Sunday 19 July 2009

Hi everyone,

First of all, apologies on behalf of myself and Olivia for not 'blogging it' sooner. The computers we normally use have both experienced hard-drive failures and there are NO internet cafes in Thevara!!!! Anyway, 60 km away from Thevara, I'm sat in a small interenet cafe sweating like mad trying my best to touch-type, for the first time I might add, to finish this as quickly as I can so I can get out and breathe!!!! So . . . I'll just stop rambling and get on with it . . .

As well settling into our laid back, relaxed, possibly even chilled morning routines (just for you Ruairi (",) we have also settled into 5 hours of teaching for 6 days a week. Monday is guitar for me followed by four days of piano and finally the three vocal ensembles on Saturday.

SINGING

One of the major battles I have had to overcome from the start is the sheer enthusiasm of the owner of the school. She firmly believes that if you put your passion into singing, it's more than enough. It is an absolutely beautiful way of thinking that I don't condone at all but given the level of technical skill she wants from her students and they want for themselves it is rather difficult so . . . How do I introduce technical exercises but make them 'passionate'?

I use a diversion tactic not dissimilar to those used in card tricks. I disguise the technical aspect e.g. moving the larynx, by talking of how we may want to put more or less 'emotion' (or tone) into a note. As for sliding up and down scales while altering the larynx, I had to talk about this in terms of 'intensity' and 'emotional climax'. It sounds drastic but it seriously was my only option at this point. ITseems to work a treat and . . . now that she is sufficiently happy that I am working on 'emotion', I drop the bomb and reveal it is in fact a technical exercise and very good for the voice. She loves this idea! Hooray! I then try to push it further by saying that to some extent, we have to detatch ourselves from putting all our emotions into music when practicing and act as a sort of 'technician' so that in performance when certain feelings ARE to be conveyed to the audience we have the technical ability and fallback to do so. She is not so keen on this idea and replies with 'if there is no emotion in practice then the song is dead'. I leave it there, but I am sure that with a few more weeks our viewpoints will meet somewhere in the middle.

GUITAR

The students here have been learning guitar, on average, for about 1 year. However, I discovered that most of them couldn't read music OR even Tablature. They were set on just learning the chords to deifferent songs.

On talking to most of the older pupils I realised that they were in fact frustrated as they LOVED guitar songs but just thought the sound was a bit DULL when THEY played them. Hmm . . . Not sure what they meant. By fluke I was playing along with one of the students and I started inprovising over the top and the student asked me how to do it. On showing him how I use a scale to improvise he wasn't that impressed. I took another angle. I showed him how I used chords AND my knowledge of scales to create added/suspended notes, though for now I just call them EXTRA notes, he loved it. This is what the guitarists wanted! They wanted to learn HOW to find the chords and HOW to change them to make them more interesting. I focused on this aspect in the next week and the change in attentiveness and eagerness of the pupils was dramatic. I am NOT going to try and teach them notation in 7 weeks as I don't feel I will be using my time effectively. As they have been taught by ear and most of them can recognise mistakes/added notes, even if they don't know what they are, I hope to, in the remaining 6 weeks, give the pupils an undersanding of HOW to find Chords and scales and move it around the guitar to get different colours and possibilities, but also HOW to carry on discovering the guitar after I've gone. My BIGGEST challenge in this deparment I feel.

PIANO to follow soon, unfortunately my connection is about to an end and I have some elephants to visit. Goodbyyyyyyyyyyye for now,

Neil x

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