Spooky Week in the Studio!

Wednesday is Halloween, and since the studio will be closed on the big day, we'll just have to celebrate all week! This holiday provides an excellent opportunity for us to explore the nature of minor keys in creating music that is spooky, mysterious, scary or playful. So here are some of the ways we'll be playing with minor keys this week:

• Pick a favorite happy-sounding piece you've learned that we'll turn spooky.
• Improvise your own original minor key music during lesson - this activity will provide rhythmic themes for students to choose from, and using a C minor pentascale, they choose notes to go with the rhythms.
• Holiday themed music theory games. 
• Monster Mash-up! - Create your own mash-up of a piece by cutting out & re-organizing the musical sections. 
• Listen to (or learn) some of these well-known classical themes in minor keys.
• Toccata & Fugue in D minor by JS Bach
• In the Hall of the Mountain King by Grieg
• Funeral March by Chopin
• Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky (this is the video from Disney's Fantasia)
• Dance Macabre by Saint-Saens
• Symphonie Fantastique: Dream of a Witch's Sabbath by Berlioz
• Sorcerer's Apprentice by Dukas (also from Fantasia)
• and more! 
• And finally, come to your lesson in a costume and we'll take a photo and pick a treat! (be on the lookout, piano teachers have been known to sport costumes this time of year. ;-))

Looking forward to a week full of fun & spooky music for you as we gear up for our video Recital on Saturday, November 3rd!  

For fellow teachers looking for something to pumpkin spice up your studio this month, I linked to a couple specific activities above, but I definitely recommend looking into the  October resources from Teach Piano Today, and sheet music from Compose Create and Piano Pronto.