Passion For Practice Musings From Music Masters Illustrations Explained
1.0 Title Page, Cat Playing Clarinet: This is painting is titled, “Just Do It”, and is my all time most popular painting. The original sold, and card and print orders keep coming in. People love their cats, but also, that expression that the cat does not want to be practicing, but playing with the mouse with it’s tail. (In turn, the mouse is playing with the yarn.) Much practice can be hard to listen too, so the spider enters with ear muffs on.
2.0 Introduction page, “Practice Makes Permanent”: This is mostly explained in the book. About setting the metronome too fast can make a player unnessecarily frustrated and quit, about the frog sounds in the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto and about practicing smartly starting from a youngster - practice magically brings you to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Purchase as note card (caption on back), print or original.
3.0 Section 1.0 Warm Up Properly, titled “I Forgot to Practice My Scales”. This popular card is pretty self explanetory. People often hate to practice scales - the kid practing with a mallot on the dragon scales, the dog howling, the people in plugging their ears, lightning, an alarm, fire crackers exploding. It’s easy to forget to play scales with good tone. You just want to get them over with?
4.0 Repeat Correctly Repeatedly This was my most popular new card sold while exhibiting at my last music teacher convention. It was hard to come up with a visual to match the sentiment. A different painting of this concept in the first book, actually fits a different lesson better. The elephant (of course elephants never forget) is making a mistake on the chalk board, so he/she has to rewrite it over correctly many times. The elephant tries to short cut the times by using lots of pencils at once. And a pun on elephants loving peanuts and musicians not earning enough is the sentiment of the little poem that goes with the painting.
5.0 Section 3.0 Practice Slowly This is a painting of a music teacher trying to hold all the students back from racing ahead. It represents all instruments.
Continued HERE.
