Happy Summer! When summer vacation begins, it can become easy to let your piano practicing go by the wayside. Summer can be a great opportunity to really grow as a musician. Below are some ideas to help keep up the skills that you developed over the past school year.
1. Since there is no homework and you will have more free time, how about upping the amount of time you spend at the piano. If you usually practice 20 minutes a day, amp it up to 30! If you practice and hour, try for 90 minutes.
2. Learn a new piece on your own. Select a piece from your piano lesson or repertoire books and teach it to yourself!
3. Set a scale challenge and work to get your scales smooth, even and FASTER (use the metronome and record your progress in your notebook)
4. Listen to a work by a classical composer every day. Youtube has so many wonderful videos of famous concert pianists playing all historical era works. Try Baroque (Vivaldi, JS Bach, Scarlatti, Purcell) one day, Classical (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Cimarosa) the next, Romantic (Chopin, Brahms, Beach, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Schubert, Gottchalk), Impressionistic (Ravel, Debussey) and Contemporary (Kabalevsky, Tansman, Gershwin, Copland, Khachaturian, Bartok, and Joplin) can follow on successive days.