Last weekend I received the e-newsletter from the fabulous Music Educator’s Marketplace and saw this brilliant new product: Nate’s Scale Plates. They were developed by a 9-year old piano student, and they are exactly what several of my students need! It baffles me that scale fingerings are as difficult as they are for some students, […]
Resource Reviews
Review of Irish Celebration
St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner, and if you enjoy hearing holiday-themed music in your studio you’ll want to grab a copy of Wendy Stevens’ latest sheet music: Irish Celebration. The melody is fun and catchy – one that any early elementary student will love learning and playing over and over…and over and […]
Review of How Sweet the Sound
When our local music teachers association dubbed our first meeting of the year a “New Music Review” I knew exactly what I wanted to play. I had recently received Wendy Stevens’ newest book, How Sweet the Sound, and fell in love with the first arrangement – Day of Arising. It’s a gorgeous setting that just […]
Review of Easy Hymn Solos
Attaching the tag line, “stylish arrangements” to a collection of early elementary hymn solos may seem like a bit of a stretch, but composer Wendy Stevens manages to pull it off! I recently played through each of the hymn arrangements in her new three-book collection of Easy Hymn Solos published by Hal Leonard and was […]
MuseScore – A Free Notation Software
I’ve been hearing rumblings about MuseScore for several weeks, but Joy’s review of it earlier this week prompted me to finally take a closer look. Like Joy, I was very disappointed to find that Finale decided to charge for the NotePad software that they previously offered free of charge. I had quite a few students […]
Interview with Elizabeth Wellburn
Today, I am pleased to welcome Elizabeth Wellburn, author of the children’s book Echoes from the Square, for a special interview. What prompted your interest in writing this story about Vedran Smailovic, cellist of Sarajevo? My daughter Amy is a cellist, and we had heard about Mr. Smailovic’s actions on the internet. I believed that […]
