Word of the Week
Grazioso Gracefully
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The Composers and Their Music
More videos today! This time, we're taking a look at some of the music of Chopin, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. If those three were novelists, Chopin would be the romance novelist, Tchaikovsky would be writing tragedies, and Brahms would contribute the epics and swashbuckling adventures. However, the piece of music I'm going to share by Chopin may feel contradictory to the above statement. It's not really typical of the lyrical, soothing melodies that mark most of his compositions. But the Revolutionary Etude is among my personal favourites. This Brahms piece is one that I learned for my ARCT. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea (most people don't care for Brahms's music), but this was without a shadow of a doubt my absolute favourite piece to play on my ARCT list. Finally, because it's more or less the Christmas season, who doesn't "The Russian Dance" from The Nutcracker? (Again, not a great illustration of Tchaikovsky's...
Resources for Composer Month!
Hello, everyone! This month is Composer Month! Students will be competing in teams to see who can collect the most facts about Chopin, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. The winning team at the end of the month gets chocolate. 🍫 That being said, you can expect to see a lot of composer-themed blog posts this month. I haven't got a schedule for what I'll be putting out this week, but this week it's YouTube videos with facts. Here's a video about Brahms: And one about Tchaikovsky: The creator of the above videos didn't have one on Chopin, unfortunately. So here's a video from a different channel that I pulled up. It's actually quite fun to watch, with the artist sketching and painting as the video's audio progresses. There you go, folks! Stay tuned next week. I might give some personal opinions on the composers, share videos of their music, or dig up more facts like these for next week's blog post!
Word of the Week
Risoluto Boldly (It also means resolute, but that's optional for students to say next week.)
October Update: It was pretty normal, actually
Once a month, I try to write an update. And I can honestly say that October is probably my least favourite month to write updates for. After all the excitement of September's theme month , October always feels so bland. It's little more than a frantic juggling of assigning Christmas pieces, tackling theory, and trying to stay on top of students' technique. Honestly, I do try to make lessons fun, even in October, but we also do need to move through their method books. Christmas pieces are the best part. This year, I finally purchased a few more Christmas books for students. There are a lot of carols that are popular, but also still under copyright, that kids love to play. With traditional carols, it's actually easy to find sites that have free, easy sheet music for beginners. I found a new one this year. It's called Christmas Music Songs. It's great! But, of course, when you have songs that are not pu...