Diana Springford – Head of Music

Welcome back to Term 3. This week has seen us transition again to online learning for classroom music, including our compulsory Years 3-6 Instrumental Program, as well as the K-2 Infant Strings Program and our private music lessons. It is very important that we keep Music routines going throughout this unusual time, for the continuity of Music learning, for our health and wellbeing, and for fun. 

Congratulations Music Team – teachers, tutors, conductors, students and parents – for a great start to the online learning of music at Emanuel School. Thank you for the goodwill and time you have all put into making this work. 

We currently have all private instrumental lessons, IP and ISP on Zoom! Parent and student policies were emailed this week, reminding everyone of expectations of this mode of learning. We will continue working on refining our engagement with each other and music via Zoom. Please let your tutor know if the sound is hard to manage as they might have some suggestions about how to change the Zoom settings to be more music friendly.

From next week, we expect to have ensembles and choirs on Stile for Primary School and Reshet for High School, and this will continue until we return to campus. Our tutors and teachers have returned to these platforms very quickly but as we progress, we will try a few new things to keep it fresh. Every week on rehearsal day, the conductors and band mentors will upload a new set of material for musicians to work on and assignments to complete. In some ways this hiatus from normal rehearsing will allow us to actually tune in and listen to a variety of music that we might otherwise only play. 

Co-curricular tuition is an essential support for our elective music curriculum program.

Private Music Tuition and Infant Strings Program

Schedules for Private Music Tuition and Infant Strings Program have been emailed to parents. We use the same link for music tutor schedules each term, so you should all be able to access and bookmark your schedules on your device. Tutor Zoom ID codes are embedded at the top right of each Private Tuition Schedule. 

A note about new enrolments to ISP: In the case of the K-2 Infant Strings Program, we are regrettably unable to add new enrolments into the program during this period of online learning.  As soon as the situation changes, we will let you know.

A note about new enrolments to Private Music Tuition: In the case of private music lessons, we will need to review on a case-by-case basis new requests to enrol into private instrumental or voice lessons.  For example, it is necessary in the current online environment for the enrolling student to have access to the instrument which they wish to use for private tuition and new ventures in online private music tuition are more likely to succeed where the student has a pre-existing experience of learning with a tutor (e.g., the student has been learning the instrument in IP, or is resuming private lessons after a break). However, we are open minded, so please ask.

Please contact Matilda Grieve by email if you have any questions.

On the Music Portal Page, you will find announcements and information about:

•   Private Music Tuition (beginning and discontinuing)
•   Ensemble and Choir membership for K-12 students
•   Infant Strings Program (ISP) for K-2
•   Performance opportunities
•   Borrowing an orchestral instrument

 You can also find fun news and updates from us on Instagram.