EPTA UK Piano Teacher Talk your quick update on what s going on in EPTA

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1 Issue 2 15 October 2018 Key dates to note: Masterclass with Angela Hewitt at Kings Place, London, book your ticket here via this link: uk/single/selectseating.asp x?p=22415&z=0&syo=1 EPTA CPD days: Manchester Topics include - simultaneous learning, ornamentation, sight reading, techniques, child protection and safeguarding, pedalling, creativity, inspiration plus so much more. Presenters include Murray McLachlan, Paul Harris, Melvyn Cooper, Nancy Litten, Kathryn Page, to name just a few. FREE to EPTA members! Nonmembers also very welcome at a nominal cost for the day. Please contact the administrator for more information or to confirm your attendance admin@epta-uk.org Are you interested in joining EPTA? We provide: 1. Public Liability Insurance 2. Countrywide events for all EPTA members 3. Competitions for performing and composing. Plus more. Contact us here to find out more: admin@epta-uk.org EPTA UK Piano Teacher Talk your quick update on what s going on in EPTA Dear Piano Teachers Hopefully you all enjoyed the first online newsletter last month. Continuing with this new innovation is Newsletter number two. Having spent a wonderful few days in Malta for the European conference, a number of us from the UK came back invigorated, inspired, and well and truly glad to be part of such a warm, healthy community. What a wonderful world the piano world is I made many friends from all over the world (though I would have preferred the mosquitoes not to have been quite so friendly to my legs and arms!!) This was my first ever European conference and it was packed full of wonderful events I will hopefully manage to attend more of these in the future. Don t forget to let us know your thoughts on EPTA Facebook and Twitter pages, or on Pianadao site also. Thank you Andrew Eales for including this newsletter on your blog site. It is much appreciated.

2 Repertoire showcase, There is a lot of core repertoire available to us as pianists. EPTA s website has an enormous amount of pieces listed, with the recommended grading. Why not take advantage of this excellent facility if you are looking for something new and stimulating to offer to your students. Here s this month s selection, suggested by Karen Marshall: Grades 1-2 *1 - The Old Cuckoo-Clock by Buchinskaya *Flying above the Clouds by Bulllard Grades 3-4 *The Elfin Harp by Carroll *A little Joke by Kabalevsky Grades 5-6 *Two Part Invention in F major No. 8 - J S Bach *Rondo, Sonatina in D, Opus 36, No. 6, 2nd Movement by Clementi Grades 7-8 *Prelude in D flat (The Raindrop) Opus 28 by Chopin *Novelette No. 1 in C major by Poulenc Kings Place, London The AGM of EPTA UK is occurring during the final day of the EPTA CPD days, in Manchester on 11 th November, so if you are an EPTA member, this is an excellent opportunity to come and meet other members and the management committee if you haven t already done so. Most of the management will be there. If you haven t yet visited the wonderful facilities of Chetham s School of Manchester, this would be an ideal time to do so. Just thirty seconds walk from Victoria train station in Manchester! Wishing you all an inspiring term of performing and teaching keep up the excellent work you are all providing. Very best wished from us all Don t forget, look on the website for the number of events held throughout the country. The piano competition is also looming close, so next newsletter will have a short bite of information to let you know more about this wonderful opportunity. Some outstanding young pianists who have won this competition over the years are performing in the Angela Hewitt Masterclass on 15 th November. See more information on the top left of this document Huge thanks to Andrew Eales (Pianodao) for kindly agreeing to make EPTA Piano Teacher Talk available on his blog. We appreciate his support and all the work he does for Music Education.

3 Easy Ensemble Playing by Karen Marshall I am often asked how do you incorporate ensemble playing into your piano teaching? For duets, I regularly pair children together to play. As I work in a village this can be quite easy, many can have some of their lessons at the village school as duet lessons. It can be so much fun and really help to develop their listening, reading and interpretation skills. In September though I always think about how I timetable. I try to put children next to each other who could potentially play together. It s not always possible but I try. I also regularly do music swaps whatever level the students are (with permission from parents). I do 5 minutes at the end of one student s lesson and 5 minutes at the beginning of another student s lesson. This provides 10 minutes where I join the students to play trios - the three of us can usually get through one easy trio - it s huge fun and fantastic for counting! It s a practical way to give the opportunity to play some trio repertoire. Do use any round e.g. London s Burning, as a first start in playing trios. Karen Marshall, the music teacher and writer, has joined the EPTA Management Committee as a co-opted member working on a special project for the 40th Anniversary Year. Karen has taught the piano for 27 years, she is widely published and also special needs trained (working with BDA Music). Karen said: I have had a special relationship with EPTA since I was 15 years old when I performed at one of their concerts in Ilkley, Yorkshire. I have continued to attend meetings locally wherever I have lived and have found EPTA a real lifeline at different points in my career. Become a Virtual Virtuoso Mark Tanner We re all used to isolating tricky passages and working them up slowly, hands separately, applying different rhythms or articulations, but have you tried practising the piano in your head? I usually encourage pupils to experiment with doing this right from the off, though admittedly some pupils will take to the challenge more readily than others. Why bother? Well, by building up a reliable audio-visual piano in your head you ll have an additional means of practising away from the instrument whenever it suits you. The more nitty-gritty or irksome the passage(s) in question, the more valuable this type of virtual practising becomes. Coordinating tricky fragments doesn t always require the player to actually hear what is resulting from their fingertips; it s more a case of feel, spatial awareness and watching what your hands are doing. Into the bargain, your inner ear sharpens, your analytical powers evolve and you ll likely find memorising becomes that bit easier, too. Importantly, there are two immediately profitable (though subtly different)applications of this technique: one is to help negotiate specific mechanical difficulties by mentally hearing and feeling your way around the issues in question; the other is more physical: table-tapping. This latter activity gives your fingers a useful workout in tandem with your musical imagination. Either way, start with short, simple white key patterns play them out loud on the piano, then immediately ghost them on your knee or on the piano desk while you attempt to hear what you re playing internally; then play it out loud once again to check that what you heard (and felt)was accurate. Next, expand into playing/internalising intervals and scales, one-handed, then two-handed, involving more and more chromatic notes, stretches, leaps and coordination elements; occasionally, you might try doing this without actually moving your fingers so that the process of imitating the piano is entirely imagined; you ll be picturing your fingers move elegantly around the keyboard as you hear the subtlest nuances correspond with crystal clarity in your mind s ear.

4 Spend five minutes a day at the start of a practice session building up this skill, and within a fortnight you ll hopefully be well on the way to becoming a virtual virtuoso! You re now ready to test-flight the technique on troublesome moments in pieces you re currently working on. Don t feel obliged to go off-piste while doing this the score is invariably your best friend when practising tricky fragments of music, or indeed when memorising. I ll wager you begin to rely more and more on this kind of virtual learning, which of course is available to you even as you wait for the bath to run. Some folk use a dummy keyboard (Rachmaninov famously did) or even a paper keyboard to give yourself a visual halfway stage to moving over to your internalised practising. I sometimes run through whole concert programmes using moving as well as motionless fingers when I ve no access to a real piano. I find this works particularly well with contemporary music because my imagined physical movements marry up to the dissonances bouncing around in my head in a rather reassuring way. Crucially, your fingerings need to be bullet-proof before you launch into internalising music, however uncomplicated, as time spent unlearning is perhaps the most disheartening of all Second steps in Pedalling Margaret Murray-Mcleod In the first article the idea of LISTENING closely to the length of notes played with or without the pedal was examined. Now it is time to change from listening to LOOKING. If you have a grand piano this is easy, but if you teach on an upright piano and cannot remove the front, your pupil could look inside from the top.they may need to stand on a stool to do so.or you could find a picture of the inside of a piano (quite a few available on line). Ask them how many strings there are to each key.in the treble; the middle bass and lowest? Why are there three different types of strings? If they can hold a finger close to one of the bass strings while you play the note, they can feel it tickling their finger as it vibrates! Great fun! Let them watch the hammers as you play a scale. Can they see what stops the note vibrating as you release each key? Explain why they are called dampers. Don t be afraid to tell them the names of the moving parts, even if they are quite young; they will soon begin to remember the words as you use them. Now, can they see what happens when you depress the sustaining pedal? Play an arpeggio or group of notes so they can hear the effect. I find that pupils, especially the younger ones, get quite excited to see all this amazing action inside the piano. At last they are ready to sit down to use the pedal themselves! Next time: Best foot forward! Technical Advice - Dr. Murray McLachlan If there is one piece of technical advice that we should all hold to at every stage of our playing careersand constantly mention to pupils- it is this: keep your wrists loose and your fingertips firm. From your very first lessons to your final farewell recital at Carnegie Hall, this is a vital technical consideration. Without flexibility, comfort and freedom in your wrists ( and elbows, shoulders and neck) all kinds of physical ailments risk appearing. Stiffness and tension will inhibit and frustrate progress as well as potentially lead to health issues. But relaxation on its own is not the answer: without firmness in your fingertips, it is impossible to control articulation, find technical competence and reliable facility. You need to be able to have control and a sense of Anchorage from the bridge (knuckles) of each hand. Without that essential firmness, technical reliability simply cannot be guaranteed. What is required is a combination of freedom with firmness. Pupils need to think and experiment in order to sustain freedom and firmness in their pianism at all times. The issue is fascinating and especially appropriate for discussion in Epta because it is vital at all stages. Beginners and virtuosos alike need to

5 constantly consider how to achieve an equilibrium of freedom with control. In this sense the issue is a wonderful way of uniting piano enthusiasts of every persuasion and stage! Motivation and social Lucinda Mackworth-Young, Pianist, Psychologist, Teacher, Lecturer, Consultant. Director of The Piano Teachers Course UK. If I were to ask all my students -from beginning amateurs to post Diploma professionals- what motivates them to practise on a regular basis, and why they stick with piano for so long, nearly all of them would say the Group Lessons and end of term Soirées. And what they would mean is: the social factor. Although they all learn individually, and plenty are motivated through doing Grade exams and Diplomas, they also come for Group Lessons, where around four people play to each other in a Safe Circle. The rules for this are that everyone is only allowed to feel, think and say something appreciative about the performance, and the performer's aim is to enjoy the experience of playing to people. Also, at the end of each term, those who've had five or more lessons are eligible to play in the Soirée - no charge and fizz afterwards. The rules are similar: Everyone is encouraged to say something appreciative about each other s performance which often includes warm comments about progress, and everyone is encouraged to reflect on and appreciate their own term s or year's achievements. As part of this, it s vital that people realise they are learning on their own terms, towards their own personal aims (whether to play a pop tune or pass a Diploma), and are not in competition with each other. Newsletter edited, compiled and edited by Liz Dewhurst with Karen Marshall.