I happen to love holiday and Christmas music, and it is not just that the melodies are so classic and they conjure up wonderful old memories of enjoyable times growing up with my family and church in a rural Virginia farming community. What I’ve discovered as a piano teacher is the power of one of those old melodies to actually change a young life. It...
Read MoreBy Alyssa Cowell We offer formal vocal training at The Catoctin School of Music. Many times students sign up for voice lessons expecting to learn a new song every week, or practice singing songs that they hear on YouTube or Spotify. This is not the purpose of voice lessons. Formal vocal training is all about evaluating a student’s current vocal technique and teaching them to change...
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I came across this article titled, “8 Things Top Practicers Do Differently.” http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/8-things-top-practicers-do-differently/ To summarize – experimenters observed a handful of piano majors as they learned a moderately challenging 3 bar excerpt during a single practice session. The experiment was designed to identify the practice habits that lead to a higher or lower success ranking among the participants. Participants were ranked on their...
Read Moreby Drew Holcomb The classical guitar is a world-renowned instrument and has undergone many transformations to get where it is today. From the medieval, renaissance, and to the baroque era, the classical guitar has been revolutionized. The baroque classical guitar, in particular, was one of the more dominant instruments in music history, but it had to undergo many steps to get there. Through its improvements in...
Read MoreBy Marc Powell I was recently asked by one of my high school seniors to write a letter of recommendation for his college application. This was my first time being asked, so it took a bit of asking around and researching how to do this. Here is what I figured out to make it easy: -Write honestly and constructively – The letter should make it sound the...
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