September 26, 2009

Alicia de Larrocha, Pianist, Dies at 86
By ALLAN KOZINN

Alicia de Larrocha, the diminutive Spanish pianist esteemed for her elegant Mozart performances and regarded as an incomparable interpreter of Albéniz, Granados, Mompou and other Spanish composers, died on Friday evening in a hospital in Barcelona. She was 86.

Her death was confirmed by Gregor Benko, a piano historian, record producer and family friend. He said she had been in declining health since breaking her hip two years ago.

In a career that began when she was a child — she made her concert debut at 5, and her first recording at 9 — Ms. de Larrocha cultivated a poetic interpretive style in which gracefulness was prized over technical flashiness or grand, temperamental gestures. But her approach, combined with her small stature — she was only 4-foot-9 — was deceptive: early in her career she played all the big Romantic concertos, including those of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, and she could produce a surprisingly large, beautifully sculptured sound.  [...]

Ms. de Larrocha’s most enduring contribution, however, was her championship of Spanish composers. Although Arthur Rubinstein played some of this repertory, few other pianists outside Spain did, and none with Ms. de Larrocha’s flair. She made enduring recordings of Albéniz’s “Iberia” and Granados’s “Goyescas,” and helped ease those works into the standard piano canon. She also made a powerful case for the piano music of Joaquín Turina, a composer otherwise known mostly for the guitar music he wrote for Andrés Segovia, and she almost single-handedly built a following for Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer of quietly shimmering, poetic works.  [...]

Ms. de Larrocha began to demand piano lessons when she was 3, after visiting her aunt as she taught students. At the keyboard on her own, Ms. de Larrocha imitated what she had seen her aunt’s students do, and impressed her aunt sufficiently that she took Ms. de Larrocha to Marshall. He was less encouraging. He said it was too early to start lessons, and suggested that Ms. de Larrocha be kept away from the piano. Ms. de Larrocha said that once her aunt locked the instrument, she banged her head on the floor until Marshall relented and began to teach her.  [...]

“There are two kinds of repertory Alicia plays,” Mr. Breslin said in 1978. “Things she plays extremely well, and things she plays better than anyone else. But what I think makes her a phenomenon is that she doesn’t give the impression of being a great personality. She’s cool as a cucumber. Onstage, she doesn’t even like to look at the audience. So what the public is responding to is something in the music.”  [...]

But over all her technique never failed her, nor did her sense of color, especially in the twin pillars of her repertory, Spanish music and Mozart. She continued to earn glowing reviews.

When she played her final Carnegie Hall performance — the chamber version of Mozart’s Concerto No. 12 in A (K. 414), with the Tokyo String Quartet, in November 2002 — The New York Times reported that, “The small details — the trills and turns that adorn the score — as well as the more expansive pianism in the cadenzas and the glowing Andante, had considerable energy behind them.”

The review continued: “Her performance had the bright, light quality that she brought to her playing in the ’70s, when her appearances at the Mostly Mozart Festival were among the highlights of New York summers. If anything, her approach to Mozart on Monday was more fluid, more carefully nuanced than it was then.”

(source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/arts/music/26larrocha.html)

I like numbers.  I like keeping track.  I did the math, and here’s the result:

During the eight weeks from June 1 through yesterday, July 24, I taught 165 private piano lessons which ranged in length from 30 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes.  In addition, there were two performance classes for K through 3rd grade, four group events for high school students, and six partner lessons for two 2nd graders. 

Individual students and the number of lessons taken so far this summer:

Xavier:  7 piano lessons;

Blaise:  13 piano lessons, 6 partner lessons, two performance classes;

Jessica:  30 piano lessons, two performance classes;

Taylor:  8 piano lessons, 4 group events;

Anna:  15 piano lessons, 6 partner lessons, two performance classes; 

Abby:  11 piano lessons, 3 group events;

Nicole and Coleman:  12 piano lessons each;

Grace and John:  4 piano lessons each, two performance classes;

Liza and Ronette:  7 piano lessons;

Corbin:  8 piano lessons;

Kyle C:  14 piano lessons, two performance classes;

Kyle M:  7 piano lessons, two performance classes;

Zane:  5 piano lessons;

Jamey:  6 piano lessons, one group event. 

Additionally, I observed/interviewed 5 students, and enjoyed the company of three guest students.

This coming week, we will wrap up the summer with a few more piano lessons and one more performance class.

Initial post: Jul 23, 2009 12:16 PM PDT
Jeffrey P. Bezos says:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com
(source: www.amazon.com)

Robert James

Hello Teacher,

My name is Robert James,Am interested in learning Piano lesson in your place,i am 18 years of age and i will like to know how much your charge per hour and let me know how many lesson will be taken in a week,I will like like you to get back to me on time because i have already told my dad about it and he traveled a lot,so please get back to me earlier before he go for another trip ok.
Waiting to read from you.
Regards,
Robert James.

John Hill
Jun 27

Hi, How are you doing today?I want a private lessons for my son(Paul) at your location.Paul is 14 year old boy and is ready to learn.Please I want to know your policy with regard to fees, cancellations, and make-up lessons.Also,get back to me with the total fees for six month lessons(one-hour lesson in a week) starting from July 10th.
In addition,I want to know the lessons location and your phone number.Looking forward to hearing from you.
My best regards,

John.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

K-STATE SOPHOMORE FROM OVERLAND PARK RESEARCHES THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE BEHAVIORS AND ATTITUDES ELICITED FROM DIFFERENT MUSIC LYRICS

MANHATTAN — The words to “Itsy Bitsy Spider” tell a simple story about an arachnid and a spout, but simply recalling the lines could initiate an unintentional attitude.

That’s the focus of research by Kansas State University’s Eduardo Alvarado, sophomore in pre-law, Overland Park, who is looking at the behaviors elicited from the musical lyrics of common songs.

Alvarado is working with Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychology at K-State, through K-State’s Developing Scholars Program, which pairs underrepresented students with faculty mentors to work on research projects.

Alvarado is studying the effects priming can have on behavior by looking at the positive and negative responses stimulated from music lyrics from a variety of song categories, including patriotic and Christmas songs. Priming, he said, is when someone is exposed to a certain environment and their subconscious is activated, and then they tend to act in accordance with that environment without deliberate intent. Priming can manipulate behavior; if someone witnesses violent behavior, they would likely behave more violently.

“One of the key implications is that behaviors may be malleable in the sense that many individuals have the capacity for similar reactions in social situations,” Saucier said. “Relatively small-scale primes may activate certain reactions, and these may be pro-social or anti-social depending on the context.”

Alvarado said the researchers wanted to see if certain musical lyrics activated a pro-social response, which is a positive feeling like empathy, or an anti-social response, which is a negative feeling like aggression. Participants from K-State’s spring general psychology courses participated in the initial project for class credit. The participants had to complete a survey and do a lyrics exercise. For the lyrics exercise, participants had to fill in missing lyrics for different songs.

The songs involved in the study were patriotic songs, such as “The Star-Spangled Banner”; secular Christmas songs, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”; religious Christmas songs, such as “O Holy Night”; and neutral songs, such as “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

Participants filled out a survey that asked questions about their religion and their attitudes toward other cultures and diversity. Half of the participants were asked to complete the survey before the lyric exercise, and the other half completed the survey after the exercise.

Alvarado said the researchers assume people act similarly to primes, and they looked overall at the surveys to see if there was a change in the responses before and after completing the lyrics exercise. They wanted to see if the songs created a pro-social or an anti-social response. He said the preliminary findings showed that the patriotic songs had a negative effect on the participants, as shown through their responses to the survey’s questions about other cultures and diversity. The patriotic songs made the participants close-minded and prejudiced.

“Once they were in a patriotic point of view, they were less empathetic,” Alvarado said. “They didn’t put themselves in other people’s perspective.”

Though songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” were meant to be neutral primes, the researchers found that they stimulated a pro-social response.

“You wouldn’t think that those songs were going to put people in a certain mind frame, but they do activate a certain attitude,” Alvarado said. “We found it made people more accepting and more empathetic. The reason for this we think is because we used to listen to these songs when we were little and they kind of activate childhood happiness.”

Saucier said follow-up research will focus on using stronger and more salient primes to influence pro-social and anti-social behavior. Jessica McManus, graduate student in psychology, has been collaborating on the project.

Alvarado said he has learned that being involved in research is a full-time commitment, but he wants to continue learning more through his projects.

“At first I was nervous, but I knew it was a really good opportunity,” Alvarado said. “A lot of people don’t know they can participate in research as an undergraduate.”

Alvarado said he likes, through K-State’s Developing Scholars Program, learning about research projects other students are involved in. He plans to go to law school and thinks his research experience will help him understand how people think and react to different situations.

Alvarado is from Mexico City and moved to Overland Park when he was 11 years old. He is bilingual, speaking English and Spanish, and is learning Italian. A 2008 graduate of Shawnee Mission North High School, he is the son of Eduardo Alvarado and Lisa Lopez.

source: http://www.k-state.edu/media/newsreleases/jun09/ealvarado62309.html

… and I love people who support it:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/05/25/brown.graduates.sidney.frank/

For  I-don’t-remember-how-long  I have been taking the last week of May off, starting the piano summer the first full week of June.  This week “off” is of course no vacation for me as this is the time when I am busiest putting the (somewhat) final touches on the summer schedule and calendar. 

I am looking forward to teaching lots of private, one-on-one lessons - not only the regular once-a-week kind, but as many as the students show up for and my schedule allows.  And my schedule allows for quite a bit, and quite a bit of flexibility, too:   I am actually looking forward to being able to adjust my schedule to my students’ summer schedule which means working around their vacations, summer camps, and other activites.   Where other teachers get exasperated because their schedule changes from week to week – I think it is wonderful that I have that flexibility.

In addition to the private lessons, there will be group events, all kinds of different activities – performance classes where we learn what it takes to perform (performing is so different from playing and therefore requires a different kind of preparation), history lessons, learning about and listening to recordings of pieces by different composers, etc. 

When I’m not teaching or preparing lessons, I will be outside, playing with dirt.  This now is the most beautiful = prolific time of the year.  On our walks, Mark and I find something new in the neighborhood gardens every day!  Our own yard is still very much at the beginning, I only started planting a few weeks ago, and that’s what it looks like.  But it is starting to come together, a bit greener and more colorful every day now, it seems. 

It is going to be a beautiful summer.

Source: diveintomark’s twitter tweats

1.
The boys are having a pillow throwing contest. I can’t imagine how this could possibly get out of hand.

2.
The tweet is coming from inside the pillow fort. I repeat: the tweets are coming from INSIDE THE PILLOW FORT.

3. (about an hour later)
Update: the attack has been rebuffed, the pillow fort has been razed, and a peace treaty has been forged. It involves ice cream.

(In case you wonder what this has to do with piano or music or teaching or learning – absolutely nothing.)

an abstract from an article by Isabelle Peretz, Elvira Brattico, Miika Jarvenpaa, and Mari Tervaniemi in Brain. A Journal of Neurology

Like language, music engagement is universal, complex and present early in life. However, ~4% of the general population experiences a lifelong deficit in music perception that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain damage, intellectual deficiencies or lack of exposure. This musical disorder, commonly known as tone-deafness and now termed congenital amusia, affects mostly the melodic pitch dimension. Congenital amusia is hereditary and is associated with abnormal grey and white matter in the auditory cortex and the inferior frontal cortex. In order to relate these anatomical anomalies to the behavioural expression of the disorder, we measured the electrical brain activity of amusic subjects and matched controls while they monitored melodies for the presence of pitch anomalies. Contrary to current reports, we show that the amusic brain can track quarter-tone pitch differences, exhibiting an early right-lateralized negative brain response. This suggests near-normal neural processing of musical pitch incongruities in congenital amusia. It is important because it reveals that the amusic brain is equipped with the essential neural circuitry to perceive fine-grained pitch differences. What distinguishes the amusic from the normal brain is the limited awareness of this ability and the lack of responsiveness to the semitone changes that violate musical keys. These findings suggest that, in the amusic brain, the neural pitch representation cannot make contact with musical pitch knowledge along the auditory-frontal neural pathway.

So, in essence, and pushing this issue a bit further:  this is like autism with regard to music?  Just like an individual with autism who can perfectly well see and hear – but then doesn’t know what to do with this sensory input (what does it mean when someone “smiles”??), an individual with an amusic brain can hear and distinguish musical details just as well as everyone else – but what is being heard has no meaning because there is no “contact with music pitch knowledge” due to a “lack of responsiveness”.

The question, as always, is:  what do we do – now that we know?

From the book “Art & Fear” :

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Analysis Paralysis.  I sometimes tell a student that while mindless “practicing” (which isn’t really practicing, it’s just putting in time)  is counterproductive, dangerous and generally bad, mindful repetitions, playing something over and over, observing along the way, making minute corrective changes as you play, over and over, can lead to better results than highly sophisticated, well-thought-out ideas that never make it out of your head.  

There is a difference between making clay pots and practicing the piano:  if your first clay pot doesn’t turn out to be a masterwork, you can just set it aside and go for another one.  When you practice, which is an athletic activity, every repetition has the potential – for good or for bad – to form a habit, to cement one certain way of playing.  There’s nothing – well, not much – more frustrating than finding out, after having played something numerous times, that you practiced a mistake – wrong note, wrong fingering, wrong rhythm, wrong motion.  It tends to become ingrained, and thus a pain to undo. 

Still, there is something to be said for just jumping in and doing it, mindfully, listening, paying attention to what you just did, over and over, correcting as you go.

My name is Sibylle Kuder, I am auditing Teri Holmberg’s Intro to Music Therapy class.  Before our weekly observation today, I arrived early and sat in an observation booth, watching and listening through the one-way mirror to the group in the room.   This had nothing to do with the Music Therapy session, this was just the “regular” pre-school group, doing their various pre-school things:  some children painted, others drew on paper, or read, built castles, etc.  There were three adults in the room, young women, students of the Early Childhood program? 

They moved among the children, watching and interacting.

At one point, a small girl drew a picture of a giraffe on a dry-erase board.  One of the adults started to write the name of the animal by the picture on the dry-erase board, stopped in the middle, turned to one of the other adults and asked, “How do you spell ‘giraffe’?”  – “Giraffe?”  -   ”One ‘f’ or two?”  -  She wrote it with one ‘f’ and looked at it, unsure whether it looked correct or not.  The other adult who didn’t know how to spell it either said, “That’s a hard one to spell.”  To which the first one, looking at the little girl, replied, “Yeah, that’s a hard one to spell!”

Please understand that I have no problem with someone who doesn’t know whether giraffe is spelled with one ‘f’ or two.  (In French, Portuguese, Polish it is spelled with one ‘f’; in German, English, Italian it is spelled with two.)   In English, you cannot tell by sounding it out; or someone may have trouble spelling in general; or the correct answer may escape you for the moment – all of which I find perfectly acceptable reasons.  What I find unacceptable and inexcusable, in an educational setting (which I assume the Stone House is), is that the two young women left it at that:  they seemed perfectly content with not knowing how to spell the word, reassuring themselves and the little girl that it was a hard word to spell.  I find it inexcusable that the realization that ‘giraffe’ is hard to spell was not immediately followed by a “Let’s look it up!”  – I bet that it would have taken me less than two minutes to find a book in that room that had the word ‘giraffe’ in it.  – Or at least a “We’ll have to look that up later!”  -  or sending the little girl “… go see if you can find the book with the animals so we can see how ‘giraffe’ is spelled.”  Or something.

:

While we were waiting  in a different observation booth for the Music Therapy session to start, I watched a different group.  This group was sitting on the floor, singing along with the teacher.  Or trying to sing.  While I realize that not every Early Childhood Teacher has had formal Early Childhood Music and Movement training, I do expect anyone who works with children to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the musical development of young children:  children’s voices have a very narrow singing range, they sing comfortably between about D above Middle C, and up to A or B.  This is not the normal singing range for adults who tend to sing much lower.  However, children cannot sing that low.  What you get if you expect them to sing along with you in the lower range is children who use their speaking voices, they sound like they “sing” out of tune.   One or two of the children were attempting to sing an octave higher than the teacher which, again, is out of their range.  If you keep that up, you end up with children who learn that they cannot sing in tune because they were not allowed/encouraged to develop their singing voices in the range which is natural for children (but not as comfortable for most adults).  “Children are not little adults” – that goes for singing, too!

I don’t expect only spelling or music specialists to work with the children in the Stone House, but I do expect an environment which fosters a love of learning and inquisitive minds (looking something up if you don’t know it), and in which children’s specific needs are taken into account.

Hard to believe that the following is apparently not common knowledge among teachers (and parents):

Developmental psychology tells us many things that, as music instructors, we need to know. Primarily, it tells us the thinking style of the child; that is, whether the child is dominated by his or her perceptions, or by logic. It tells us why children at certain ages do certain things, such as why a child may gaze away from the piano while playing. As an example, a preschooler would gaze away due to the inability to ‘not look’ at something else in the room (known as centration). A child age 7 or older may look away because he or she is not aware that looking at the score is necessary, while an adolescent may be looking away to try out a newfound skill of memorizing quickly. This is only one of many situations that require a solid knowledge of cognition as a function of age.

Developmental Psychology also tells us why children may become stressed in certain situations. Preschoolers become stressed when aspects of their environment change; the more change, the more stress. Older children tend to become stressed when they believe they have broken the rules, and therefore seek to know what the rules are. Adolescents often talk themselves into being stressed due to their interpretation of the events around them.

Find the rest of the article at merchantcircle.

Schneeflöckchen, Weißröckchen,
wann kommst du geschneit,
du wohnst in den Wolken,
dein Weg ist so weit.

Komm setz dich ans Fenster,
du lieblicher Stern;
malst Blumen und Blätter,
wir haben dich gern.

Schneeflöckchen, du deckst uns
die Blümelein zu,
dann schlafen sie sicher
in himmlischer Ruh’.

Here you can listen to the melody for this song (played on piano, no voices).

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/12/08/vatican-solar-array-goes-live/