Our Anecdotes and Activities
Please take note of the following dates:
Our participating students earned a combined total of over $150 in brand new music of their choice. Favorites include Classical, Kid’s Songs, Jazz & Blues, Pop, Rock & Roll and even Improvisation! The students also helped to raise money to support our 20th Anniversary Recital this January with complete success. They have collected enough funds to cover many of our show’s expenses, allowing us to open our show to the public with FREE ADMISSION for the 20th year in a row.
THANK YOU ALL for helping to support our 20th Annual Piano Recital! Your efforts are appreciated – this should be our greatest show yet!!
We’re going to try something new this year – cookie sales! And I don’t mean just *any* little cookies – I mean DEB’S BAKERY COOKIES! These things are not only fantastic, they are HUGE! Here’s the plan: Students will be able to help defray the ever rising costs of our Annual Piano Recital – building use costs, insurance, printing and advertising, just to name the big expenditures. PLUS – students will receive credit for each dozen cookies they sell, which will go toward earning books and sheet music, either for the recital or just for fun!
This week a “shopping list” was sent home with each student to decide which book(s) they may like to earn. They will earn one book or two pieces of sheet music for selling 6 dozen cookies. The more they sell, the more books/sheets they can earn. High sellers may even be able to put their credits toward bigger items like a metronome or music bag.
Cookie order forms will go home with the students the week of October 4-6 and must be returned in two weeks – the week of October 18-20. Fresh cookies will then be available for pickup beginning the following Tuesday (OCTOBER 25) at 11:00 a.m., or whenever you are at your lesson the week of October 25-27.
We know that you will LOVE these cookies! May I recommend the snickerdoodles?
NOTE: The two boxes represent ONE DOZEN. There is 1/2 dozen cookies in EACH BOX.
Elkland School Auditorium: Twenty-two local students are now preparing to perform three piano solos each, in order by age, youngest first. These performances will be intermingled with duets wherein each student will play with another student, family member or teacher. There will be a brief intermission with light refreshments.
Our setlist includes quite a variety of covers: Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Counting Crows, Christina Perri, Paramore, The All-American Rejects, Vanessa Carlton, Miley Cyrus, Rascal Flatts, Ben Folds, Uncle Kracker, The Fray, Secondhand Serenade and the Glee Cast.
Both shows are open to the public. There will be NO ADMISSION fee.
I would like to thank the 10 students who submitted items for our Musical Puzzle Book! Thank you ALL for your participation – you did a great job. Each of the ten participating students will receive one complimentary copy of the finished book. All other students will receive one special puzzle, inspired by each one of them and created by Audrey.
If anyone would like to receive additional copies of the puzzle book, they are available for the cost of materials – $2.00 each and would make a great gift for family and friends.
Puzzle cover contest winner: Audrey! (who was the only submission – and yes, it’s clip art *sigh*) 🙂
Special thanks to Sylvia Williams, who tirelessly proofread every single puzzle and even submitted one!
I am now taking submissions for our “DESIGN THE COVER” contest. Everyone is eligible, whether you submitted a puzzle or not. We need something that will well represent Audrey’s Piano Studio and our Summer of 2011 Musical Puzzle Book. Cover size: 8.5 x 11 normal printer paper. It can include text, art, or both. It can be hand drawn or computer generated. Designs may be submitted via email or handed in at your lesson. DEADLINE: August 10 – that’s just two weeks!
As for the puzzles themselves, I’ve extended the deadline to August 10 as well. REMEMBER: Puzzle submissions are not limited to Word Searches and Crosswords: You may include anything: A dot to dot, a picture to color, another type of puzzle – ANYTHING!! You are only limited by 1) our musical theme and 2) your imagination.
Audrey’s A440 is currently visiting the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee!
Many are aware of the famous song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” called “Do-Re-Mi”. The lyrics teach the solfege syllables by linking them with English homophones (words that are pronounced the same (or nearly the same) as another word but differ in meaning). It begins, “Do (Doe) a dear, a female dear. Re (Ray), a drop of golden sun. Mi (Me), a name I call myself.”, etc.
The 1959 show tune was a huge hit with me as a child, but sadly, the current generation doesn’t seem to know it. We shall attempt to remedy that – at least locally. Piano Guild Auditions have a musicianship phase called “Ear Training” in which first year students can earn a song credit, and thus a point, for singing the solfege from any given note. This is an excellent goal/skill for any piano student to attain.
I have here demonstrated the solfege in the Key of C, but it can be sung using any scale, and thus beginning on any given note.
On a side note, one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams, noted in his article “Unfinished Business of the Century” that, while each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives its meaning, when they hit “La” something went awry. Read on for his humorous thoughts:
“‘La, a note to follow so…’ What? Excuse me? ‘La, a note to follow so…’ What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?
“Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in a ‘a note to follow so’ and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.
“Only when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better. Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isn’t it? ‘La… a something, something… what?’
“One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it. And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.
“How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? ‘La, a…, a…’ — well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.”
With our recent lessons in A440, we’ve all be getting to know “Audrey’s A440” – a tuning fork about to go on an adventure! Read more to find out about it:
Ever hear of geocaching? It has absolutely nothing to do with piano, of course, but our studio has become involved in that we’re sending a new travel bug on a journey around the world, and hopefully to many musical places. In addition to that, the travel bug’s namesake will be a brand new cache right here in Osceola. If you decide that you’d like to join in the fun, please visit the geocaching site and get started! All you need is a GPS and a sense of adventure.
