With the May written exam series fast approaching, here is a series of tips that will help students and parents prepare for the big day… 1. Revise regularly We all know that knowledge quickly gained is knowledge quickly lost. Use these last four weeks to do steady revision each day – don’t try to cram […]
My daughter’s class at Australian Music Schools is studying towards a Grade 3 Theory exam in May this year. The class have always sat their Theory exams together, enjoying the experience they had in Grades 1 and 2 of sitting nervously outside the exam centre and finally being called in, and ‘debriefing’ together afterwards before […]
At the recent Piano Festival at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music I gave a presentation called ‘Teaching Digital Natives’, in which I discussed the ways in which technology has changed the learning styles of the current generation. There were 120 piano teachers in the room, of various ages and stages of teaching. We started the […]
Wilhelm Backhaus: (Germany, 1884-1969) Backhaus was a most highly esteemed pianist. One of the greatest Beethoven exponents of his generation, he regularly toured the music centres of the western world, and his brilliant performances would often leave audiences open-mouthed. Asked about his remarkable command of the keyboard and his practice program for the concert stage, […]
Being the co-author of the said Blitz Sight Reading books, this might be interpreted as rather a strange title for an article by me. You may ask, shouldn’t I already have KNOWN that the Sight Reading books work? Shouldn’t I have held off publishing them if I thought for a second they wouldn’t work? Well […]
For those of you who have been receiving the Blitz email newsletters, you’ll know that the much anticipated iphone app ‘ScaleBlitzer’ has finally been released. After more than a year of blood, sweat and [many] tears, Abe Cytrynowski and I have produced what we think is the ultimate tool for teachers and students in the […]
Vicious Cycle The vicious cycle of theory study goes like this: Student dislikes theory because all their friends do or because they ‘just want to play’ => student avoids theory => student does not do well at theory => student dislikes theory How did this happen? I believe the main reason this cycle comes about […]
When you practice a musical instrument by yourself, it’s a pretty solitary experience. There’s no team spirit, no friends at the training session, no coach to tell you what to do. It can be REALLY hard to be disciplined in practice – that is, to tackle the stuff that really needs work first and leave […]
In an effort to stimulate more practice and a fairer competition, I decided to refine the House Points system I described in December last year. No matter how I’ve tried to mix up the students and houses, for the last couple of terms one house has clearly run away with the House Cup. This makes […]
My daughter recently came home from her flute lesson with a great little system for correcting mistakes, which she called ‘IRC’. IRC stands for Isolate, Rhythms, Connect. Her flute teacher, Emma Sholl (of SSO fame), discussed with her that ‘Isolate’ means to figure out exactly where the mistake is. ‘Rhythms’ means to go over and […]