Piano Lab 5 - Honors
This course is rigorous and requires advanced technical and interpretive skills. Students continue to play pieces in key signatures containing numerous flats and sharps, complex rhythms, unusual meters, and subtle dynamics. Repertoire represents different styles, cultures and musical periods. Students learn to play in a number of styles including blues, rock, Broadway, Gospel, rag-time and jazz. The skills that are acquired are playing by ear, “comping”, writing dictation, reading a chord chart, reading a lead sheet, sight-reading popular sheet music and improvising in various styles. Students learn 7th, 9th 11th and 13th chords in all keys, chord inversions, blues, jazz and modal scales. Students at honors level four may also accompany other instrumentalists or singers, choral ensembles, play in chamber music ensembles, play in the pit orchestra for one of the yearly musicals or play in one of the jazz bands. These students are also expected to perform a minimum of two times a semester, and prepare a paper on one or more composers. Sight-reading level four materials and one and a half hours daily of outside practice is expected.