July Challenge: Lead Sheets Week 1
This post is for all my piano students. As you know, I am taking the month of July off of teaching, so I am challenging each of you students to learn new lead sheets each week in addition to at least 2 new pieces from your books.
Here are this week’s lead sheets:
Michael:
Week 1 – Lead Sheets Elementary
Chloe, Bethany, Jana:
Week 1 – Lead Sheets for Early Intermediate
Sarah and Nicole:
Go to this website and look at all of the free, downloadable lead sheets for praise songs. Download one that you know or would like to learn and practice this using the skills you learned at Music Menagerie Camp.
Read MorePiano Camp 2011 Video
Have you been wondering what we did at our Music Menagerie Piano Camp this year? Well, wonder no more…
Wanna come next year? 
2011 Spring Recital
Well, today was our 2011 spring recital! The students did a wonderful job and it was fun seeing and hearing them play so musically. What a difference one year can make in a students’ playing! I thought you might enjoy a picture of some of the students and a picture of our wonderful punch!
A few of the wonderful students
Our Pink Punch: always a highlight
The punch can be made by combining room temperature Sprite with Raspberry sherbet. The proportion is flexible, but I’d start with 1-2 two liters of Sprite mixed with 1/2 gallon of sherbet. It makes a beautiful froth and is delicious! I ask my piano families to bring the sherbet, Sprite, nuts, and tableware for the reception and I buy the cake. It helps with recital expenses and families don’t mind contributing to a beautiful reception.
Read MoreCreativity at Christmas Time: Jingle Bell Variations
Since the topic this week is encouraging creativity in our students at Christmas time, I thought I’d re-post the “Theme and Variations” challenge that we completed in my studio last year. It was great fun and there is still time to do a small version of this project in your studio for Christmas. Here is the post from last year:
If you have heard the Composition for Kids lecture, you have heard about the Theme and Variations challenge that I have suggested to “encourage creativity.” This last month, I challenged the students in my studio to create their own variation of Jingle Bells. You can read the details of the project and how to do one yourself in this previous post.
My students have finally completed their variations, and I am happy to report that even the students who have never been interested in composition before now participated in this challenge! Some students took off with this idea and knew exactly what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it. But with most students, I employed a procedure to help them get started which I have detailed under the video.
Though the video is long, I thought it important to keep everyone’s variation together for a true Theme and Variations form. In future posts, I will be commenting on how I coached these students and how I might further coach them provided we had the time. The performances aren’t perfect, but encouraging creativity that was most important. There are 10 variations to Jingle Bells and the student represent a variety of levels from beginning to late intermediate. Enjoy!
Here is how I helped some of the students develop their variation:
1. Pick a mood. You can see the list of moods here.
2. I asked them what kind of things you could do on the piano to create that mood. I would ask them questions about:
- Location of melody (fragile sounds were obviously higher, dark sounds were lower)
- Tempo
- Modality
- Harmony (Many students chose to use harmonies that were in pieces they were currently studying. This was a wonderful sign that their vocabulary of possible sounds expands with the repertoire that they study.)
- Meter (Several had really enjoyed previous waltzes they had studied, so we experimented with how to change Jingle Bells to a 3 beat meter.)
- Texture (though I didn’t name it, we talked about lonely sounds, unison sounds, chords, ostinatos, etc.)
3. After they had a list of possibilities, I sent them home to create their variation. With some students, we were able to tweek the variation in subsequent lessons. With others, we “accepted” their variation because of a lack of time to tweek.
Read More2010 Christmas Cover Art Contest
Thank you to all you students who submitted artwork for the 2010 Christmas Cover Art Contest. This year we chose to have an animal theme, so each picture was to incorporate animals into a Christmas idea. Since there was only 1 entry in the older division, the student who entered and I decided that we would just roll all of the entries together this year.
Students, please vote on your 2 favorite entries. Send me an email with your name and your 2 votes. Please vote by Tuesday, December 7th. Congratulations to you all on your wonderful artwork!
Here are this year’s entries:
Entry 1
Entry 2
Entry 3
Entry 4
Entry 5
Entry 6
Entry 7
Deadline Extended: Help your students recognize a great opportunity
The questions for Mona are trickling in and someone told me that I might not have allowed enough time to tell teachers, who would tell their students, who needed to think about questions, and then needed to submit them! So, I am extending the deadline for submitting questions to Mona to this Friday, October 1st.
Another thing that occurred to me as I spoke with my own students about submitting questions was that students often do not realize a great opportunity when they see it. Just as children don’t understand how scales, chords, balanced repertoire, counting, creating, etc. help make them a better pianist, neither should I expect students to understand how they can use this opportunity to interview Mona as a way to help them be better composers. As a teacher, I feel it is my job to encourage my students to participate in the things that I know will make them better musicians.
So, this weekend, I sent an email to my students (any student who has composed something) that said this:
Last week, I gave a lecture on “Nurturing Creativity and Inspiration.” I talked about how each of us has a “creative box” from which we pull out ideas and recombine them in new ways…like you do when you compose. The difficulty is that if we continue to only use the ideas that are already in our box, our compositions will start to all sound alike. So, it’s important to continually reach outside of our box and pull in new styles, ideas, problem solving techniques, etc. so that our music can stay fresh.
I think this opportunity to submit an interview question is exactly that…a way to ask another composer how they deal with certain difficulties or things so that we have yet another way to approach composing the next time we do it.
So think of the last time you tried to write a composition. What did you have trouble with? Was it finding a good motive to begin with? Composing a B section? Coming up with a title? Writing lyrics? Finding time to compose? Feeling like you aren’t creative? These are the things that you can ask Mona about! How does SHE deal with these difficulties?
So, perhaps you can use something in the above paragraphs to help your students understand how this can help them and what a great opportunity this is. You might remind your students about their last composing experience. ”Remember how you had trouble thinking of material for your B section? Maybe you could ask a successful composer if she has any tricks for this.”
I know many teachers tell me that they don’t know how to help their student composers. This is just one of many ways that all teachers can help their student composers. We can help students enlarge their “box of creative ideas” so that they can have more ideas to draw from and more problem solving techniques with which to work. I’ll leave the opportunity open until Friday, October 1st for additional questions.
Thank you for your participation and for giving your students this opportunity! You may submit questions here or send me an email.
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