Dear Friends,

This week I'm teaching at the Summer Piano Institute in Xanthi, Greece. 🇬🇷 It's an incredible experience - there are about 50 piano students and 6 piano faculty here at this festival.

Before I came here, I was thinking about what makes a music festival or a camp such a special, enriching experience. Here are four of my takeaways from being here this week:

🌎 Festivals create a mini-community. Pianists are here from all around the US, from Europe, South America and different parts of Greece. For this brief period of time, we are all coming together to create our very own community, with its own dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Students have lessons with three different faculty, all lessons are public, we have daily recitals and masterclasses, and there are also outings for the group. All of these shared experiences create bonds between people.

🕸 Festivals provide networking opportunities. Students are in the process not only of learning how to play the piano, but they are at the beginning of their own professional career and will, someday soon, be out in the world doing interesting musical things. Some of the connections made here during this week will surely yield fruit in unexpected and as yet unknown ways, which will happen when people who met here make a decision in the future to collaborate and create something new.

💗 The participants have a shared love for music. Different people express this in different ways, and people might not always agree on how to interpret something, but the love that is expressed by both students and faculty is palpable, in performances and lessons.

🎹 Learning the piano is a lifetime process. In watching my faculty colleagues teach here, I am seeing totally different ways of thinking about music and approaching students. I am taking notes and learning myself. Teaching here broadens my own musical perspective, and will therefore help me improve my own playing and teaching.

What about you? Have you ever been to a music festival or had another kind of experience where you came together with like-minded people and created a community? Feel free to hit reply and tell me about it!

Have a great week - and Happy Practicing! 🎹

-Kate

PS Thank you to all of you who wrote to me after last week's email with your condolences about Pepper. It meant a lot to me to hear your stories!

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Quote of the Week:

"Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

- Aristotle

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Today’s Practice Tip - Study Your Score! 🎼

Continuing on last week's theme of visualizing away from the piano, today's practice tip is to study the score away from the piano. While on the road, I have been doing mental practice for some new pieces I'm learning, which is a quiet and enjoyable activity that cultivates inner calm and brings me deep into the piece.

This week's exercise:

Find an enjoyable place to sit where you will not be interrupted. (This week, I have been sitting at a table under a tree at an outdoor coffee shop.) Open the score to a piece you are working on and look at the music while imagining how it sounds in your head. Engage your intuition and let yourself explore the music and notice things in the score as you read through it silently: dynamics and articulation, overall thematic structure, the emotions you feel when you imagine a certain spot... whatever catches your attention as you do this work.

This kind of practice will help deepen your relationship with your piece, and over time you will build a mental structure of it in your head that comes about independently of the physical practice you do at the keyboard.

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🎧 My Favorite Recording This Week: Clementi Piano Sonatas

I have been enjoying listening to this wonderful recording of Clementi's sonatas by German pianist Stefan Irmer. Clementi is known to many pianists for his easier sonatinas, but his sonatas are challenging, sophisticated, multifaceted works that, in my opinion, are underappreciated. I particularly like his Op. 25 and his Op. 40 sonatas!

You can preview the Op. 40 Sonatas here!​

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Upcoming Dates and Events:

July 26-29: National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, Schaumberg, Illinois

August 23: First day of classes at Butler University! The fall semester begins!

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