Welcome to the tonebase Piano Community!
Hey everyone - this is Dominic from tonebase 🙂!
As the lead of tonebase PIANO it's such a pleasure to welcome you to the tonebase community. We would love to get to know you! Please introduce yourself in a post below with the following format:
- Where are you from and what's your favorite food from there? ;)
- What are you currently working on?
- What are you hoping to get out of this community?
I'll go first:
- I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri and you better believe that I love my barbecue! It is hard to pick my favorite food between ribs, brisket, or a beautiful grilled steak, but if I have to decide...nothing beats a juicy, fall-off-the-bone rack of baby back ribs!
- Currently working on some old favorites of mine by Carl Vine (Piano Sonata No.1), Beethoven (Piano Concerto No.4) and Scriabin (Fantasy op.28) but also adding some great repertoire by H. Leslie Adams (Etude in A-flat minor Book 2), Laura Kaminsky (Alluvion), and Clara Schumann (Romanze in A minor Op.21 no.1)!
- I am hoping to getting to know and helping all of you achieve your musical and artistic goals. Let's have some fun and get to work!
Now over to you (after some participation from our tonebase team members!)
826 replies
-
Hello, Tonebase Community.
My name is Norm and I live in Oviedo, Florida, right outside of Orlando/Winter Park. I moved here in July of 2023 after a long career as a high school music teacher/choral director in Hamburg, NY a suburb of Buffalo. I am currently retired from teaching music and now work as a Dean in a middle school…so I am hardly retired. I joined Tonebase to connect with a music community since I have been out of the music loop for a couple years.
I received my undergraduate degree in Piano Performance from the SUNY Buffalo and my graduate degree in piano and music education from SUNY Fredonia. I also pursued a graduate degree in piano performance (but never finished) at the Manhattan School of Music, and spent my freshman year of undergrad at MSM. I also studied for several years as a teenager with Ana Maria Bottazzi, who was very influential.
As a piano performance major, I studied and performed many advanced piano works, including; Bach: C minor Partita, Beethoven: Sonatas Op.57,Op.78 and Op. 109, Brahms: Concerto No.1, Rachmaninov: Paganini Rhapsody, Schumann: Carnival, among others.
While I studied the above and other challenging piano works, I never felt totally comfortable enough with my technique to become a confident solo pianist…thus my decision to change my focus on conducting, teaching and accompanying. Looking back, I realize that these works, although impressive, were way beyond my technical ability at that time and I would have been better served working on shorter, less challenging pieces, developing a larger, more diverse repertoire.
I hope to use the Tonebase platform to refine my technique and increase my repertoire by learning the many works I should have learned in my developmental years of study!