The Faculty at Chetham's

-

I was going to write this blog in some kind of order: day one, day two, day three, etc. But now we're here, I'm going to devote this posts to the incredible teachers Sam has had here, Murray McLachlan and Paul Harris.

It’s our third day, and Sam has just had his first ever lesson with Murray McLachlan. I don’t know if Murray is an actual legend in the piano and piano-teaching world, but I think he must be. If he’s not, then he should be. My own specialism in life is contemporary fiction, and I imagine a lesson with Murray for a pianist is like a lesson with Salman Rushdie for a writer, although I doubt any novelist could teach with the verve of a musician. (We’re too boring, and too lazy. It’s why we write, in silence, sentence by painstaking sentence.)

We walked into the room and Murray was just looking over the notes I'd made on Sam's application form. I was expecting him to say something along the lines of, 'Hello, Sam. What do you like to play? Why don't you show me?' Instead, his opener was, 'I see here that you like to play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. Have you ever thought of writing your own cadenza for them? It's easy. You just do this.' 

Sam watched, and then he looked at me with real excitement and took his seat at the piano.

I can’t even describe rest of the class, other than to say that the energy and pace of it were out of this world. I was worried Sam might be floundering and I think he was at the beginning, but he kept up quite bravely while Murray threw techniques and suggestions at him, occasionally pacing the floor and sipping from a thermos of what I assume was coffee, but could well have been petrol or maybe some kind of planetary fuel plucked from outer space. 

Because I can’t describe the lesson, I’ll just have to report what happened afterwards. Part of me was expecting Sam to come out and start crying, not in any way because Murray had been brutal (he hadn’t) but because the pace was so intense and the level so high, I thought he might have been out of his depth. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

‘Oh, my God. I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Are you ok?’

‘It was amazing. It was exhilarating.’ 

I’ve never heard Sam use the word exhilarating before, so as his mother, this was a double joy – not just an incredible piano lesson, but also a dormant vocabulary to he had to reach for to enable him to talk about it. 

His second teacher has been Paul Harris, who Sam has had every year we've been here. Officially, Sam signed up to a theory course but Paul is happy to teach Sam anything he fancies, which for the lsat couple of years has been composition. 'If you could write anything at all,' he asked Sam, 'what would it be?'

'A piano concerto,' Sam said, 'but there's no way I can do that.'

'Of course you can do that.'

So this week, Sam has worked under Paul's guidance to produce a mini sonata for piano, two violins, a viola and a bass. He is delighted. It's not finished yet, but I've asked his permission to post it here and he has graciously obliged. 

https://flat.io/score/68a24f090ee69347d8eec1d5/edit

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Experience at Chetham's Piano Summer School

-
In August 2023, I went to my first ever Chetham’s International Piano Summer School. I am tragically musically illiterate but had a 10-year-old son obsessed with Mozart and Beethoven and not completely shabby at playing the piano, so we decided we’d give the summer school a go. I admit I was slightly under sufferance here. Being tragically musically illiterate meant my main role in my son’s piano education was to sit on the sofa while he played and occasionally look up and say, ‘That’s brilliant, darling,’ grateful his interests didn’t require me to stand on the edge of a football pitch cutting up oranges on a Sunday morning.   We arrived to an atmosphere of excited anticipation. The reception was filled with people – adults, children and faculty – checking in for their five-day stint at this world-renowned music school, all of them brought here by one thing: a lifelong love of the piano. It was impossible not to be at least slightly infected by this and later, as Sam and I walked ...
Read more

Brilliant Workshops at the Summer School

-
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 h...
Read more

Forging New Friendships at Chetham's Piano Summer School

-
Sam has always been very content in his one square mile around home. As long as he has his friends, his piano and his PlayStation, he’s happy. He goes to our local school, where his love of piano makes him the proverbial big fish in a small pond. His teachers roll him out for every event. At open evenings, he’s there in the hall, providing an impressive backdrop of Mozart and Beethoven while prospective parents drink coffee with the headteachers. It’s great for his confidence, but he doesn’t have any friends at school who share his passion. He made these friends when he went to Chetham’s. The chance to forge lasting friendships has been one of the best things about his two summers there. Outside of lessons and practice, there’s plenty of time to relax in the atrium with a drink and snack and get chatting to other young pianists and their parents. Every child is there because they love music, and this is something Sam really valued. After years of being the only person in his school who...
Read more