Program Information for the Boot Camp Sessions

These sessions are designed to provide an intensive and in-depth experience for serious students aged 16-28. Workshops, master classes, lectures, and private lessons provide the participants with a wealth of information on technique, musicianship, practicing, auditions, and career topics.

Detailed lists of master class and workshop topics for each instrument:

Violin

• The Somatic Violinist: Stretches and Alignment for healthy playing
• Franco-Belgian/Russian/German Schools of Violin Bow Styles
• A Comprehensive Approach to Playing Kreutzer Etudes
• The Virtuoso Practicer: How to Structure Your Practice Time for Maximum Efficiency
• Scales & Arpeggios
• Paganini. Caprices
• Bach. Violin Sonatas & Partitas
• Beethoven. Violin Sonatas
• French Violin Sonatas (Debussy, Ravel, Franck, Poulenc, Faure)
• Violin Works by Prokofiev
• Finding the Most Important Values in High-Level Violin Playing
• Understanding the Sympathy of the Hands
• Expressionism vs. Violinism: Untangling the Tangled Priorities
• Techniques for Better Bach
• Ysaye: Extending the Possibilities
• After slow practice, what next? Steps to bridge the gap between slow practice and performance
• Practicing- how to organize it, how to stay focused, how to be efficient
• Finding the fun in scales and technique exercises
• Creating a creative warm-up and scale routine
• The Tonal Palette: Discovering the expressive powers of the right and left hands
• Musical rhythm and its physical realization
• Ring: finding the acoustic potential of the instrument
• Basic bow concepts and etude study
• Self-diagnosis: designing your own plan of study
• Habits of musical inquiry: intuition, convention, and trust
• Preparing mentally for effective practicing
• Creating Art through sound
• Effectively communicating
• Building a structure for interpretation
• Managing performance fears and anxieties
• Understanding the benefits of “Results vs Procedure” oriented practicing
• Exploring the essence of musical artistry
• Three Systems of Intonation
• Building a Fugue Part I: Characters, Articulation and Strokes
• Building a Fugue Part II: The Legato Left Hand
• Building a Fugue Part III: Ringing Chords
• The Role/Roll of the Right Thumb
• Forearm Rotation
• Sustaining Across Bow Changes
• Breathing with the Bow
• Body Springs
• The Calm Violin: Releasing Tension in the Shoulders
• "Galamian bow arm techniques and exercises as he taught me”
• Scales- Practice routine.
• Interpreting scores
• Playing without fear
• Practicing effectively
• Reading music: from eye to brain to ear to fingers.
• The language of music: from notes to phrases to character.
• Hearing Harmony when you practice.
• Rhythm at the bottom of everything.
• Having a healthy sound -- then looking for beauty and color.
• Using scales and arpeggios to work on technical priorities.

Viola

• Exploring a "Historically informed" approach to the Bach cello suites on modern viola
• Exploring a Karen-Tuttle inspired "holistic" approach to viola technique
• Fun with scales--using basic scales as a forum for refining all aspects of technique
• How to practice five hours in just minutes a day: structuring efficient practicing
• Michelangelo's Guide to the Right Hand: Mastering the legato
• Michelangelo's Guide to the Right Hand: removing extraneous motion for consistent spiccatto
• Robot, no! Expressive playing using the right hand
• Michelangelo's Guide to the Left Hand: removing extraneous motion for logical and consistent shifting
• Secondhand emotion: connecting with your audience to overcome stage fright
• Fingering for good intonation and speed
• Issues of balance and sound in the big 3: deciphering dynamic range in the Walton, Hindemith, or Bartok concerti

Cello

• "The physics of tone production: weight, speed, placement and the basics of bow technique."
• "Building strength in the upper part half of the bow" (Working on a sustaining sound in the upper part of the bow and bow changes at the tip. Students should prepare Popper etudes 5 and/or 6)
• Shaping the left hand(Working on the balance of the left hand, using Cossman, double stop 3rds, 6ths, and octaves)
• "Expressive vibrato" (How to practice to develop a balanced vibrato, how the vibrato and bow work together, developing expression and color in the vibrato. Students should prepare The Swan, the Faure Elegy, The Rachmaninoff Vocalise or an equivalent singing and expressive work.)
• Extensions
• Thumb position
• Practice techniques
• Bowing with arm weight
• Intonation
• Scales
• Memorizing
• Popper Etudes: why practice them?
• Double Stop Exercises
• Sight Reading
• Varied Vibrato – Creating different characters through varying vibrato (Faure Elegy, Apres un Reve, Frescobaldi Toccata)
• Basic bow strokes every cellist needs to know
• Expressive Intonation – Bach and beyond
• Beautiful sound – a marriage of the bow and left hand – Frescobaldi Toccata
• No TV Fuzz! How to keep your brain activated when playing
• Free shifting
• Sound production and projection
• Singing left hand
• Playing or performing?
• Performing under pressure
• Bach - performance practice: should we care?
• Efficient practicing: When you wish you had all day...
• Eleven Pieces for Solo Cello Music Commissioned by Rhonda Rider as Artist-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park... You too can commission works and play wonderful pieces inspired by nature!
• Bach Suites: Historically informed or highly Romantic.
• "But I'm playing as loud as I can!" Issues of projection in sonatas, concerti and chamber works.
• warm-up exercises
• fingered thirds
• octaves and false harmonics
• string crossings
• Haydn concerti & Divertimento
• stylistic and technical challenges Beethoven works
• Standard cello concerti (Dvorak, Lalo, Elgar, Saint-Saens, Schumann, etc.) projection of sound and musical ideas
• The Disappearing Bow
• The French Bow Strokes
• Practicing More Efficiently
• Rhythm and String Playing
• Making Musical Sense-Exploring the Art of Interpretation
• Beethoven Phrase by Phrase
• Patterns, sequences and clusters

Flute

• Standard orchestral excerpts
• Intonation
• What Bach’s E Major Sonata teaches us about Baroque style
• To Bb (flat) or not to Bb (flat)
• Breath control and tone production
• Embouchure and articulation
• Learning by emulating great players: finding your sound by imitating others
• Finger technique and how to hold the flute: avoiding "overuse" injury
• How to use "facilitating" fingerings
• Alexander Technique and the Flute
• Rhythm...practice techniques to internalize subdivisions and a sense of meter
• Warm-up and Beauty Routines for Tone
• Building Solid Technique and Virtuosity
• Creative and Intelligent Practicing, using Orchestral Excerpts
• Ornamentation and Bass Lines in Baroque Music: Telemann Methodical Sonatas
• Crayola 64: Experimenting with tone colors, vibrato speeds, and dynamics.
• Line and Interpretive Power: Gluck-Dance of the Blessed Spirits from "Orpheus", and Mozart-Andante from the D Major Flute Concerto
• Standard works for flute and orchestra: Mozart, Reinecke, Nielsen concerti, and Griffes Poem
• Hue-Fantasie
• Doppler-Hungarian Fantasie
• Debussy-Syrinx
• Kuhlau-Grand Quartet in E Major
• Piccolo: Demon or Diva?
• Piccolo excerpts
• Playing in the orchestral flute section: Orchestral etiquette
• Beginning Baroque Ornamentation
• Warm ups: Better than coffee
• Playing without pain: Establishing good postural and ergonomic habits for longevity
• Bach Partita: How understanding harmony influences phrasing
• Developing more resonance in your tone
• Loose embouchure: How to get there
• Getting the most out of your practice time
• Mozart concerti for auditions
• Taking auditions of all kinds successfully
• Unaccompanied repertoire for flute
• Mock orchestral audition
• Developing virtuosic technique
• Developing a great flute sound
• Developing your artistry
• The 20 Do's and Don'ts of the Mozart D Major Concerto
• Winning an Orchestral Job by Mastering the Absolutes in Music: Rhythm, Intonation, and Right Notes
• Orchestral Excerpts as Warm-Ups, Take 2. Making your Audition Preparation More Efficient
• The Dutilleux Sonatine
• The flutist as an entrepreneur
• Becoming extraordinary — developing your own voice
• Phrasing — using harmony as your road map
• String playing and how we can imitate it -- different strokes, attacks and sounds
• Mozart Concerti- the opera within
• Orchestral excerpts – put yourself in the orchestra by using the score
• Past, present, and future – performance philosophy
• It’s the little things that count – how to appreciate your practice and progress
• Approach to the flute – breathing life into technique
• Breathing: the pedagogy of Arnold Jacobs
• Playing for the rest of your life: postural awareness
• Hand position for optimal (easy) technical facility
• Tone -including awareness of body resonance-for live performance
• Vibrato: awareness and practice techniques
• Focus in preparation and performance
• Solo repertoire for auditions
• Practice methods to beat finger busters
• Etiquette for professionals
• The Embodied Flutist- tools for playing musically and authentically
• Marcel Moyse inspired warm-ups
• Telling your story in music

Clarinet

• Understanding the orchestral audition repertoire
• Efficient Preparation and Execution
• Mastering the Fundamentals
• How to choose equipment (clarinets, mpc's, reeds, ligatures)
• How to prepare for the "real world" while in school
• Understanding the Mozart Concerto and its application to the orchestral audition process
• Techniques to better understand breathing as it applies to a wind player
• Care and repair of one's instrument including tuning techniques
• Clarinet reeds, a history of cane with a presentation encompassing the process from cane field to the box to its importance on a clarinet mouthpiece
• Conditioning and adjusting commercial reeds
• Articulation: Quality and Speed (Kell, Stark, and other such repertoire)
• What MUSIC teaches us about what and how to practice-merging fundamentals with music making
• The importance of Baermann-exploring the countless aspects of our playing that are nurtured by a daily commitment to these scales and exercises
• The Solo de Concours genre
• Presenting new music with conviction
• Sound shape: the fundamentals that create your voice
• Body use: from posture to fingertips
• Making airstream the primary focus of your playing
• Developing depth in the altissimo register with the use of arpeggios in the Baermann method vol. 3
• Rose etude #11, 3/2 meter (developing a balanced sound throughout registers)
• Playing a cadenza in a larger work (Copland, Nielsen, Francaix concerti) and bringing out the character of the work
• Preparing yourself for the audition process: warm-up, scales, metronome, tuner, and recording device