Hey Tak,One of my students reflected on your workshop for their final assignment. I wanted to share. You made such an impact, thank you!Mr. Kwan’s Lessons
During music class, we were given many lessons and had many teachers come in to help us improve our growing skills. One of the teachers that we had come in was Mr. Kwan. All of the in-person lessons that he gave our class during AMR and AMS left us with new skills. He taught us many things and heightened our knowledge on the techniques we already knew. During our regular AMS music class, we were taught how to properly hold our bow; specifically which fingers to place where. We were even given a small exercise so that we would know if our bow hold was correct. The proper placement would allow you to balance your bow sideways without difficulty. The next thing that we learned during AMS was how to properly pizzicato. Mr. Kwan instructed us to use our fingers to pluck the bow rather than using our nails to pick at the string. To heighten the sound even further we were told to pizzicato on the fingerboard rather than near the bridge. After all of Mr.Kwan’s lessons during class, he gave us more lessons during our after school AMR class. This time, Mr.Kwan taught us how to play together as a group. When working on pieces such as Incantations, there are multiple instruments playing together in harmony. However, sometimes we don’t listen to each other when playing and the harmony is thrown out of balance. There are many things that we have to listen for in order to be in sync with each other such as timing, speed, and pitch. By properly following these directions written in our music, we were able to sound amazing and quite professional when playing our pieces. Overall, the lessons that Mr.Kwan gave not only helped our orchestra as a whole but helped me personally with my playing. His lessons were always very interesting and guided my playing to be better than before. As a student who is still figuring out how to play the violin properly, I always walked away from Mr.Kwan’s lessons knowing how to improve the skills I already had, and slowly sound like a professional.
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Laura Reeder
