Sam Hazo Clinic

We had a terrific clinic with Sam Hazo this morning. We hadn’t really looked at Our Kingsland Spring since we performed it a few weeks ago, but the kids were fantastic, worked really hard, and Mr. Hazo was really able to bring their best out of them. It’s so wonderful for the kids to not only have the opportunity to work not only on great music, but be able to spend time with the people that created it.

Anyway. Mr. Hazo had a bunch of wonderful phrases that I hadn’t heard. I thought I’d share my favorites:

– “Warming up the paper” The difference is whether you know something about the music before you play it or not.
– “Sing your lives through your instrument.”
– While describing how there are no wrong answers when dealing with interpretation: “2 plus 2 can equal 5 in music…if you make a pretty enough 5.”

– “When you have a soft note, go for the note, not the dynamic.”
– “People will never hear a missed dynamic, but they’ll hear a missed note.”
– “When dynamics go down, effort must go up.” “Less sound = more intensity”
– “It’s easier to become great than to maintain greatness.”

We still have a lot of work to do on the work, but they made some nice progress this morning. We spent a tremendous amount of time on pitch when we rehearsed this several weeks ago. Some of those efforts need to be revisited. There are also some moving parts that need to be brought out more consistently, and we have some intensity/energy issues at times as well.

Tomorrow afternoon, our Board Liaison John Whitwell will be visiting our rehearsal to introduce himself and spend some time with the kids. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince him to pick a baton and help us get better as well!

There’s a lot more I should be posting about, hopefully I’ll find the time to get to it soon.

(For topic suggestions or questions relating to our Midwest performance I can be contacted via email: cdestefano@skokie735.k12.il.us or through the contact page on our website.)

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