It's the time!

Please see the link: http://www.stringsmagazine.com/search/ssg/default.aspx

It's that time of year to think about summer plans. Here is a very comprehensive listing of summer festivals/schools/camps (mostly for stringed intruments because it's from strings magazine!). I know many of you don't want to spend your exciting summer at a music camp, but I strongly recommend for everyone to attend one of the summer camps here because it will give you vast improvement in your playing skill. Not only from good faculties, practices, but you'll also learn a lot from other friends and musicians around you who will be coming from all over the world to the camps. These camps are challenging but definately you will earn something! Audition dates and deadline are coming, so hurry!

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?referrer=emailarticle Please click this link.


This article has been out for a long time, but I think it is still interesting.
My question is..If a great musician plays great music but no one hears..was he really any good?..
In my opinion, I think he is.. because first of all, he is famous alreay, he plays for his own musical happiness, playing music is not alway to show to others and he doesn't has to be recognized by other people to be judge as a good musician or not. It's the people who don't know about music or don't know anything about famous musicians, or they are too busy to listen and don't have time to stay for a musician. I hope people have more time in their mind and in their heart to calm themselves in their regural life. The world is getting busy and so as many people nowadays. After I read this article, I always look around and look once more at musicians when I see them in stations..Who knows..it might be a famous musician who I really want to see! :)

Posture and Form

-Brahms Sonatensatz played by Jascha Heifetz

For all the musicians, posture and form are extremely important. It is because as all good teachers say and especially my former teacher says, "Power = Violin up, left elbow up!" If any violinist can't figure out what it means, check Jascha Heifetz's posture, form and bowing to playing this music perfectly. His bowholding is very relaxed, lightly holded, no tension on his arm, arm moves very straight, light touch on the strings but makes heavy, sticky, full sound and his bow figers move naturally, flexibly. The relaxation on his posture, I need to learn it!

if only they had something similar for violin...HAHA

Just for fun..
I always liked to watch this duos playing piano and violin. They perform beutiful musics in a different way as general classic musicians do. They use tools, adds comedy, variety shows into their performance and not only that, they are amazing players as well.
More information and more videos check out:
http://igudesmanandjoo.com

Controversy: Facebook Group "People who DON'T clap between movements"

The group "People who DON'T clap between movements" has over 35000 members, including some of my friends, and I find it disturbingly pretentious...

Any composer before the twentieth-century would have been offended had there not been clapping in between movements. Mozart wrote of his delight when audiences would clap during passages in his "Paris" symphony K297 -- while the symphony was still playing! Brahms complained when people didn't clap enough between movements at the premiere of his first piano concerto. Even in the twentieth-century, at the American premiere of a Shostakovich symphony by the Chicago Symphony, an old man stood up and yelled "Bravo" after the first movement, while people glared at him-- it was Shostakovich himself.The idea of silence is an oddly modern construct, while the opera, ballet, jazz, etc. have not taken on this performance practice. The megalomanic conductors of the early twentieth-century gave rise to this audience control and I must say it feels unnatural to perform the end of the first movement of Sibelius concerto with such a big flourish to a silent audience response.

So my question is, is there anything wrong with listeners expressing their uncontrollable awe of your playing? Have audiences become so passive and unopinionated that they only clap when they know they are supposed to?

Security in Memorization

Here are some Security in Memorization that I would recommend everyone to try with.

Four facets of memorization are:
1.Tactile (least reliable under stress)
2. Visual: visualizing the printed page
3. By ear
4. Analytical (most reliable under stress)

Practicing memorization:
1. Divide a piece into sections, number each section, be able to start at any number.
2. Work backwards from the end, phrase by phrase: set the metronome. Give yourself an exact number of counts to think, then go back and play the next-to-last phrase. When you finish, wait, count, go back to the phrase before that, and so forth. The goal is to reduce the metronome count from, say, 8 to 4, to 2, to 1, to 0.

To check for security in memorization, try these tests:
1. Play the whole piece at a painfully slow tempo (if necessary, use metronome set to 60 to the 16th note, for example)
2. Think every note and finger associated with each note away from the violin.
3. Sing your part from start to finish.
4. Take any phrase, start any measure on any beat. Be sure the fingering is unchanged.
Do not do these tests right before a performance!

Remember that memory slips are most likely to occur in:
1. Passages that are similar but not exactly the same. -- mark the differences on the score
2. Passages with rhythmic complications
3. Modulatory passages. Analyze the keys
4. Bass line or bottom notes of chord progressions. Analyze the bassline motion.

The purposeful playing of everynote will guard against memory blackouts. Your intentions for each and every note must be perfectly clear to you. Your mind needs to be as active as your fingers and bow. The more you plan and map out the piece, even create a storyline, the less likely you will get lost.
1. Refresh your memory by studying the score visually and trying to imagine how it sounds and exactly how your hands would look and feel with the violin. Then play the piece slowly through with the music.
2. From memory, play the right hand as softly as possible and the left hand as forte as possible throughout, then do the reverse.
3. Play the piece through with your eyes closed. play slower than usual
4. Go through all the correct motions as if you were making sounds but do not press your fingers all the way down
5. play through the piece very slowly in pianissimo
6. Combine the visial, aural, and tactile senses in "mental" practice. Close your eyes and try to "hear" the music. Try to imagine how your fingers/bow "feel" on the violin and how the music "looks" on the page. If you cannot "see" the music, don't be concerned. It is more impoartant to "hear" it mentally and visualize how your hands look on the vioin and bow if you played.

Good luck everyone!!

Music lessons pay off in higher earnings: poll

Music lessons pay off in higher earnings... unless you're a musician!
Enjoy!


TORONTO (Reuters) - Those hours practicing piano scales or singing with a choral group weren't for nothing because people with a background in music tend to have a higher education and earn more, according to a new survey.

The poll by Harris Interactive, an independent research company, showed that 88 percent of people with a post-graduate education were involved in music while in school, and 83 percent of people earning $150,000 or more had a music education.

"Part of it is the discipline itself in learning music, it's a rigorous discipline, and in an ensemble situation, there's a great deal of working with others. Those types of skills stand you well in careers later in life," said John Mahlmann, of the National Association for Music Education in Reston, Virginia, which assisted in the survey.

In addition to the practical skills gained from studying music, people questioned in the online poll said it also gave them a sense of personal fulfillment.

Students who found music to be extremely or very influential to their fulfillment were those who had vocal lessons and who played in a garage band. Nearly 80 percent of the 2,565 people who took part in the survey last month who were still involved in music felt the same way.

"That's the beauty of music, that they can bring both hard work and enjoyment together, which doesn't always happen elsewhere," Mahlmann added in and interview.

Do you agree? or disagree?

I found this article that I received long time ago, and I would like to share with everyone..Do You Agree? or Disagree to the article here?..

From the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/arts/music/06look.html?_r=1&ex=1360040400&en=a765e50df4a26f96&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&oref=slogin

By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: February 6, 2008

Wandering from one television channel to the next the other day, I came across young people playing the piano. One man, bearded and a little hefty, rippled through a Beethoven sonata, sharing with the camera complicit smiles, exultant grimaces, gazes to the right and left, and a gentle swaying from side to side.

The next, a young woman, sat down to Schumann, bending her back, lifting her head and gazing straight up. Maybe God was sitting in the rafters just above her, and she was using the opportunity to say hello. Both pianists were perfectly fluent. They kept time, played the right notes and sounded expressive when they were supposed to.

I had to turn away. I could listen, but I couldn’t watch. Two performers, four glazed eyes and four waving arms were too much for my stomach. And if someone with a lifelong love for the piano repertory has this kind of reaction, what about those coming to classical music from the outside? Think of the smart young people ready to believe, filled with curiosity and good thoughts, and imagine with what astonishment and amusement they must come away from such scenes.

It’s another reason classical music is not reaching more young people: not because of how it sounds, but because of how it looks. Even worse, lugubrious gymnastics like these advertise the feelings of performers, not of Beethoven or Schumann. Music is asked to stand in line and wait its turn.

Our two pianists might simply have been talking themselves into playing well and sharing the conversation with us. Maybe they didn’t trust their own ability to make music without a little theater to juice up the proceedings. Elaborate arm waving and heaven-bound gazes, at any rate, seem to have become part of the conservatory curriculum, like accurate scales and counterpoint.

Some, I am sure, watch the wrong people and engage in monkey see, monkey do. More often, I suspect, performers just want everyone to know how wonderful they are, right down to their virtuoso fingertips. There are bad examples out there. Liszt evidently jumped around when he was a young touring virtuoso, but he is said to have sat at the piano like a stone later in life. Glenn Gould, who acted out his musical eccentricities with remarkable finesse, looked like the music he was making.

Serious theater in the wrong hands turns unintentionally into physical comedy. I have always wanted to make athletically inclined students sit in a chair away from the piano, writhe to their heart’s content and then ask themselves what they just heard. Some music does bear watching, like the slow ballet of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” Most of it doesn’t. Vision, the dominant of our five senses, gets in the way.

Responsible teachers ought to be beating these kinds of histrionics out of their students but are too often perpetrators themselves. One answer might be for conservatories to hire time-and-motion experts, professionals who could point out that the flailing arm, the bulging eye and the balletic upper torso are extraneous work in a business best devoted to doing the most with the least.

Technique is not about muscle building but about optimal allocation of resources. More happens faster and more clearly with the minimum of gesture. Weight and relaxation, not force, make big sound. So much energy is squandered on these melodramas for the eye — and so much attention diverted — that it is a wonder our pianistic thespians can hear themselves at all.

If the teacher won’t do the job, what about tying offenders to a post and running films of Arthur Rubinstein at work? They should note the dignity, the rectitude, the stillness of the upper body and, above all, the quality of the music that results. My colleague Alex Ross once described a filmed Beethoven sonata performance as Wilhelm Kempff watching Wilhelm Kempff play the piano.

And a note to the larger ego: playing the discreet middleman does not sacrifice the spotlight. It is neither meekness nor submission nor self-effacement. At the end of the day, whom do we take more seriously, Rubinstein or Lang Lang?

The television program I happened to come across was produced by or for (probably both) a major American piano competition, and the young people I saw on it were part of that process. The program also offered commentary by an eminent conductor talking about the differences between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to art. The Apollonian refers (and I paraphrase) to symmetry, invention and elegance; the Dionysian, to art more from the gut, more spontaneous.

More personal too. Dionysus had the stage when I was watching: two ambitious young people were taking part in a system that asks them to use Beethoven and Schumann as ways to sell themselves. Maybe our eminent conductor could have added another distinction to his two-sided debate: that Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music.

Classical Chicken

My friend sent me this movie clip and when I was watching it, I was more interested on how it has been made than the movie itself. I'm not sure but I think this movie is mixture of all the cencepts that we have learned in Tech Trends class. Using method of creating TABLES can create those 9 boxes for individual chickens with filming 9 different MOVIES. However, I still don't know how the conductor chicken can pops out from the table, and how other chickens go between the other boxes..At the end, it's the process of PODCAST which we also learned in Tech Trends class. I would like to try making one like this one day if I have ability.

Networking

As being a musician, it is important to have good networks. We can make connections, build contacts and find leads with other people who are in the same society by good networking. It can be works with friends, family, professors, classmates, co-workers, business associates, and referrals. We can network by attend events; career related, academic related (presentations, student clubs), and professional associations (become a member). Furthermore, there are other ways to network through online which is much easier than offline networking by joining online forums. Therefore, I would like to give you some online forums for those of you who are interested in it: Ryze (http://www.ryze.com/), Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/), Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/), and everyone's favorite, Facebook (http://www.facebook.com).

meadowmount school of music

As I mentioned in the previous post, the summer music camp where they have poor technology is "meadowmount school of music." This summer camp is "a seven-week summer school for accomplished young violinists, violists, cellists and pianists training for professional careers in music." String players who want to practice A LOT and want to enjoy the nature away from technology, check out the website: http://www.meadowmount.com

Even though they have problems for some technology things, the music camp itself is GREAT! I really enjoyed my time there and learned a lot.

Leonid Kogan

This youtube website reminds of me my summer string music camp days at the Upstate of New York. It is a place where we get no cell phone and the internet reception is very weak. It's basically a 'place without internet and cell phone technology'. Therefore, after a few days of the camp, most people give up on getting cell phone reception and rely on weak internet reception. Internet only works at one place and if many people use it at once, we all lose the reception. However, once we get a reception, my friends and I used to watch youtube. We all love to watch Leonid Kogan's video and inspired by his technique. We analyzed his technique, playing skills and tried to copy because HE IS AN AMAZING MUSICIAN.
We don't have to go to expensive concerts to see and learn visually from famous musician unless we want to, technology developed well and I'm glad that we all can get to watch/listen to variety of music, musicians and concerts with one click through youtube.