Last Wednesday, the White House welcomed 120 middle and high school music students from all over the country to participate in four different engaging workshops.  From the Blue Room to the Map Room and the East Room to the Diplomatic Reception Room, beautiful music and instructors’ guiding voices echoed through the halls of this historic home.  Aspiring students plucked their bows and strummed the strings of their guitars, while picking up tips and queues from their instructors, renowned classical musicians Awadagin Pratt on the piano, Joshua Bell on violin, Sharon Isbin with classical guitar, and Alisa Weilerstein on cello.

This link takes you to the page with more information as well as links to wonderful videos of the performances!

From The White House:

The greatest joy that this job affords – and there are many – is the chance to throw open the doors and invite Americans into the White House and expose them to the talents of their fellow Americans. One of the ways that the First Lady has been doing is this is through the White House Music Series. This series was conceived as a way to celebrate the arts, demonstrate the importance of arts education and encourage young people who believe in their talent to create a future for themselves in the arts community be it as a hobby or as a profession.

Please read the rest of the article here.

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)

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.