Celebrating Student Achievements in Music!
Proud Moments: Success Stories from October!
We take immense pride in the accomplishments of our students during each lesson as they build their musical confidence and develop as musicians. In our October newsletter, we are excited to share a collection of success stories highlighting the wonderful achievements our students are making here at Passionate About Music Education!
Congratulations to Dylan who passed his ABRSM grade 2 theory exam with distinction. He earned an impressive mark of 73/75! This is the second theory exam Dylan has completed from the ABRSM theory course and he gained a distinction award in both exams.
Did you know that you need to pass Grade 5 ABRSM theory if you plan to take the practical or performance exams at grade 6 – 8 level with the ABRSM exam board? For those of you who don’t know, ABRSM is an internationally recognised external music exam board that offer music exams for all musical instruments and voice. Here at Passionate About Music Education, we offer music courses in theory and practical exams for any of our students wishing to take these exams. The music and theory exams can be taken by school aged students and adult learners.
In recent years ABRSM has made it possible to take the theory and performance exams on-line at your convenience, which really is a positive move for students living internationally. Theory exams can be taken on-line from home and you can submit and upload a recording of your performance exam pieces onto the ABRSM portal for assessment. This makes entering the exams a much smoother and quicker process for all.
Many of our beginner students from last year are now currently working through the ABRSM grade 2, 3 and 4 woodwind repertoire. It’s exciting to see how quickly everyone has progressed both as a soloist and a member of their school bands in such a short amount of time.
Over the summer a number of our students wanted to learn Disney songs of their choice. We love encouraging students to take the initiative when it comes to songs that they want to learn. Charlotte, one of budding elementary clarinet students, wanted to learn to play “Let it Go” from Frozen. When her school decided to host a talent show last week, Charlotte decided that she would play this Disney classic as a solo for her show. This was Charlotte’s very first solo performance and she did a stunning job! Seeing how proud Charlotte and her parents were of her first solo performance makes us super happy here at Passionate About Music Education. Well done Charlotte!
Congratulations to Mylin and Rosie who are studying piano at our studio. Mylin has made an impressive start to his piano skills by completing two whole books this year and is currently working his way through his third book! Rosie is just about to complete her second book in the next few weeks! We like to use a series for our beginner piano students called Piano Adventures by Nancy and Randall Faber. It’s an excellent series of books that are cleverly written for quick progression and fostering strong musical skills on the piano.
A shout out to Cathy who is one of our adult learners. She recently completed the Accelerated Piano Adventures book by Nancy and Randall Faber. We were so happy that Cathy recently played some of her piano pieces to her dad when he came to visit her. That was a special family moment. Great work Cathy!
Preparing for Auditions!
Many of our band students take part in regional and state auditions. It’s a great way to meet and play with other like-minded musicians from your local area. Most auditions require a set of scales including the chromatic scale, sight reading and a prepared solo piece.
In our studio, we work towards learning how to be successful in an audition by practising mock auditions. We spend time focusing on helping students understand what the audition will feel like. That way we normalise the nerves and emotions the student will experience on the day so that when they enter the audition room they can be super successful and not let the nerves take over!
This month Joshua did a fantastic audition for his local state gaining great feedback and one of our newer students Westley successfully gained a place in his local regional band. This was his first audition so that was a great achievement.
For those students wishing to have lessons with us to solely work on auditions, we do offer an audition package service exclusively for you. Reach out if you want to know more about this service and how we can help you with your auditions!
All things Band!
It’s been an exciting month of school band here in Florida, even with a few hurricanes trying to get in the way! We are thrilled to be back helping support the band program of Bridgewater Middle School led by Mr Kyle Sargent. It is astonishing to see how much his program has developed over the last few years. We are thrilled to be part of the school community and help the woodwind students develop great technique for playing in bands and solos long beyond school!
This weekend is the MPAs in Orange County for Marching Bands and Horizon HS will be taking part in this event. If you remember, we were there at their band camp back in the summer when they first started the season! We went to the preview showing on Saturday 26th October, and we have to say that the band has worked incredibly hard to make such great progress. They looked and sounded amazing. It’s always so great to sit with parents of performers and hear how proud they are of their child for being involved in school band! We wish Horizon HS and all the other local bands the best of luck at the MPA marching band event!
Music Resources for you!
As always we have been busy creating more musical resources and content for our musicians and music teachers to use in and out of the music lesson!
If you haven’t checked out our YouTube channel “Music Theory Made Simple” out yet, then here is what you will find:
72 rhythm reading play-along exercises in a full range of time signatures. There are two versions of each rhythm reading exercise. One with a metronome and one without.
20 sight reading play-along exercises for clarinet, flute, alto and tenor saxophone. Again these come in a range of time signatures, keys and difficulty levels.
New this month are scale play-along exercises which we have created for clarinet, flute, bassoon, alto and tenor saxophone. We will be continuing to share the written notation on our website in November.
So we do hope you pop on over to our YouTube channel and check out all the latest videos and of course don’t forget to subscribe whilst you are there!
In summary, a really fantastic October here at Passionate About Music Education! We are excited to keep building our community of musicians through November. If you can support us by referring and sharing what we do with your friends who would benefit from our services that would be awesome!