Objectives

Objectives of the Skipton Music Festival

  1. To rejoice in music making and to revel in its challenges, its complexities and its beauty.
  2. Public performance To give both children and adults a chance to perform in front of an audience.
    This unique challenging and exciting opportunity gives them a great sense of achievement and pride in their performance.
  3. International performance etiquette: To enable children and the audience (friends and families), to learn the international performance etiquette.
    (For example, bowing and not clapping between movements.)
  4. Musical knowledge: To enable both children and the audience to deepen their understanding of musical knowledge and terminology.
    (For example the use of words such as “lazy”, “piano”, and “staccato”.)
  5. Learning and development: To enable the audience to understand how children learn. For example, positive comments confirm what they are doing correctly on their performance. We never use negative comments –  what we do is give specific and practical  hints, tips and techniques on making the performance of children even better. Children are dissatisfied if they know they could do better but they are not given guidance or any specific tips and hints on any ways on how to do it.
    This whole section needs looking at.  It’s confused and woolly.
  6. Open, verbal feedback To give verbal feedback to each performer personally.   It important that this is in front of the other performers, so that all can learn from each other.
    Feedback also  enables parents and friends to appreciate just how difficult it is to play a musical instrument well and to give such a performance.
  7. Return on Investment of months of teaching and practice:  To give a fantastic opportunity for performers to demonstrate the results of months of teaching and practising.
  8. Reinforcing great teaching: Positive feedback and hints and tips to get even better, which the teacher may have been saying for months, reinforces what the teacher says.   This adds to the credibility of the teacher and also gives a different perspective on the same performance.