This month’s article is simply the foreword to the Foundations Course. After five years of research, refinement, and development, it is our pleasure to officially release the Foundations Courses in Violin and Piano. The Guitar and Cello editions are expected to be released in late April. Order copies here, or go to our Student Life page.

In thinking of how to introduce a student to this course, I think back to a time when I was sharing a box seat at a theater in Portugal with a good friend who was and is a prominent violinist. We were watching a young violinist (not older than 13) perform the entire Paganini concerto brilliantly, and my friend commented that he shudders at the thought of learning a piece as technically burdensome as the Paganini Concerto. I was momentarily surprised to hear it as I knew he had already performed it at a younger age and had performed many more difficult pieces since.

It did, however, call my attention to an interesting concept: at a young age we are not aware of how difficult our endeavors are. A child learns the entire Paganini concerto not realizing the gravity of the piece, and therefore approaches it without fear. An experienced violinist knows how difficult a piece like that is and approaches it with some anxiety (if not dread).

I often find myself going back and forth in my teaching with how much I should mentally prepare my students for the difficulty of their tasks. I wish there was a blanket answer I could give, but there isn’t. So I will take a moment to jot down a few of the things I discuss as a student leaves the beginner stages and enters the intermediate realm:

Most students (and many teachers) overlook the most challenging aspect of intermediate studies altogether. If we think of the end of the beginner course as a short single sonata movement or a pupil’s concerto movement, and the beginning of the advanced course as a full-length concerto, we see that a student moves from studying a piece that is approximately 2 pages long to a piece that is between 20 and 30 pages long. Developing the ability to handle a work this size is by far the most taxing endeavor of intermediate study.

So each student will be challenged through each of the rounds in this course to become a new musician, and to some extent a new person. At the least that’s what it feels like. Each round will require new practice techniques (both in technique and management), but more importantly will require a new resolve (mentally, physically, and emotionally). After all, if a student continues to learn the comfortable 4-bar section per week, it would take years to learn a single movement of a full-length concerto!

The secondary emphasis of this course is organization and practice technique (not instrumental technique) supported by a solid foundation in musicianship. Practice rotations, complex schedules, and review techniques are employed. In addition, the student will learn to understand their music through the study of composition and analysis, and approach it with a well-balanced and developed mind, ear, and technical skill set. A student with a disorganized mind will not be able to make the transition to the advanced course.

The technique and form elements of this course really are tertiary compared to the mental maturity required to complete it. Still, there will be plenty of focus on instrumental technique through an efficient developmental repertoire system.

Overall, any musician will find this course to be an extremely efficient and well-balanced way to traverse intermediate studies. A student who treats music as an extracurricular activity and has limited practice time will be able to complete the course in approximately four short years. A student who is professional-minded and devotes hours of practice each day will be able to do so much faster.

We look forward with great anticipation to developing a new generation of musicians who perform, compose, understand and analyze their music, and can communicate its complexities.

- Alexander Tseitlin

by Alexander Tseitlin

It still amazes me to think that there was a time when if you wanted to sit down for an hour and a half and see a creative piece, a movie was not an option; symphonies and operas held that place in our lives until a few decades ago. Sometime last fall, I was working on putting together the Foundations History Course, and wanted to see what was available on YouTube in the area of baroque operas. I stumbled upon a stunning production of Lully’s Cadmus. Even if you’re an opera skeptic, it would be hard to look at this and not be amazed at the production and the music. You could tell that the director and cinematographer went out of their way to create scene after scene the visually belonged in a renaissance painting.

At one point, my daughter passed behind my desk and caught it out of the corner of her eye. I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much wonder in a child’s voice when she asked, “Daddy, what’s that?

Fast-forward just a few weeks, and now the majority of “Movie Nights,” are replaced with sitting on the couch with some popcorn watching Michael Tilson-Thomas conducting “Rite of Spring,” or watching a recording of a Beethoven String Quartet performance.

We still have regular movie nights, but it’s great to see the kids entertained and inspired by masterworks as well as entertainment. I thought I’d include links to some of our favorite YouTube playlists, which include performances by great orchestras, ballet companies, guitarists, cellists, pianists, and violinists. Enjoy!

Lully’s Cadmus

SFO Rite of Spring
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf0e_n49dcQ&list=PLA91BCDCEFEA04DF6&feature=mh_lolz

Assorted Andres Segovia Performances (Guitar)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx9fPeaD_Ns&list=PLB6675681B529D36D&feature=mh_lolz

Abbado Mahler 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxpX5aImLw&list=PL13378531E528849C&feature=mh_lolz

Assorted Evgeny Kissin (piano)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJOOPqLx5gQ&list=PLC2A52AD541122EA4&feature=mh_lolz

Assorted Small Ensemble Chamber Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKFzy7tEXu4&list=PL5071C0C2853FA94C&feature=mh_lolz

This past Summer two of our assistant faculty members spent 6 weeks interning in the office learning the ins and outs of Eleos. In addition to the administrative, accounting, and corporate work they were doing, they got to spend some time in our production studio where they wrote, performed, recorded, and for the most part produced two short singles. I was finally able to finish mixing and mastering them (our studio has been extraordinarily busy this Fall).

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 ”This Little Bag” by Amanda Roberts

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 ”Loser” by Julia Geber

Amanda Roberts wrote a short piece based on Jane Austen’s poem “This Little Bag.” Julia Geber wrote a short piece based on Shel Silverstein’s poem “Loser.”

It’s a great representation of how powerful a great musician can be in the contemporary music world. What struck me about the pieces is how drastically different they are, and how well they reflect Julia and Amanda’s different personalities. If ever there was a pair of works that demonstrated the benefit of music as an expressive medium, these are the two. Enjoy!

by Alexander Tseitlin

Well, I suppose there are more than two ways in most situations. But before I digress:

I suppose some of our students’ parents wonder what goes on in our heads when we design our program. Every week I do a number of observations on my assistant faculty. I’ll slip in (hopefully) discreetly, watch for a few minutes, and slip out with a few notes to help them improve their teaching. This month, one particular idea stood out in my observations:

There’s a moment when a student just learns a piece: they’ve put all the notes together, and stand back to look at it. And the feeling is usually a mix between “I finally learned it,” and “I still don’t feel like I can play it all that well.” The latter feeling is expected (it’s a freshly painted product, after all).

Then comes the teacher’s next task: improvement. There really are primarily two ways to do this:

1. Drill said piece relentlessly for weeks.
2. Trust that technique and musicianship are concepts, and will improve with exposure to more music. Move on to the next piece and keep the current one in rotation.

With method 1, it may take 6 weeks to fully refine the piece. Method 2 may take 8 weeks, or 10. But at the end of those 10 weeks you will have a polished 1st piece, headway into the next one, AND a more refined playing ability because obviously the next piece is more technically advanced than the first.

And there lies the true issue: the student using method 1 did not actually progress in those 6 weeks, only refined; the student using method 2 refined and progressed.

Brahms Waltz in B Major, Allison Miner
Brahms Intermezzo in A Major, McKenna Coker
Giuliani La Chasse, Becca Turner
Bach Sonata in g minor, McKenna Coker
Beethoven Sonata in f minor, Amanda Roberts
Bach Minuet in G Major, Ariana Greenidge
Haydn Sonata in C Major, Kerria Pang
Nursery Rhyme Suite, Victor Matthews
Bach Chromatic Fantasie, Ranya Stover
Seitz Concerto in g minor, Liam Pang
Bach Chromatic Fantasie, Liam Pang

I remember sitting in a composition class at USC and watching a professor effortlessly explain the harmonic movement of a passage of Brahms. That’s when it occurred to me that it’s not only your breadth and depth of knowledge that’s important, it’s the fluency. My professor clearly had a knowledge of this depth for at least a decade, and can speak and understand it as if it was a native tongue. No matter how much I understood about harmony, I wouldn’t be able to practically use it for a while. It’d be like having the keys to an aircraft carrier with a rudder of a sailboat.

I have to admit I’m growing a little envious of these young students who so freely grasp these complex elements of harmony and composition. It would be an understatement to say that by the time they get to their teens, they’ll be fluent composers and intelligent musicians. They’re working on things you wouldn’t normally see outside of a college classroom (sometimes even in graduate school). To the left, Becca calls out scale-degree analysis with the technical notations of inversions from the Bach Minuet in G Major. In the video below, I explain and demonstrate the concept of tonicization (moving to another key area) as seen from the perspective of an ant on the table.