Performance

Music Performance

According to the Hiner Method, a music performance should primarily serve to support and intensify a student’s motivation to learn and perform music.

When traditional, inflexible notation is used to teach piano, the aim is a perfect or nearly perfect music performance. It happens because the less a student’s eyes are involved in the process of sight-reading, the more the process demands strictly memorizing not only the text but also the fine motor skills, dynamic shades and other aspects of music required for a performance. And mostly this memorizing is superficial, and the piece is played without the performer thinking about it. This kind of performance can be interrupted by a single forgotten note.

Without practicing sight-reading on various compositions, a student won’t create the natural, practical music storage in his or her mind, so the methods of playing different tunes, phrases and sound combinations aren't collected. All beginners’ repertory is limited to those compositions that have been played and polished accurately with a teacher.

By means of it, once learned piano piece, which a student can't sight-read freely, can sound perfect during the performance and seem more ideal than it is. The performance of a student, who has sight-read many music compositions and deals fluently with a music text, at the first sight could concede a learned performance at the initial stage of teaching.  However, over time the playing of such a perfomer will become deeper and more interesting, and this performance will show the real progress of a musician.

Let me remind you that in the Hiner Method, the aim of performance is all students' personal growth and their desire to polish up their own personal skills.

In the Academy of Soft Mozart, what do we consider a music performance? Any records of  at least one whole piece that has been uploaded on YouTube and then posted to the special place for an academic concert on the Soft Mozart online forum, is considered a performance. The video could be filmed at home, in the circle of your colleagues, at an academic concert or on the big stage.

The participation in academic concerts is the final line, the generalization of work on a music composition.

According to the Hiner Method, you should consider the work on a piece of music as the project whose result is important not only for solving the current training tasks but also as the way of developing a student's  abilities to set goals, fulfill them and celebrate a victory. The ability to celebrate a victory is especially important for the self-enrichment and psychological health of every person.

In the modern world, a traditional academic concert at a music studio or a school has a momentary and insufficiently specified impact. The meaning of performance, a positive student's growth and also appraisal of his or her achievments might be underestimated or even invisible for others and  himself because of the briefness of a moment and impossibility to recreate it or compare with the previous one.

It's not the same if a performance is videotaped every time. The opportunity to compare this video with the previous one helps to show a concert performer's progress and to see his or her development from the viewpoint of his or her positive personal growth but not in comparison with a hypothetical ideal.

The social dimension of online concerts is highly important: an opportunity to see other performances and the positive dynamic of other performers intensify the desire to learn music and prompt students to want to make progress.

As a rule, the performers in the Soft Mozart Academy, while watching other music performances, often plan what compositions they would like to play in the future.

Only real and personal success helps a performer see the true value of the stories of other successful performers. The self-confidence and control over a self-development by means of the Soft Mozart program help every student not to look for a praise and encouragement from outside and not to aspire to copy or envy somebody.

 

One should bear in mind that from the beginning, stages were created to separate a performer and the audience, to rank the artist above the listeners. Such a separation works just for professional performers.  All students can aspire to the stage, but if they want to become professionals, they must regularly train and improve many skills.

The aim of Soft Mozart is to teach you to respect your personal work and efforts, to perceive the training as a process and a life experience. When only professional achievments are respected, it means that students are encountering real life, in which not everything goes smoothly and perfectly.

We have the following aims--to gradually strengthen in students the desire to perform, to raise their self-confidence and to give them a belief in their strengths and the desire to share their achievments with others. A professional performance can become the final result of a student's self-improvement, but it should not be the aim of music lessons.

Concrete facts of the progress, the ability to distribute your forces, focusing on the task, gradually developing the mastery according to a personal experience and possibilities all these help develop professionality.

Even the ability to be in the spotlight--not only to be at a loss but also gather yourself and show the best results--is one of the aims of training with the Hiner Method.  Without developing a self-respect, a personal dignity, an ability to estimate yourself and others objectively, any trials by fame are fraught for a weak child's soul.

Those students who have played many music compositions and have worked on developing of hearing, chords, and transposition, usually aren't afraid to perfom because they are not placed within strict requirements to play the composition by heart. They aren't afraid to play a wrong note because they can easily replace it by a small improvisation.

It' s important to be able to prepare children for the stage in such a way that each performance works for their psychological health and helps them believe in themselves.

Students can choose pieces from both Gentle Piano and any other music repertory for their perfomance.

The appraisal of a performance by teachers and other members of society must be positive only and must be based on the affirmation of the student's real achievements.

People using the Hiner Method don't approve of criticism that has been given without a student's request.  Every performer must be ready for solving more challenging stages of performance. If a student isn't ready and keeps working against physical obstacles, any critisism might affect his or her musical growth.

If you are intentionally cultivating in students the ability to rely on real facts in appraising their personal growth, they will learn to evaluate themselves and set new goals. The aim of the Hiner Method is to create for students an environment where they can constantly find information to inspire their development.

The performance of music is the opportunity for people to communicate in one language, the ability to be joyful about others performers' talent s and see oneself as a deserving participant in a music spectacle.

 

Integration

In the Hiner Method, a music performance doesn't stand apart from other music disciplines. The skill to play the music intertwines with understanding music theory, listening to music, reading music literature, and engaging in other parts of music education.

Piano pieces, which have been performed once, could become an illustration of learning theory and the history of music, and could be used as the material for music and rhythmic dictations, elements of transposition or chord selection.