurst's U3A Music Appreciation class tomorrow. I hope the class will enjoy the unusual sound.

U3A welcomes people over 50 who are no longer working full time. We meet at Mitchell Conservatorium on the first six Mondays of Term 4 each year at 11 AM for a one hour varied program.

If you would like to hear a full program of Early Music, please come along to the Baroque Ensemble concert on Saturday, 3rd November at 7.30 PM, where you'll hear

Andrew Baker - violin
Philip Braithwaite - flute
Tracey Callinan - harpsichord
and Sybbi Georgiou

playing some wonderful music from the time of Purcell, Bach and Handel. Please ring 6331 6622 during office hours, Monday to Friday for more information about this delightful musical feast.

Birthday boy beats Mozart

When we think of a child-genius, it is natural to think of Mozart. He was performing and composing at the age of five. But other composers also began very early. And some even surpassed his considerable feats.

Did you know that Chopin wrote pieces from the age of seven that were much more demanding to write and play than many of the pieces that Wolfie wrote, even in his maturity?

But the one who really impresses me is Camille Saint-Saëns, born on 9th October, 1835.

Consider this: at the age of two he could already read and write, and was picking out melodies on the piano. He began composing shortly after his third birthday, and by the age of five had given his first piano recital.

At seven he was reading Latin, studying botany and investigating butterflies (the last of which he continued to do for the next eighty years).

When he was ten he made his formal debut as a concert pianist, performing a Mozart piano concerto in B flat and Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto in C Minor. For an encore, he offered to play any of the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas from memory!

Sharing your music

Do you have a song in you? Would you like to share it with the world? Mitchell Conservatorium's Composition Competition gives you the opportunity to do just that. You can even share a piece of music which you have composed for a school assignment.

All the details are here on our website.

12th October is the closing date, so you could finish off your masterpiece during the spring school holidays.

There are some great prizes, ranging from $100 to $350.

Have you got a song in you?

Armchair Concert

Did you know that several Mitchell Conservatorium musicians are presenting programs on our local community radio station, 2MCE ? Christine Sweeney and David McKay present Mitchell Conservatorium's own fortnightly program, Armchair Concert.

You can hear highlights of Mitchell Con concerts, every second Monday, from 1.30 to 3.30 PM. We have played a wide variety of quality performances on our program so far, including a wonderful concert by Ensemble Six, a Central West string sextet, music by duo pianists, Max and Hayden Reeder, and new compositions by Jamie Briton and Russell Gilmour.

On our next program, on Monday, 17th September, we will play some of these again, because we think they're worth a second play ... and maybe you didn't hear them first time round.

You might also like to listen to Oliver Harris presenting Great Sounds in Music on Tuesday evenings from 8 to 10 PM. Oliver is a terrific brass player and composer, but also a pleasant guide to the world of music, as you'll discover when you tune in.

And David McKay presents a weekly album show called Gontroppo's Grooves, on Tuesdays, from 1.30 to 3.30 PM

You can listen to all of these programs at 2MCE.org
, on 92.3 or 94.7 on your radio, and on the smartphone tunein app

Mitchell Young Pirates?

Captain Stevenson, Angie LeChuck and Daft Petey

Another great musical devised by Mitchell Young Voices director, Michelle Griffin was enjoyed by an enthusiastic audience last weekend at All Saints Cathedral. As I entered the hall, I was greeted by three exotic characters, who also looked strangely familiar. There was something about Captain Stevenson, Angie Lechuck and Daft Petey that made me think I'd met them before.

As it turned out, I had never previously met the good captain, but when he's not a pirate who doesn't do anything he is Geoff Griffin, the father of musician, teacher, composer and conductor Michelle Griffin.

Angie is Mitchell Conservatorium's Cindy Fox and Daft Petey is talented actor, radio announcer and musician Ryan Fitch.

These three narrated the story, creating a suitable introduction and conclusion to the program.

Kathy Powell is not just the mother of talented Mitchell Conservatorium students Courtney, Timothy and Luke Powell, but is also a great singer and the perfect person to play the part of the evil Miss Elizabeth Black, who makes the orphaned children drink a nasty concoction of Brimstone and Treacle ... or tries to.

Mad Cap'n George

Michelle Griffin makes a grand entrance as the Mad Cap'n George singing Gilbert and Sullivan's Oh, Better Far To Live and Die and gave an excellent impression of a pirate who is one wave short of a shipwreck.
She cleverly kept in character through the whole proceedings: even when handing out prizes for the best-dressed pirate.

I enjoyed hearing the pirate orphans singing Paul Jarman's songs Find The Way Home and Far Away Our Home. You may remember Paul as the composer of the moving song, Pemulwuy

Does this map really lead to buried treasure?

Mitchell Young Voices provides a great way for young people to enjoy music through participating in singing, dancing and acting. If you'd like to be part of their next production, please ring Mitchell Conservatorium during office hours on 6331 6622 to find out about rehearsal times.

All Guitar Program at Mitchell Con

Aaron Hopper and Fretworx

Yesterday, I only knew the names of two of the people in the photo above. But the power of social media has changed all that! From left to right, we have Andrew Dean, Emily Foster, director of  Fretworx, Aaron Hopper, Tim Burrey, Melissa McKinnon and Kiaran Bryant, performing two of  Aaron's beautiful compositions in a concert at Mitchell Conservatorium yesterday.

It was an all-guitar concert, which provided an opportunity for Tim Burrey to present his A Mus A program, but it also included a wide variety of guitar styles.

Heath Auchinachie

Heath Auchinachie, of Ilford, began the concert with Drifting, an intriguing piece by Canadian composer Andy McKee. Heath has referred us to an extremely popular clip of the composer himself playing the piece.

Tim Burrey 

Tim Burrey played a program of music that was written by composers who lived between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.  He showed he was as comfortable playing a Domenico Scarlatti sonata, Milonga Del Angel by Astor Piazzolla, a John Dowland piece or a suite of three pieces by Federico Moreno Torroba.


Tim's first teacher, Georg Mertens, played Villa-Lobos' popular first prelude, Albeniz's Asturias and a Fernando Sor piece.


The concert was warmly received by an enthusiastic audience of supporters. All funds raised from the sale of tickets were donated to Central West Care. We were interested to hear of their innovative programs from its director, Richard Ulbricht at the beginning of the concert.