Review is Required

[S.Carter]

I enjoyed Jamey's article "Review Is Required."

One of the advantages of being a teacher is that you have an excuse to go back and review pieces, because your students are working on them.

Now that I'm no longer teaching, I still go back an review. I've been reviewing some of the same pieces for 30 years.

Jamey's article reminded me of something I'd read about the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, who taught people like Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
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**Boulanger, Nadia
one of her students walked up N.'s driveway one day, early for his lesson, to hear his teacher, alone in her studio, windows open, oblivious to distractions, assiduously practicing the simplest of Cortot's piano exercises - the ones she assigned to her youngest students. She had often told her students that only a total mastery of technique could free them for the proper interpretation of music. But her application of this principle to herself so impressed her student that he never forgot it.

from The Tender Tyrant,Nadia Boulanger, Alan Kendall
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"I had a surprise when I fond myself in Faure's class and discovered Ravel was there too, doing, as I used to do them, traditional counterpoint. I was insignificant, and did counterpoint, I didn't always find it interesting, yet it seemed quite natural that Ravel should do it. I did it, he did it, we did it... It was only years later that I realized that he had already written his string quartet and, I asked him why he was still studying counterpoint. 'One must clean house from time to time; I often do it that way,' he replied." pp. 25f
. . .

from
Madomoiselle, Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, Bruno Monsaingean Carcente, Manchester, 1985 w/chronology, discography, index

[Guni]

Cool. Yeah, review is so important and someone can gain such a lot of new things out of this.

It just happened to me with the article about triads. Although, it's just the theory part of things I did spend an entire week to review triads on the guitar in all possible ways. I discovered lots of tiny new things like fingerings, chord melodies, etc ....

Hope I can all pack this into the next triad article which will be the practical side of things.

Thanks

Guni