Music Education
Part of the job of the music staff working on an opera is to deliver notes to the singers. Notes, in this context, are basically “things the singer is doing wrong”. If you’re a music staff member with compassion, this process can leave you feeling at best like Toby
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Interlude, Hong Kong’s classical music portal invites its readers to a passionately curated audio-visual knowledge portal. With contributors from diverse fields such as Psychology, Art History, Media Studies, alongside, the Musicians and the Musicologists, one is introduced to themes, which are organised around music history to contemporary music festivals.
Music Education
Even though pianists can boast some level of extraordinary abilities when it comes to being ambidextrous, we too are subject to our natural tendencies to favour our right or left hand. Let’s set aside for a moment what our limb-favouring means for our technique at the piano. Instead, let’
Music Education
Everyone who takes a music exam hopes to achieve a distinction and this needs careful preparation of the supporting tests as well as the pieces. Sight Reading Sight reading is playing or singing a previously unseen piece. Sight reading is tested in practical music exams because it is an important
Music Education
The best thing about opera is that it takes any human emotion, and blows it up to huge proportions. There’s really no such thing as “mildly happy” or “somewhat down” in opera; even an explosive emotion like anger is amplified. With so many anger-inducing headlines on our news feeds
Music Education
Gaining a distinction in a music exam is a great achievement. A distinction means that the candidate has achieved a high percentage when measured against pre-determined criteria: ABRSM: A distinction mark is 86% or higher Trinity College London: A distinction mark is 87% or higher London College of Music: A
Music Education
Unless a singer has perfect pitch (and a few of you lucky ones do), they’ll appreciate being given a starting pitch from the rehearsal pianist. Often, a pianist’s first instinct is to do exactly that: they play the singer’s first note on the piano, with one finger,
Music Education
Music exams are criterion-referenced, meaning that marks are awarded according to pre-determined criteria. The advantage of a criterion-referenced exam is that anyone can get a distinction as long as their performance is good enough when matched against the criteria, as opposed to a norm-referenced system, in which only a percentage
Music Education
In an interview with Eleanore Büning for FAZ, star soprano Anna Netrebko said of the teleprompter she used in Dresden to sing Elsa in Lohengrin, “Jetzt verrate ich Ihnen ein Geheimnis: Ich kann keinen deutschen Text memorieren.” (“Now I’ll tell you a secret: I cannot memorize any German text.
Music Education
And why people love it to distraction. A series of personal recollections by Zane Dalal There is something absolutely riveting about the world of opera. Even if your connection with Western classical opera is limited, you might immediately notice that friends and acquaintances who profess to loving it, don’t
Music Education
Maurice Bandmann’s story has nearly been lost to history. It was Bandmann, along with Jehangir Framji Karaka, a Parsi businessman and head of a firm of coal brokers, who built the Opera House in 1911. Once an integral character in the growth of theatre in India, Bandmann’s story
Music Education
A few years back, one of my friends gave me a copy of Maestro Roland Dyens’s Lettres (Letters, published 2001). I had heard a few of his works before. To name a few, Tango en Skaï, Libra Sonatine and Hommage à Frank Zappa. Although I had tried my hand
