Christopher Norton Out West – Los Angeles, Vancouver Island and San Diego

CAPMT is the California Association of Professional Music Teachers. It has over 1,000 members teaching throughout the state in independent studios, private and public schools, conservatories, colleges and universities. CAPMT offers a variety of programs for the music student and educational and professional opportunities for its member teachers.

I was honoured to be the Conference Artist at the 2011 CAPMT annual conference, held this year in Whittier, a city in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area. The conference was at Whittier College, a beautiful campus with great music facilities. Here’s what the grounds of Whittier College look like:

I did three sessions back to back, the first one on improvisation, with some young (around 8 years old) students as well as teachers and parents. Using American Popular Piano Level 2 Repertoire and Etudes books, I was able to use a very well-equipped keyboard laboratory to get everyone played together, including the parents! The second session, also focusing on improvisation, was for teachers only and they loved being able to play in a big group and seemed to really like the chance to improvise. My final session was a more theoretical presentation for teachers, talking about the steps required to teach improvisation, steps that we had been experiencing in a practical way in the previous sessions.

A number of teachers were interested in a return visit to California from me, probably to run something along the lines of the improv camps for children that have become my speciality, where improvisation group work and individual master-classes lead to a public concert. When these plans come together, details will be flagged up on both www.christophernorton.com and www.americanpopularpiano.com.

And so to Canada – I flew from LA to Vancouver and then drove to Victoria, Vancouver Island, accompanied by two associates from Conservatory Canada, Victoria Warwick and Paul Coates. Conservatory Canada (www.conservarorycanada.ca) is a fast-growing examination board that has really taken American Popular Piano on board over the last couple of years. I have toured Canada for Conservatory Canada already and I’m sure that I will be doing lots more with them in the future.

The Victoria event was organized by Heather Yaxley, who is an MYC (www.myc.com) teacher. MYC is another organization with which I have close ties and their system and American Popular Piano seem to dovetail nicely, with our books an easy “next step” once children have completed their MYC programme.

Victoria was a 2-day event - a mixture of teacher sessions, improvisation group sessions and masterclasses, with a public concert at the end. The age range was quite wide, and there were some delightful very young students. Here are some pictures of students during the Victoria event:

Master class students:

Improvisation groups:

And American Popular Piano displayed by some of the students at the end of the concert:

I hope to make a return visit to Victoria and there are also plans afoot to stage events in Vancouver and Nanaimo. Watch this space!

My final stop was back in California, at the Recreational Music Center in San Diego (www.recreationalmusiccenter.com) RMC aims, as they put on their promotional material, to “cultivate the joy of making music through relevant and creative teaching methods”. Piano is taught at RMC, but so are bass, guitar and drums and the teachers are all really fine practicing musicians. All ages are catered for and there is a lovely atmosphere created by the very gifted husband-and-wide team who founded RMC, Leslie and David Gereghty. Here’s Lesley:

I started with teacher presentations - an introductory session on American Popular Piano followed by Unlocking Popular Styles, which takes APP pieces and “unpacks” them stylistically. This unique resource is on our website (www.americanpopularpiano.com) and has sound clips and music examples in 20 styles, as well as direct links to songs in similar styles on i-Tunes. I got the teachers to be drummers, with tapping, clapping and beat-box effects - they loved it.

The rest of the two days was taken up partly with improv sessions, with participants as young as 7 and as old as, well I’m not going to say (adults..) All of the participants really enjoyed playing in groups (of 6 Roland HPi-6 keyboards) and nobody missed out on the chance to improvise their own rhythms and melodies to backing tracks. Here are students obviously concentrating hard:

and helping each other:

I also did quite a lot of work on tone production, good hand positions and other technical matters with individuals and with groups and some of the results were startling. One mother said she heard her daughter playing later that day at home and was amazed by the sudden difference in expressiveness and in warmth of sound.

We did two mini-concerts on the second day, which parents attended. There was a really special atmosphere – the children had bonded with each other and with me and there was real joy in all their performances. And their accuracy in timing terms was very striking for the audience. I even got a couple of students to do simple improvisation on the spot and it was clear that the audience found this really quite moving.

Recreational Music Center were very excited by the whole event and we are hoping to arrange a much bigger event, In San Diego, probably before the end of 2011. You can read more at the Recreational Music Center Blog:

http://rmcdg.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/christopher-norton-jazz-workshop-at-rmc/

It was a very positive end to what has been a most rewarding trip out west.

Ackerman Music Opens New Store

Ackerman Music opened it's fourth UK store in Brighton and I was there to enjoy the event. Read the full story on Music Instrument Professional's website:

http://www.mi-pro.co.uk/news/31709/Ackerman-Music-opens-new-store

Here are some pictures from the event.

November 2010 Europe Mini Tour

Having been a life-long fan of the music of both Grieg and Nielsen, as well as a fan of contemporary Danish cinema (for example Festen, Italian for Beginners and Breaking the waves) I was very pleased to get the chance to do a workshop for the first time in Denmark as well as a conference in Norway.

I flew to Copenhagen from London and then got a train cross-country to Esbjerg, a town in the west of Denmark. The music dealer in Esbjerg was Søren Storm, a former professional violinist who started Aarhus Music a couple of years ago and is, I’m sorry to say, the only specialist sheet music dealer left in Denmark. Here he is (and he is as cheerful and enthusiastic as this picture indicates!)

Denmark, like other Scandinavian countries, has a very effective network of Music Schools - Søren was a graduate of this one in Esbjerg - and the workshop was held in a lovely room on the third floor of the local Music School. I did my usual two-part presentation – introducing Microjazz and other Boosey & Hawkes materials in Part One, introducing American Popular Piano and the whole idea of teaching improvisation in Part Two.

The audience of local teachers were very warm and receptive and were inevitably impressed by my video clips (taken from Youtube) of students playing my music – an Inter-city stomp performance by an 8 year old in China, a very spirited performance of Joshua fought the battle of Jericho (from Concert Collection 2) from a 7 year old in Malaysia. I got warm applause for some of my live performances too – for Jingo from the Rock Preludes Collection and Joy to the World from the Concert Collection in particular. Teachers knew of my material, but were interested to find how much music has been written post-Microjazz. Here is some of my Danish audience during the break, at which point we were all pleased to have (herbal) tea and cakes and a chance to chat informally:

American Popular Piano intrigued the teachers – the use of improvisation in teaching has become of great interest to Danish teachers and the video clips of students playing duets from APP with their teachers were also very effective in demonstrating the virtues of ensemble playing and of the use of contemporary popular styles to encourage better piano playing.

At the end of the Danish presentation, I was taken straight to the airport (no, it’s not what you think!) so that I could get a flight to Bergen and then a transfer to Stavanger, both extremely attractive Norwegian cities. That evening I met the organizers of "Skolemøtet I Rogaland", an annual conference in the Stavanger area for both primary schools and Music Schools. It included 15 whole day workshops and 49 half-day workshops. I was one of the whole day workshops and in fact gave 3 presentations, again one about Microjazz, another on American Popular Piano and a third on Unlocking Popular Styles. The last one mentioned helps to make it easier for teachers to identify modern popular styles by looking at drum and percussion parts, bass parts and piano parts, all based on pieces from American Popular Piano. Roland Europe are including Unlocking Popular Styles in their new range of HP pianos and the APP website also features a very easy-to-follow version of the presentation, with lots of sound clips and music examples. Here are some of my Norwegian audience, again very warm, supportive and enthusiastic:

My music was familiar to many of the teachers – indeed, one of them had even sent to Canada for the Connections series (not presently available in Europe) and was amazed to actually meet a composer whose work he had used successfully for many years.

When I went onto the improvisation materials and APP, one of the teachers, formerly from Romania, proved to be a wonderful improviser and he proved how effective improvisation on the pieces from APP can be. We also had a lively discussion about the best way to start students improvising, which will probably continue on-line! Here he is playing, to the delight of the other participants:

Isn’t that a great look of concentration?

My third presentation, Unlocking Popular Styles, included lots of audience participation and was enjoyed by all. The teachers all took note of the websites that represent my work – www.christophernorton.com, www.americanpopularpiano.com and www.youtube.com/user/christophermicrojazz.

I then flew back to the UK for a couple of days before getting the Eurostar to Paris, where I put in a guest appearance at a Paris music fair called Music & You. It was held at the Grande Halle de la Villete. The entrance to the music fair pictured below;

The fair showcased the full range of musical instruments, including woodwind and brass, acoustic guitars, accordions and of course keyboards, synthesizers and electric guitars. Sheet music publishers and distributors were also there. It was very noisy, especially with a rock guitarist playing opposite the Schott stand more or less on the hour! However, we had relative quiet during the time I played, using a Roland piano and the new backing tracks from the Microjazz Collections, as well as pieces from MicroRock, the Concert Collection 2 and Latin Preludes. Here I am beside, erm, a big picture of myself on the stand:

A number of teachers came to speak to me during the course of the afternoon and I was pleased to find quite a few already familiar with Microjazz. This was a lot more informal than the sessions in Scandinavia, but it did indicate that with the right material you can literally draw people in aurally. I will do a workshop in Toulouse early in 2011 and also hope to back in Paris before long.

Christopher Norton Festival, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

I visited Fredericton, New Brunswick on the Connections tour back in 2007 and met Wendy Beardall, who has been President of the Fredericton Music Teachers Association (FMTA) and who continues to be a positive and lively presence in this delightful town on the St John river. Wendy invited me to come back to preside over a Fredericton-based Christopher Norton Piano Festival and opted, along with her enthusiastic, nay visionary committee, for a 3-day event.

Day 1 started with a “Meet Christopher Norton” event sponsored by the local high school. Music students from Fredericton High School and Leo Hayes High School came and heard me talk about my work as a composer and heard me play a number of pieces. Here are some of the entirely typical teenage audience:

This went very well and at the end of the session there was some spare time, so I selected 10 students from the larger group and got them to come on stage, where there were coincidentally 10 keyboards set up. Before they knew what was happening I was teaching them a chord progression (Stray Dog Blues from Microrock) and then getting them all to have a go at improvising on it.
This led neatly to what was the “official” second session of the day – a group of 10 students from FHS came up on stage and played Clean sweep from American Popular Piano Level 6, then went through the Improvisation Etudes based on that piece. We got some very good results and everyone had a chance to shine during the course of an intense but rewarding session.

The entire afternoon of day 1 was work with other improvisation groups, ranging in age from about 9 years old through to late teenagers. All of the pieces used were from American Popular Piano. The students seemed to enjoy this a lot and a number of the most confident players came to the grand piano and did their solos on a much louder instrument, the others all playing along on the relatively quiet keyboards.

Day 2 was masterclasses from 9 am until nearly 5.30. The students were grouped by age and I was very impressed by the overall standard, as well as by their willingness to try my suggestions out, in public! The youngest group were all so good I chose every one of them to come and play in the evening Gala concert.

There were groups of students throughout the day, each one an older age group than the last. The final group was in many ways the bravest – adults, some of whom had come back to the piano relatively recently. Here is one of my adult students at work:

And a testimonial from one of the adult students:

Thank you for a beyond-fabulous experience with my students this past weekend in Fredericton, New Brunswick! I haven't played a piano solo for over 15 years - but you quickly put me at ease! Every student left feeling excited about the piano, the music and the fact that they met someone they can look up to! My son is still telling everyone about his weekend with Mr. Norton. It's something none of us will forget any time soon! - Irma Mulherin

After a break, during which we got photos of the individual master class participants onto a Keynote presentation ready for the Gala Concert, we repaired to the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in the city centre. The children performed brilliantly and the capacity crowd were enthusiastic and both moved and astounded by many of the performances. I played along on a second keyboard, something the students had not heard before the concert. I’ve done many concerts of this kind now, but this was definitely one of the best – there was a lot of audience participation and a really joyful atmosphere was in evidence throughout.

Day 3 started with a breakfast with some of the local teachers, then a session called How To Incorporate Improvisation Into Lessons, which was held in the home of Margaret MacDonald, the local FMTA President. This proved to be very useful, as it was quite hands-on and it seemed a fitting end to the weekend, as it reinforced many things that had come up in the group improv sessions.

My thanks again to Wendy and Megan Woodworth and the committee for organising the event so well, to Fredericton High School for the use of the school hall, to the Fredericton Music Society for the use of the Church of the Nazarene for masterclasses and to Tony’s Music Box for the loan of the piano for the concert. It was a very positive event and will definitely be repeated.