Our 3rd Annual Conference was well-attended, with 22 in the audience, including four non-pianists and three brand new AMSF members. A warm welcome to Maureen Llort, Francis Friesenger, and Eli Jacks. Thank you for jumping in, immediately after joining. We are happy about this upward trend in attendance. But more than the numbers, just like the previous annual conferences, the audience enjoyed the event and found it worthwhile.
Nancy Breth, a DC-based piano teacher who has long been familiar with AMSF through the Washington Music Teachers Association (WMTA), was our guest speaker. She and our founder, Matt Harre, have been members of WMTA for decades.
Ms. Breth first discussed memorization. Interestingly, she is among the group of pianists who espouse that pianists need not perform pieces from memory, given that all other musicians are not required or expected to do so. We can blame Liszt for the expectation that pianists play from memory! Nonetheless, Ms. Breth gave us tips on how to study pieces that indirectly promote memorization. Key to this is mapping and analyzing the piece before sitting at the piano. She talked about understanding the structure, writing the fingering, identifying patterns, marking differences in patterns, thinking a bar ahead, and memorizing how sections feel. I thought memorizing one’s feelings in any given section was interesting. It was the first time I heard of such a thing, but it makes complete sense since music is supposed to elicit emotion.
Our guest speaker could not be bigger on sight-reading; it is among the key piano skills she instructs her students. Ms. Breth believes that most piano pupils will eventually stop taking lessons and later in life, sight-reading skills are among the skills helpful in bringing music back into their lives. Ms. Breth brought numerous materials that promote sight-reading and the session culminated in a group effort to sightread a piece. Several in the audience, including a violinist, lined up to each play four measures of a tune, enough to complete the piece!