At the Belligen Music Festival...

Claudia Douglas

Claudia studied cello and piano at the NSW Conservatorium High School, having grown up in a musical family. Her father was a fine jazz pianist and her mother an avid concert-goer who fostered her love of music.

She studied with the legendary Richard Gill and with Australian cellist David Pereira, later undertaking post-graduate studies with Molly Kadarauch at the University of Melbourne, receiving first-class honours for her performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto.

She has played with major orchestras including the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Philharmonia and has performed in concert with David Helfgott. She has been living in Bellingen since 2008, where she teaches and performs regularly.

I have had the privilege of not only seeing Claudia's performances (spanning diverse repertoire and divine execution) but also of being tutored by her. An incredible talent not to be missed. In this little neck of the woods (Mid-North Coast, NSW), we are truly blessed to have her in the program at this lovely festival! Here's the link...  

http://www.bellingenmusicfestival.com.au/ 

Dusting off the cobwebs...

For those of you who have thrown yourselves wholly into your music playing during 2010, and given those arms and fingers and brains a well-earned rest over the festive season, it's now the PERFECT time to shimmy into action for 2011! I'm running a little "spritzer" workshop  for my students. If you are further afield from the Bellingen area then gather a few musician friends around and wake up the music in you! Oh, and I've just decided to provide refreshments - in this steamy weather I feel like a very cold and very fizzy drink... mineral water with a squeeze of lime...hmmm... zingy....

Advice from the Maestro Printable Version

By James Reel

Old joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. But according to Itzhak Perlman, that’s exactly the wrong way to get to Juilliard or any other competitive school. “Whenever a student asks me for my autograph,” he claims, “I don’t say, ‘Best wishes.’ I say, ‘Practice slowly!’ Practicing is really the main component in achieving something very satisfying when you play any stringed instrument, but the problem with practice is sometimes people put in the time, they’ve practiced four hours, five hours a day, and can’t understand why it isn’t getting any better. “It comes down to listening. What are you listening for when you practice? “Here’s my favorite example of how not to practice: You have a couple of notes that are out of tune, and you repeat them over and over for 20 minutes and it’s not working, and while you were doing that, the bow was going in all bad directions because you weren’t paying attention to your bow because you were only paying attention to your left hand. So your left hand is not working well yet, and you’ve practiced for 20 minutes with the bow wrong. “So now you have to undo that, but you’re not paying attention to the intonation, so you’ve practiced for 20 minutes out of tune. “So just reduce it to small increments, two or three bars, and try to get a hold of everything at the same time. It’s difficult to concentrate on everything. You can accomplish a lot more in less time. Practicing slowly is extremely important. Then you can figure out what’s going on. “Nothing escapes you.” Quality Time “Sheer time is not necessarily good; what’s good is the quality of the practicing. If somebody’s really serious, five hours a day is almost too much; no more than that. After five hours, the body doesn’t absorb any more. When I was growing up, I didn’t practice more than three hours a day. And when you practice, it’s got to be 50-minute hours, with 10 minutes of rest.” http://www.teenstrings.com/article/3/3,54,PracticeTips-1.asp