Our 09.07.2016 WKMT London Music Festival – some reflections…

We went silent after 5 days of hard work followed by the festival itself which lasted 9 hours on Saturday 09.2016.2016. Very long and exciting day for all of us!

It filled us with joy to see our students working so hard towards perfecting their performances. Playing piano in front of an audience is one of the most stressing experiences a person can go through. It is a challenge for our focusing abilities and implies the acknowledgement of time as an unstoppable flow. The latter might be the main reason why performing in front of an audience is fundamental for our piano students’ development. Knowing our performance can’t be stopped once started, encourages us to apply all our mental power to our playing. This state can only be driven by the “audience” factor and its most immediate effect is the solidification of the abstract conception we have of the piece/s we performed. This is something unachievable by solely taking one-to-one piano lessons. The stress we undergo during our performance lead us to pay an outstanding amount of attention to what we play, far more than ever before. Our learning capacities are dramatically enhanced and the result of that is we tend to remember what we play much better after.

Performing in front of an audience close to an exam date can prove to be the most efficient way to guarantee a successful entry. Our confidence grows dramatically and by the time we play in front of the examiner we are already aware of the contingencies that might come together with the live performance; and therefore we are ready to sort them out during our piano lessons.

I’m particularly proud of those students who took this challenge seriously and delivered properly last Saturday. Watching them in action is the best reward possible for us as teachers. All this effort set the foundations from where our students will continue developing their skills solidly and continuously.

A big thank from all the team at WKMT for all the students, families, Arts Club 1901 and patrons who supported our 09.07.2016 WKMT London Music Festival. We will keep on working hard to make sure there are many more to come.

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