Gifted Music School

The Gifted Music School is a music school (duh!) for high school students.  It takes place outside of normal school.  There are two divisions; the full scholarship division and the preparatory division that anybody can audition for.

The preparatory division is for anyone of any age.  Most kids start there and can take private lessons.  There are many teachers that are really amazing.  Some are graduates of top music colleges.  They do have to pay a tuition for the GMSPD.  The full scholarship division is all payed for for every student.  The classes and orchestra rehearsals are free.  The ages are anywhere from eight to eighteen years old.

Kids in the Gifted Music School  choose to spend their Saturdays at the Gifted Music School taking more classes, but all involved with music.  I have been in the program since i was nine years old.  That is seven years.  I love the Gifted Music School because I feel everyone there is someone I can relate to.  Many of my absolute best friends come from the Gifted Music School.

Many of the students of the Gifted Music School go on to many different good colleges.  Some people choose to go into music, while others go into academics.  We have had people going to Curtis, Julliard, New England, Peabody, Colburn, and many more to study music.  Kids who go into academics have made top schools like Stanford.

The Gifted Music School brings in famous music artists from all over the country. From left to right: Bill McLaughlin, Roberto Diaz, Jenny Oaks Baker, Robert Lipsett, Joseph Silverstein, Fry Street Quartet, and Leon Fleisher.

The Gifted Music School is similar to actual school because we take different classes that are each at a specific time.  The pianists have a slightly different schedule than the string players. 

 The pianists start with music literature.  We learn about different composers and go over the pieces they wrote.  Some of the pieces we go really into the form and the meanings behind the piece.  Our next class is Keyboard skills.  We learn to read all five clefs and get really good at sight-reading music.  I am really horrible at that class because it is hard for my brain to think that fast.  

After keyboard skills, everybody gets a half-hour lunch break.  We usually eat lunch and just talk.  Sometimes we go outside and walk around.  Once in a while, people will bring in lunch for us.  Those are the best days because it is usually really good food.  

After lunch we have solfege and ear-training.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  We have to train our ears to help us with our music and get perfect pitch.  After that, we go to theory.  Theory is divided by ability.  I am in theory four which is the highest level this year.  I have done theory for the past five years.  

There are at least three concerts a school year.  We have a fall, winter, and spring concert.  The orchestra rehearses during the first three hours of GMS.  That is when they work on their pieces for the concerts.  Most of the concerts get a special guest to come and conduct or play with the orchestra.  There are usually lots of people who come to watch the orchestra and many are very impressed with how good the kids are.  We even got to premier a brand new piece in one of the concerts.  Sometimes we also have some solos instead of the whole orchestra.  We even include the Suzuki preparatory division in the concerts.   

All of these classes can get a little bit hard sometimes, but I learn so much that it is worth my time to take all of these.  I will be so sad when I graduate high school and I can't come back to the Gifted Music School.  The school has grown every year.  More students join, more teachers come, and more people come to the concerts.  

GMS Outreach Concert

On Wednesday March 2, I was asked to play and speak in a music outreach concert.  An outreach concert is where we go to title 1 schools and give music concerts to introduce them to music.  Title 1 schools are schools that have a lot of mixed ethnicity and not very much money.            

My very first sleepover was the night before this outreach concert.  I went to Brigham City with my friends McCall and Mackie.  It wasn't a real sleepover though.  We had to plan what we were going to say and how to introduce the Gifted Music School and the pieces we would play.  We were so nervous and didn't really know what to say about our pieces.  It took us over an hour to get it all done.  Once we were done though, we went right to bed instead of staying up and talking all night.  

Mountain View Elementary School

 The first school we went to was Mountain View Elementary School.  We played at the middle school building, which had a really big auditorium with nice seats.  It also had a nice stage that we set up on.  The piano wasn't the best, but it definitely wasn't the worst piano I have ever played.  It was a baby grand piano.

I got put in charge of talking about our quartet.  I told the kids about our name, the Kuruma Quartet, and why we are called that.  Kuruma means car in Japanese and since we drive so much we are always in the car to get to rehearsals.  Kuruma Quartet sounds cooler than Car Quartet.  I also told the kids that we first formed as a group three years ago and that none of us really wanted to do it, but our parents made us.  We then came to love working with each other and became great friends.

The first performance, I totally forgot about half of my speech.  I forgot to say our group name and give an example of the main theme.  I told the kids to count how many times the main theme came back and that I would ask them afterwards.  Of course I forgot to ask them after.  I was totally scattered throughout the whole first performance.

The second performance went a lot better.  I found I could talk a little more confidently and remember what i was supposed to say.  The audience was really good with participation and actually did try counting the number of times the theme came back in our quartet piece.  Some of the kids were really close with their counting and I was surprised.  

The second school we went to was Woodstock Elementary School.  Their multipurpose room was a lot smaller.  The stage barely fit all of the orchestra members.

The piano didn't fit on the stage, so I had to sit down on the side.  It was awkward when I wasn't playing.  The piano was an upright that I am positive hadn't been used in ten years.  It was so out of tune and bad.  It was also covered in lots of dust.  As I was playing, my fingers got really dusty and dirty.  It was kind of grossing me out.  The pedal on the piano was also way to high up.  I could barely do it because I have really small feet that didn't quite allow my heel to be on the ground if I wanted to use the pedal.

I would say that my talking turned out better than my playing that Woodstock elementary.  It was fun to skip school to give concerts though.  I also loved having a sleepover with my best friends.  

Julliard Head Pianist Masterclass

On Saturday, I performed in a piano masterclass with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky.  Now, you probably are wondering who the heck that is.  Many people in the world don't know who she is, but in the music world, she is so famous.  She is the head of the piano department of Julliard.  Julliard is a prestigious music school located in New York.

Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky 

Yoheved Kapllinsky is a renown pianist and teacher.  People are willing to pay lots of money for her to give them a lesson.  The Gifted Music School payed to bring her out to Salt Lake City form New York.  Gifted Music School held auditions to see who would play in the Masterclass.  All of the pianists auditioned, but only two of us got picked to play. 

I was really scared for this masterclass.  She is a top teacher and pianist.  I was really hoping to impress her.I was only supposed to play 30 minutes, but I ended up having a 45 minute masterclass.  When I first played through my piece, I played it my absolute best.  Dr. Kaplinsky mainly gave me comments about putting emotion into my piece.  

Let me explain my piece.  It is called Liszt Paraphrase on Verdi’s Rigoletto.  Rigoletto is an opera by the composer Verdi.  It is a fairly well known opera. The composer Liszt loved the opera so much that he decided to make a paraphrase of it.  A paraphrase and a transcription are two different things, although they are very similar.  A transcript is taking the piece and having it be almost exact, but for different instruments.  A paraphrase has a little more freedom for the person who is making the paraphrase.  It takes all of the important themes and melodies, but then adds some of their own flairs to it.  

The themes in my piece are mainly based off of four of the characters in the opera.  Rigoletto is one of them.  He is a hunchback clown that performs for the Duke.  His daughter is Gilda.  She falls in love with the Duke.  The duke flirts with every woman he meets and "says" that he loves them.  Then he moves on.  The Duke meets Gilda and tells her that he loves her.  The next moment, he is off with another woman named Magdelena.  These four people sing the main themes of the opera so they are in the paraphrase.  

When Dr. Kaplinsky gave me the comments on putting emotions into my playing, she used the word capricious to describe the duke.  I didn't know that capricious meant.  Then she used the synonym whimsical.  I didn't know what that meant either.  We were both at a loss of what to say.  She asked me if I spoke Chinese, but I said I spoke Korean.  When she asked the audience if anybody knew the word capricious in Korean, I was thinking that that wouldn't help me.  Korean is my second language.  We eventually said fickle.  Then I understood what she wanted me to think about.   

After the whole masterclass was over, both my piano teacher (Dr. Vera Ousestsskia Watanabe) and her husband (Eugene Watanabe) told me I had played my personal best.  I was so happy that I played really impressively.  If my piano teacher tells you that you played well, then you really played well.  She will tell you the truth about how to played and makes sure that whenever you perform, you play perfectly.  

I had a lot of fun during the masterclass.  It was really scary, but it was so fun and it was cool to work with someone so famous in the music world.  This was really a great experience for me.