A window into some important reflections for students and performers of classical music. At a group lesson at The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, September 2020, we listened to recordings produced before the advent of mass media such radio broadcasting and the commercial recording industry, which changed the musical landscape dramatically from around 1920 an onwards. (See playlist below) There was general agreement, that compared to today, these old recordings showed some clear tendencies: A good example is “Butterfly”, played by Edvard Grieg himself. As a student, quite frustrated, said: “Why doesn’t he play his piece, in the way, he has written it?”. That led to the realization, that we… Read More
Continue ReadingLooking at practicing
What do we classical musicians spend most of our time doing? That’s right: practicing. Nowadays this is mostly a completely closed and private process, where we are completely alone and prefer other people not to listen. As teachers, we don’t really know how our students practice, let alone our colleagues. Why has this become so? It wasn’t always like this. To take a famous example, Mozart practiced most of his childhood in front of people, and actually preferred it that way, also as an adult. And he ended up…quite successful, I think we would all agree. I feel certain that becoming more aware of what is happening in the actual… Read More
Continue ReadingNew ways in online music learning
(You can also find this at https://youtu.be/l8VnARkUFdA) Currently – because of COVID-19 – there is a lot of focus on how to do online music teaching. The vast majority is focusing on moving the normal learning situation into a digital environment. That is the synchronous learning situation, where the teacher and student are present at the same time. However, there is an entirely different group of opportunities in online music education, which we call asynchronous methods. Learning situations, where teacher and student are not simultaneously together. And this is, what this post will be about. It is not a technical review of the various solutions, but an overall description of… Read More
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