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Young students work in an ensemble setting with Suzuki instructor Galina Jitlina

We will go through a daily warm-up together and examine elements of technique and some approaches to practising and learning. We will also do a daily sight-reading and touch on other topics such as performing and basic pedagogy.

Philip will show off his cello, the sounds it can make and some of the elements behind the techniques that shape his playing.

This workshop will focus on the best methods – according to modern neuroscience – for learning new skills, improving what you know, and maintaining those improvements with the least amount of wasted time and effort. Find out what the most current research has to say about learning and memory, and how we can apply that to music to increase our efficiency in learning.

Are long practice sessions more effective than short ones? Are there limits to how much you can learn in a day? Is it better to focus on one song, or to randomly switch between several? Are certain times of day better for memorization? Can we do anything to improve our working memory? What happens when we space out our practice sessions with minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months in-between them? And is it possible to improve between those practice sessions without practicing? We’ll be answering all of these questions and more on July 5th.

In the eighteenth century, partimento was an important part of music pedagogy and a

primary mechanism by which apprentice musicians learned to improvise. Partimenti utilize pattern recognition, repetition, and variation in order to engrain stylistic features and compositional tools of the time. In this manner, apprentices would eventually become “native speakers” in the eighteenth- century style. Yet, today both partimento and improvisation are niche, specialist skills and are largely unfamiliar to most classical-music performers, even though eighteenth-century music plays a key role in today’s pedagogy and public concerts. This presentation is derived from a paper that aims to lay the groundwork for adapting partimento practice for the guitar. Therefore, it is intended for both partimento scholars and advanced guitarists with a background in eighteenth-century compositional procedures. To this end, procedures from the Neapolitan regole, and in particular, Fedele Fenaroli’s “Regole musicali per i principianti di cembalo”, are discussed in terms of guitar performance. Examples from Mauro Giuliani, Fernando Sor, and other early-nineteenth century guitarists are selected in order to examine how they solved the compositional problems laid out in the regole for the guitar. This presentation does not necessarily seek to develop a strict eighteenth-century style, but rather filter these procedures through the music of the guitarists who wrestled with them in the first part of the nineteenth century.

A masterclass is a special type of music lesson. The class will take place in front of a group of people following a performance by the student of the music (or section of the music) The instructor may take a moment to address a few general topics to the group and the group will have a chance to ask questions.

For students particularly anxious about playing in front of others, classes may be arranged private but please note a part of the benefit of a masterclass is the help in overcoming performance anxiety.