Brilliant Workshops at the Summer School

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One of the many excellent things about CIPPS are the daily drop-in workshops. If you have a piece you want help with, you can go along to one of these workshops and some brilliant pianist will guide you on how to improve it. 

I sat in these sessions as an observer and could see how helpful they were. Because I don’t play the piano myself, if I attempted to actually pinpoint the specifics, I would be making it all up, so I asked Sam for help. He told me not to even try talking about music, and has taken over the blog for today.

 

Hello, I’m Sam, and I have been going to Chetham’s International Piano Summer School for two years and love it.

They have really good workshops like (my personal favourite) the drop-in practice workshop. These are great.  You can take a piece you’re struggling with  - maybe there’s a particular passage you can’t play as well as you want, or you need help keeping the melody louder than the base line. Whatever you need, you will be helped by a member of staff to improve your playing. 

I really enjoyed it, and it truly helped me play my piece a lot better. For example, Rose taught me a really good technique called shadowing, where you touch the notes without playing them. I thought it wasn’t going to work at first because it sounded too easy to be true but after about ten minutes of shadowing practice my confidence rose a lot. I could play enormously better.

There are other workshops like the drop-in performance workshop where you perform a piece for some people, or the dalcroze workshops which teach you how to really feel the music. The performance workshops really help you feel less scared about playing in front of an audience.

I think the workshops really helped me gain a better understanding of music.

The lessons are outstanding, the teachers are amazing. You can tell that they really love their jobs, and I think, that alone really helps, because it gives you a sense of confidence that they know what they’re doing. They are really lovely and great at teaching too.

Over the two years that I have been to CIPSS I have been taught by Charlotte Turner and Paul Harris. Charlotte Turner is a really great piano teacher and really helped me improve. Last year I didn’t enjoy playing the piano before I went to Chetham’s because my mum was making do grade five. When I went to CIPPS, Charlotte made me fall back in love with the world’s most popular instrument. Paul Harris taught me sight reading in the first year I was there and theory in the second. He is honestly the most incredible teacher I have ever had teach me anything. He turns complicated and difficult things easy, in a way that I didn’t even know was possible. He is really, really kind and an overall lovely man. 

Bye, bye.

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