Today Jessica jumped right into her Festival pieces and played them beautifully. She is ready for the Festival! I am pleasantly surprised to see the progress Jessica has made over the last seven weeks. She has gone from being unwilling to perform to being eager and ready to perform. She now plays “Medieval Sand Castle” with accuracy and musical expression. She plays “Arabesque” with confidence and precision.
Capitalizing on her desire to audition for musical theater, we spent 10 minutes of her lesson going over her audition song, “Oklahoma.” I helped her add choreography to it, and instructed her to “own” the song as she sings. She’s not from Oklahoma, but as she sings, she has to convince the judges she is an Oklahoma native. I told her that she ought to tell the story with her eyes, voice, choreography, and overall expression. She responded extremely well to my instruction, and we had fun with the choreography!
As opposed to the previous weeks when Jessica was not willing to make her own decisions for guiding the lesson, this week, she asked to play “Clowns” for me. Last week, we noted that her transitions needed the most work. I didn’t have enough time at the end of last week’s lesson to give her detailed guidance on how to fix her transitions. As a result, she practiced them, but she was not able to fix them. In order to help her move with confidence to the new hand positions, we played the “Count Down” game this week. I started by counting to 5 while she found her new position. At first, she couldn’t make it. I counted to five again, and she successfully made the transition. I then decreased to four, then to three, then to two, and once she understood the game, I instructed her on how to use the game in her practice at home. Her laughter filled the room as she found the game exciting.
“Snoopy” was next on the agenda. We worked on playing with energy by incorporating correct fingering and staccato. For one particularly difficult measure, I instructed her to play the measure before and “land” on the first note of the difficult measure. Once she was comfortable with that, she was to play and “land” on the second note of the measure, etc. I instructed her to use this practice technique during the week.
Jessica did not re-write her “Circus Riders” composition, so I helped her start to re-write it during the lesson. I also suggested that she could make her “B” section a little longer. She seemed to like the suggestion.
It was obvious she had at least looked at “Canon in D.” I demonstrated the fingering in the Bass line, and had her try Left Hand alone. She then tried RH alone. We put hands together, and she noted that it was not as hard as she thought it would be.
It was a productive lesson. Jessica is beginning to understand that music is relevant to many areas of her life, especially Dance and Musical Theater.
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1 comment:
It was fun to see what blogging was all about in looking over your journal. You certainly worked wonders with jessica over these past seven weeks, and grew as a creative teacher in adapting strategies to pull her interest back to the piano and enjoying music with her.
Glad to see you use some of the practice ideas we discussed in class with her - the count down should work well for problem solving placement of hands. She seemed willing to try all of this - several months ago it would have been a different story.
I would push her a bit more on the composition, but don't go crazy with this. she may realize that the level of composition she can create is not close to what she is playing in repertoire and may shy away from finishing it. That is ok - it is the experience of writing her ideas down that counts.
I feel you have grown considerably in analyzing exactly what is happening in your studio and experimenting with ideas to see how good teaching can really make a difference in a teenager's attitude towards the piano.
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