ON YOUR OWN PIECES

The sight reading examples at eash lesson allow the teacher to experience first hand how a student reads music, tackles the challenges and executes the music on the first try. These examples are considered to be VERY EASY compared to the student's playing ability. One area the teacher will want to have a better understanding of, is your ability to work on your own using pieces that are more challenging and require more effort than time in the lesson will allow. For this reason, your new teacher will assign you an "ON YOUR OWN PIECE" each week for you to work on. Your teacher will not explain anything to you at the lesson. You must learn it completely on your own. They will be easier pieces than your current level so that you can learn them in one or two weeks, but NOT as easy as the sight reading examples so they will require some daily effort on your part to learn. What you figure out and how you prepare new music is very revealing to your teacher and allows your teacher to plan what to review, and how to approach new theory, technique and repertoire.

Getting to Know You: Although you spend an hour discussing your background with the KMI faculty at the FREE CONSULTION, and may have played some pieces, played your technique, answered some questions and possibly even taken a theory placement exam, your new teacher will not know all of your knowledge, skill and potential for at least 6 months after you transfer. Working a long time on a few difficult pieces could open many cans of worms, uncover a large number of hurdles and even result in a sense of little to no accomplishment. Your teacher WILL work with you on some pieces that are at your current level, but these simpler ON YOUR OWN pieces will allow your teacher to understand you much better, by covering a wider variety of challenges using simpler examples, and in shorter amount of time.

Testing Theory: The theory covered in the sight reading examples will test the "lower level" of your theoretical knowledge in that it will show the few gaps that may exist in music that you should mostly or completely understand. The "ON YOUR OWN" pieces should test the "upper level" of your theoretical knowledge, as these pieces should represent what you can learn without any teacher's guidance. At your next lesson you should be fully prepared to answer any questions regarding chords, keys, notation, terminology and form. Ideally, you should be able to answer these questions without any additional studying or looking things up in books.

Testing Technique: The "ON YOUR OWN" piece should test your FACILTY of technique (the "upper level" of your technical ability), as you should be able to play them without extra practice of difficult spots/passages. The technical challenges will be more difficult than sight reading, so you may have to spend time learning the notes, but you should NOT have to spend hours playing passages just to get the fingers, hands, or arms to move correctly. Be sure to execute everything to the best of your ability, so that the teacher can identify what technical skills require additional work to gain proper facility.

Attention to Detail: The ability to SEE everything on the page and translate it into the correct action is crucial for all levels of music playing. With "ON YOUR OWN" pieces you very well may have difficulty doing everything on the first try - but after a whole week you certainly should be able to do everything on the page. If you overlook staccatos, phrasing, accidentals, key signature, dynamics, etc. after working on the piece, the teacher will know how much attention to detail you must still develop for your level of playing ability.