Present: Dave Madsen, Andy Lafreniere, Seth Himmelhoch, Bill Kossler, Mary Lou Roberts, Mychal Gendron, Joe Pecoraro, Andrea Cannon, Frank Longay

SAA Teacher Trainer syllabus (voting to adopt)

  1. Seth mentions: the section for Unit Three needs the inclusion of the phrase “arpeggios using A finger”.

  2. Also, in unit 5, clarify “chord spacing”: instead write as in the Aaron Shearer book: “two and three note chords on non sequential strings.”

  3. Dave mentions: vibrato is not included in any Unit. He says that violin teachers do it at different times, so he is not saying where it should go, just that the syllabus needs to include it so it won’t be skipped.

  4. Several committee members say they teach it in Book 1 and the consensus is that it should be included in Unit 1.

  5. It should be put in after “Left hand: form and finger placement, balanced alignment” and listed as a separate bullet point.

  6. All committee members present vote in favor of the syllabus. Frank will look at it soon.

  7. Joe asks is our committee decision binding on the teacher trainers?

  8. Bill says it’s more of a set of guidelines.

  9. Andrea and Mary Lou say it is important to teach all the topics in each unit so the training is complete, but the approach is up to the teacher trainer.

  10. Bill points out that everything is driven by the repertoire.

  11. Mary Lou points out the feature in the syllabus of the different books the trainees need to read for each unit. Other committee members like this feature, too.

  12. In the ESA teacher training, Harald Soderberg asks for extreme fidelity to printed fingerings, Mary Lou wants to know what our opinion is. ESA trainees need to play for him the printed fingerings in order to pass their Units.

  13. Bill and Dave think it is not practical to do this. Dave says understanding why a fingering is being used is more important than following fingerings slavishly.

  14. Andrew says the Suzuki piano books have alternate fingerings already.

  15. Some committee members like the idea of including alternate versions of tricky passages, both easier and harder versions.

  16. A discussion of alternate versions of difficult passages will be added to the next call agenda.

  17. Frank says he is fine with the syllabus that was adopted.

Revision of the Repertoire

  1. Mary Lou asks now that the nine volumes are published, when do we start revising them?

  2. Frank says we should first discuss how we will proceed with the process.

  3. It is agreed to put an item in the next agenda to discuss the process of revising the books.

  4. Dave mentions that Pam Brasch at SAA has money to get the committee together so that revisions could be done face to face.

  5. Frank says we should remember that revision of the repertoire is an ISA issue, and we only suggest things.

  6. Bill mentions the idea of Book 10. We need to add that discussion to next call as well.