This article about holding parent teacher conferences was originally published as an episode of the…
Women Composers in Student Literature and Beyond with Dr. Cora Cooper
On this week’s episode of the Time to Practice podcast, we’re speaking with Dr. Cora Cooper about her wonderful anthology Violin Music by Women Composers, as well as works by many other composers that are not easily available anywhere else. Dr. Cooper shares her journey as a publisher as well as her practice flow chart, which is a fantastic resource for helping with music practice.
To Listen to the full episode with Dr. Cora cooper you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also listen directly from the link below:
Women Composers in Student Literature and Beyond with Dr. Cora Cooper – Time To Practice
Highlights of our conversation with Dr. Cora Cooper include:
On the Origin Story of her Anthology Violin Music by Women:
“I think it really came up one year. I inherited a bunch of new students who had come in, and they brought with them the Josephine Trot Melodious Double Stops, which I’d never worked in as a student. And it’s really . . . it’s the only work by a woman composer that’s a standard part of the teaching literature. And so they came in, I was like, this is really good. Why have I not heard of this?
And so I got really curious. Who was she? I mean, what country did she come from? No idea about her. And so I started doing research. It was I think 2006 or maybe 2003. And it was hard. It was really hard to find anything. And I was tracking down 90-year-old women that were in the Federated Clubs of America and trying to get some kind of thing.
So I just started thinking, this is really crazy. Why is she the only one? There’s got to have been more women, violent teachers, and composers out there that this stuff is really good. There must be other really good stuff out there too. It was at 2003, the first Asta convention, and Karen Clarke, who was my teacher at Florida State and I were having coffee and we were talking about things. She was also a very big advocate of women composers, and we kind of looked up at each other and said at the same time, we need to make this music available for all levels. I didn’t play a piece by a woman composer until I had already gotten my doctorate, and if we’re going to change this, it’s got to change much, much earlier as soon as possible. And so that was really the impetus behind getting the anthology together to make it available because it really, especially at that time, it’s much more available now, but at that time it just wasn’t available.”
On the practice strategy of sprints:
“The one thing I would say that truly changed my life was the idea of sprints. So for a sprint. And so let’s take the example of you’ve got a page full of 16th notes. You have to learn for orchestra rehearsal . . . instead of going through the whole thing or a line at a time or whatever, that you can speed it up by taking small groups. And if it’s in four, four and the 16th notes are grouped in fours, the technique you would use is that you would put the metronome on, first of all. So the metronome would be going and you would do a group of four notes plus the first note of the next group. So there’s always an overlap. I’d be starting where you’re comfortable, and then very, very gradually upping the speed on the metronome. “
On the underlying principle of Dr. Cora Cooper’s practice flow chart:
“Down the left-hand side of the chart is success at any cost, which is a Burton Kaplan technique that, or philosophy, whatever you’re doing in practice, you should be succeeding at it as opposed to hurling yourself at the wall trying to play something too fast or too hard or doing everything at once. And so that’s kind of the overriding principle behind all of the techniques. Make it feel easy.”
“It’s the solving problems. When I was in high school, they gave us these tests for what are your aptitudes for different professions and mindset. I should be an auto mechanic. And it’s true. It’s like, oh, what’s broken? How do we fix it? I think that’s really how I spent most of my teaching career. So yeah, there’s lots of different techniques which are not readily apparent always from reading it. So when I’ve done presentations, it’s been explaining those things that are not common sense knowledge. There are some techniques in here that pretty much saved my life as a performer, really streamlined practice a lot.”
Links in this episode:
Sign up to attend Christine’s session for teachers on Friday, April 11th at 9am pacific all about holding parent-teacher conferences in your program HERE
Find Dr. Cora Cooper’s website for all the music discussed in this episode HERE
Incorporating Violin Music by Women in the Suzuki rep by Claire Allen
Practicing for Artistic Success by Burton Kaplan
Find Christine’s Books on Bookshop.org HERE
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